04/02/2016 - Visual Research

Week 04

Visual Research

For the last two weeks I have been watching a bunch of animations that use various techniques to achieve their style. That's why there was a lack of blog posts last week, I aim to do this one today and then try and do a test animation trying out a new technique, and I will aim to blog it as well. 

'Papillon d'amour' - Nicolas Provost (2003)

This experimental film is created from the film Roshomon, Akira Kurisawa. Nicolas Provost has used the mirroring technique to create this film. This involve mirroring one side of the screen to generate this 'trippy' experience. This is definitely a technique I could play with where I would probably need to combine Photoshop with premier pro to achieve this with better results.

'Coda' - Alan Holly (2013)

I like this scene from 'Coda' because of the way that these pieces of a flower seem to appear out of nowhere to form the flower. This is a technique I have seen quite a lot over the past two weeks (but just done through different methods). I quite like the idea of having moving shapes that dance around the screen and ultimately come together to form something. This technique is another one that I would like to do a test animation with in the coming weeks.

'Feral' - Daniel Sousa (2012)

This screenshot from 'Feral' is kind of similar to the ones above in the sense that these different parts of the buildings are growing out of nowhere to form the building themselves. This technique again, is something that I want to experiment with to create my own scenes.

'My Happy End' - Milen Vitanov (2007)

This animation is a combination of paper drawn, stop motion and 3D animation. This is an inspiring animation for my project in the sense of its technique, I like the way there is hand drawn paper cutout stop motion in use here. It is something I would like to also play about with in a test animation.

'The Land Eaters' - Brandon Ray & Lisa Ray (2009)

This animation is made using hand drawn cutouts and painted backgrounds. The cut outs where filmed on a green piece of card (a makeshift green screen) and the handle and green screen were removed later in After Effects and this is where the painted landscapes were put in. I don't think I would go through the work of doing a similar process but it has sparked an idea of having a somewhat cutout animation test where I could have a big piece of paper with a painting on it and I would put it on the top layer in Photoshop but erase shapes out of it so you can see behind it in certain areas. This is where there would be some sort of animation happening.

'Marcel, King of Tervuren' - Tom Schroeder (2012)

The screenshot above is just a few seconds before the screenshot below, There is a dance of lines around the screen and they come together to form the cockerel. This is the sort of animation I love and is something I want to experiment with myself in this project.

Here is another scene where there is a fight between to cockerels and a lot of it is made up of dancing marks fighting each other, I also like the way that the scene changes red when the fighting begins and this is something I want to remember for my own project, colour is emotion.

'Marilyn Myller' - Mike Please (2013)

Amazingly, this animation was created using Styrofoam models using stop motion. Of course I probably don't have the time, or patience, to do something like this myself but it does inspire me to maybe try doing a stop motion animation where I paint over in Photoshop that the stop-motion character maybe interacts with.


'Oedipus' - Paul Driessen (2011)

This animation is in here because I love the drawing style of it, You can see below how the characters are drawn when they are moving, Its quite a bizarre animation to watch as everything is moving constantly, I like the irregularities between each frame and again, this is a technique I would like to play around with.

You might think that most of the animations shown here are not experimental, well you might be correct but the term experimental means the combination of two kinds of art to make a new piece of art.

Summary

My summary for today is that I am aiming to create short animations in the next couple of weeks based on the interesting discoveries I have made in this blog post. I have also come to the conclusion that I will need to maybe do some animation in Premiere Pro, this would allow me to use the interpolation in Premiere Pro for some of my animations.