Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry is about laying out the words of a poem to symbolise the meaning. This piece is by Ian Hamilton Finlay, a concrete poet and sculptor who is interested in taking words out into the world and make them a part of the landscape.  His words gain context from the environment they are placed in at the same time the setting gains a clarity of from the words.  He is able to influence and alter the way which the audience perceives both elements by bringing them together.  This is really interesting as it is essentially the role that I want the text to work within my film; the pictures and the words come together to present the story that I am trying to tell.  

Beautiful Illustration

 Have a look at French illustrator, Rebecca Dautremer's, website, its so hard to choose just a couple of images to show. Her work is beautiful and so atmospheric!

Pilobolus

This is dance, but really fun and great illustration of how people misread character poses!

Weird!

Run Wrake's take on animation with text, dark is probably the best word for it!

Some nice things from the internet:

It's been a while since I posted any video's on here and I'm getting quite a backlog on my Vimeo account, so there's a selection here and click here for more videos! 

... Lovely motion graphics, colour and use of text.

... A great concept, directed by Tom Jenkins.

... Streamschool, Lovely textures together on Peter Vacz  graduation film from Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design.

...Amazing and intricate sand stop motion made on a beach, for rock band Eatliz, directed by Yuval and Merav Nathan.

...'Float' by Flogging Molly, music video by Karni &Saul. It's live action backgrounds with CG character animation that foxed some of our studio's best stop motion minds! 

Story Boarding - Check

I've had to draw a line under developing my storyboard for the moment as it's taking over the studio - and so I get a move on with actually creating this film.  There may still be some changes to things like layout and text that I can do as I go along but I have enough to make a pretty accurately timed animatic now.  Once that's done I can send it to Dan for some music and start planning how long its actually going to take to animate this thing! Scary.

Mood Boards

This weekend I put together some collages using paper and material off cuts,  each one represents a different part of the film; the tree in the day, the tree at night, the fog, the kitchen/hall way and Hannah's room.  The idea was to start me thinking about the textural backgrounds of the film and how I am going to create the atmospheric settings that the story needs. It was fun and made the story board look much brighter.

3D Landscapes

This afternoon Jared tried sneakily to convert me to 3D software. I have been working on layouts for my final animatic this week and he showed me how to model my landscape with some lights in 3D Max and run a camera through it to see some different angles.

It was useful to think about actually how the staging works, but I plan to cheat the position of the moon quite a lot and I don't have the skills to play around with the camera on my own.  It really made me think about the scales of the house and tree and gave me some good ideas for some pans. It actually looked quite nice with some example textures on it, but I think I will stick to sketches and paper models for now!

Eyes

Walk Cycle

A how-to walk cycle animation I made for Hannah.  It finishes with a background but that still needs lots of work!

Branch Fingers

A quick line test I made for the tree coming to life.

Vivian French (and Kat Park!)

Since the day I decided to work with text I pretty much committed to writing a children's story.  Actually writing the words has been such a major worry that I new I had to find someone who knew how to write to help me quickly.  I send the first version to Kat Park, a friend who is an English student, and she transformed my rambling into some beautiful text.

Then from my 'reveal and engage' meetings with illustration students I discovered that children's author, Vivian French, comes to the college to help the illustrators with their stories. I met her for half an hour at lunch today, and she was great!

She seemed excited about my project, and very encouraging. As well as giving me some lovely little phrases to slip in, she was an invaluable pair of eyes for my animatic.  She identified a few parts that seemed a bit flawed, mainly the Tree's personality and motivations, and showed me how to use the text to iron them out.

Just a few more changes when it goes onto the storyboard and its sorted!

Here is the text at the moment:

Every evening when Hannah came home, her mum was too busy to talk.

So, every night, at bedtime, Hannah talked to the moon… and the moon listened.

One winter’s day, Hannah went to her window. 

Hannah panicked, 

Where was the moon?

but her mum was still too busy.

(Hannah picks up torch, climbs out of the window)

The frosty air bit at Hannah’s fingertips.

It was cold outside and things seemed to hide and jump out of the darkness.

But through the fog she saw the friendly glow of the moon.

So she climbed…and climbed…and climbed.

And slipped 

(branch snaps, torch falls, tree comes to life)

“AAARRRGGGHHHH” screamed Hannah.

“I’m sorry Tree, I was trying to reach my friend, the mooooon”

Tree: "If I help you will you let me sleep?"

Hannah: "I promise, I promiiiiiise..."

(tree throws Hannah up and clears fog)

So Hannah could talk… and laugh… and tell all her stories to the moon.

And the tree slept peacefully

(wind/cold)

Hannah realised she was alone…surrounded by darkness… at the top of a tall tree.

She slithered and slid and 

AAAAAGH

She slipped.

Hannah looked down and saw her mum reaching up.

She leapt into her arms.

As they walked home, Hannah told her mum about her friend, the moon.

Fog!

I went to visit my parents this weekend and it just happened to be misty one morning, giving me a great opportunity to gather some research photo's of the tree that inspired Hannah and the Moon.

The Lost Thing

This is such a beautiful film, the music is magic, the textures and characters are so interesting and the pacing is so thoughtful. If you get chance, watch the whole thing...

Reveal and Engage

This mini project brought together all 4th year design students together for one morning.  Giving everyone chance to present their work in a 1.5m square on the floor as best they could, and then walk around and see everyone else's.  I transferred my big story board to small cork board, neatened the post-its onto acetate overlays, made business cards, laid out some children's books and printed out a still from my test (which is quickly becoming the most handy and over used bit of animation I've ever done!).

It was a little crowded at first, and everyone seemed a bit manic to find their minimum 5 potential collaborative partners.  I also thought it would have been better if some 3rd years had come as most 4th years are too busy and involved in their own projects already to be taking on new ideas. But as people drifted off to lunch and the atmosphere settled I got chatting to a some interesting illustrators, and then Kirsty Quinn from Performance Costume.

I had been totally focused on finding graphic designers and illustrators to help with my own project and hadn't thought about other people wanting me to collaborate on theirs! When Kirsty came to find me it was a lovely surprise. Her project is costumes for from James and the Giant Peach and she wants to project a simple, sketchy animation onto the catwalk of the other characters, seagulls, shark etc. Its a really exciting idea and a great little side project to Hannah, with a totally different audience. I'm really excited about it and hope it comes together!

More Sound

This weekend Dan sent me some ideas for the music. I'm really pleased with the way he has captured the mood of the film, especially at the beginning and in the fog,  I think I want the finished sound to be more simple and lighter than it is at the moment in some places though.

I have sent Dan a new version of the animatic to work on until I have the final one, and cut some of his music with some of my ideas and some rough sound effects...