the octopus - final version

yabbadeedoobabadabbarrr !! a long long time in the making.. but here it is! the name has been changed...its a bit more direct. and i colored the octopus... i plan to completely color the whole thing if i get into any festivals with it... ahhh. sweet 4 33 am

so heres the background to the start and end of my animation.




the boy at the start of my animation is standing in the corner of this room. this drawing, and my understanding of perspective, is inspired by escher. he never actually used curved perspective as the subject of any one print, but it features in lots of his later work - "high and low" is probably the best example.



he gives a really good example of how curved perspective can be observed in real life. stand underneath two telegraph wires and look straight ahead, and notice how they converge to a point. then look straight up, and observe how they are parallel. then turn around and look straight behind, and notice again how they converge to a point. therefore, there must be a curve in the perspective! the more you try and look for this, the more you will see it...it only happens in the periphery of vision. our brains decode information in such a way that curved lines appear straight.

"floating on this eerie water, far away from bricks and mortar..saw a mermaid, didnt caught her" Tove Jansson

Linetest - timed out, upped the contrast, added color hues, and overlaid a scratch music track.

I spent all day yesterday linetesting this, and went a bit mad. The old biddies in the university cafe had themed T-shirts, FAIRTRADE FORTNIGHT written across their sagging breasts. I wonder where the T-shirts were made?

In Newport, i bought a homeless woman a kebab. The man behind the counter looked at me as if i was dirt, then tried to shortchange me a tenner. On the train, the man opposite me was asleep, so i woke him up when we got to Cardiff. He thanked me, and I replied that i hoped that he'd do the same for me. As i walked away, he called me back, and gave me my mobile phone, which I'd left on the seat.

Life.

boy paper bird flight church smoke cliff bird octopus! teacup

its odd to see two years of my life in the physical form of about two thousand sheets of paper.
so heres a rough linetest of animation...untimed, so it runs by like a rat on crack. theres still lots to animate and theres no beginning or end in this video. its been a while since i posted anything on this..but i've been working pretty hard on it. i hope when its scanned colored and with music/foley, it l feel a bit more like a film rather than a linetest.

2nd draft animatic.

I will post up the thumbnail sheets as soon as possible, but this animatic was made very simply from them, by photographing each thumbnail in sequence. I am surprised that, mostly, a feeling of movement is retained. I have been plagued by a nagging feeling that this camera-rotation was going to be harder than I thought.

The nature of my piece, with the camera rotation, meant that a 2nd draft animatic, bridging the gap between storyboard and full animation was necessary. A few changes have been made to the initial storyboard - the zoom into the boys eye at the beginning was removed for being too cliche. as well as the ending, where the boy turns into the bird. I feel the meaning of my piece is stated stronger, if I just show the empty corner of the room - (which unfortunately, is an omission from this draft, and will be placed eventually as the last shot ). This piece was never meant to be uplifting, more reflective - and the original close felt like an attempt to give it 'a happy ending', which it doesn't need. In terms of timing I would like to hone it more...it is a little shorter than I expected.

Early pencil test.

This piece of animation was an inspiration for my piece - in the naturalist style, and camera movement. I have been criticised, for my choice of subject matter - as if I wanted to portray smoking as 'cool', whereas in truth, for me smoking is a symbol of addiction, and loss of control - and is an intentional inclusion in my piece, for these reasons.

concept artwork

1st draft animatic.

Storyboard:

1. zoom into boy's eye to show tower.

2. bird lands on tower. cut to CU of hands rolling a fag.

3. zoom out to see man on bench. bird flies through smoke, into new scene.

4. bird flies over sea.  360 pan round giant octopus

- eats bird.

5. zoom out, sea in teacup, woman drinks tea, man comes in-

both look at boy in corner.

6. boy turns into bird

7. bird flies round room, into checkerboard floor, 

turns into country landscape

8. bird lands on tower, 360 pan round to sunset

I like the pencil line-quality (...but not enough black!) I still want to work on each frame with graphic pen, and also add some subdued colors into it. So maybe coloring it on computer then printing each frame out to work on with pen. 

The film revolves around 3 central characters, man, woman, and child. It is tempting to assign the labels of id, super-ego, and ego, respectively. It is in their combined interaction they are intended, as a metaphor for a mind of conflicting and tangled emotions. I am influenced by the zen approach, in trying to describe the undescribable through paradox.  The visual metamorphoses between scenes, the surreality of the narrative, and the universality of the symbolism hopefully invite the viewer to read this film in a counter-intuitive way to standard film context.

The intention behind juxtapostion of events in the narrative, and the animation style itself, is to place emphasis on the awareness of the present moment, and the dream-like nature of the past. The camera rotating round the object is identified with dreams, storybooks, and the past - whereas the points when the camera follows a more conventional film-style are identified with the real world, and the present moment. When the camera is rotating, the direction it takes is intentional - the moment it reverses direction frames the climatic moment.

The focus on upon hand gesture is important - there is an intended symmetry between the man rolling and smoking a cigarette, and the woman stirring and drinking her tea, a window into their inner selves. The bird is implied as a metaphor for the child, and this is made more explicit by the ending - the loss of the bird, the empty corner.  It is through the interaction of the bird-child metaphor with the object symbols of a cigarette/cup of tea, that the films overt meaning is understood.