This year, I would like to focus on animation. Similarly to scratching film from last year's fields and frames, I would like to create a style of animation from tracing over footage in fields and frames.
The above collage shows the different styles that I would like to incorporate in my animations. This includes mixing polygon art with smooth outlines of characters. Also, I would like to limit the use of facial features as it looks more aesthetically pleasing(Bottom right picture).
The theme of my project will revolve around insanity, therefore I will look and research into the various type of mental health issues, also taking into account surrealist art. In addition, I would like to combine the two to create a surreal animation.
Charles Bronson (Now called Salvador) is well known for his outsider art, which depicts very surrealist views from his cell. As he bases his art around Salvador Dali, he manages to portray a very disturbing yet aesthetic piece.
Andre Masson's Automatic drawings are also an art piece that I am taking inspiration from, as his drawings are based solely on the outline, leaving less space for detail. It is almost in the form of a sketch, however it holds surrealist elements to make it interesting and unsettling.
My experiments started on Adobe Illustrator, where I worked on trying my hand at polygon art.
I managed to create the effect by breaking the face up of different panels and adding small details here and there (such as the eyes and mouth)
Next, I had a go at animating. For this, I filmed a short sequence of my hand opening and closing. I then moved this over to photoshop to convert the frames to individual layers and opened the file in Illustrator. From there I was able to trace over with the pencil tool on each individual frame. Once completed I moved the frames over the Premiere and reduced the speed of all the clips together in order to create a flowing sequence of animation.
For my second experiment, I began to animate an eye blinking. This was fairly easy and I didn't use footage to animate as it was a simple process of moving the eyelid up and down.
In addition, I animated the pupil so it would have less of a static outcome.
My last experiment consisted of animating a scene from The Godfather: Part II. This was similar to the first animation, in which I traced over the subject frame by frame, however I did want the hair and clothes to fluctuate as the scene played out.
I decided to fill in the blank space by adding a speech bubble and having it jitter by animated 3 frames and alternating between each of them. By adding just the slightest change in each frame gave a very satisfying effect on screen.
