Extract from Lauren's brief:
"5. Travel
Why?
An estimated 14% of all CO2 emissions come from transportation fuels alone. The majority of these are fossil fuels, with reserves on the decline. Air travel alone accounts for 3-5% of carbon dioxide emissions that are released internationally. Also with fuel prices on the rise, it makes sense to cut down on their usage.
How?
Consider walking or cycling when your destination is less than 2 miles away. Use public transport wherever possible. Consider car sharing with those travelling to the same or nearby locations. Avoid air travel; consider holidaying within the UK or if air travel is unavoidable, offsetting your journey’s emissions."
From this part of the brief, I was able to determine how I was going to visually bring some of these elements together, to end the same message in images rather than words.
I am personally a huge fan of old school techniques, and quirky animation that is created from using such methods in the present day. In contrast to all my other classmates who have each selected the other themes from Lauren's brief, I want to really push away from flash, maya, photoshop and any other modern methods.
Inspiration.
After sitting down and having a few discussions I played around with a few concepts and started to look up various images, mostly for inspiration, for the type of animation that I would employ. My first interest was finding examples of modern life that was causing global warming, in relation to travel- but to pick something beautiful from the image, rather than focus on the gloomy aspect.
I've always been fascinated by the exposure technique with cameras, catching the movement of things over a period of time, and I wanted to capture that beauty in my animation. I also love the sporadic aspect of photos such as the ones above, and how you really get a feel for how fast modern city life really is.
As I began to work out how I was going to come up with a sample that captured the essence of this idea, I pulled out an old circuit board and began to take some pictures, imagining a city scape in minature form. The link with technology also helps to further enforce the idea of man-made equipment harming the planet.
Here are some examples of the city-like quality to these pictures, and how I could use that. my idea will be to insert the animated light trails of passing cars, mimicking the camera exposure effect in a crude manner. I would imagine, purely to avoid digital manipulation, that physical drawing over the images would required to achieve the imitated look of the above reference city photos.
Above is an example of a very famous video called 'Neighbours' which employs the pixilation method. The reason why I have looked at this video is because my method I may use would end up looking similar in practice, due to the unfinished quality of linking multiple pictures
Below is the final experiment I created, being inspired by the pixilation technique.
I took several photos of the motherboard in a flyover style, and then printed off each frame and physically manipulated each image by using a red felt pen and some tip-ex. After then compiling all the print-offs back in order I re-scanned it all back into the computer and edited it together- very time consuming! The end result is very crude, and quite jolty, but I am quite pleased with it. I hope to add some sound overlayed, some ambience of moving traffic to really sell the idea.
Travel globe.
When discussing potential ideas for another of my experiments, I suggeste linking the public transportation aspect with the global warming theme, using the background and foreground to compliment the symbolim. One of my favourite children's book illustrators, Oliver Jeffers, once applied the same theory into one of his stories by drawing on old book covers and maths paper, enforcing the thematic element of books, whilst his story was told visually.
As you can see in the above and below pictures, Oliver Jeffers uses existing newspapers, maths papers and book covers to illustrate on, linking the thematic element of books in the narrative.
Over the past year of commuting backwards and forwards to birmingham uni, I have collected a vast store of train tickets which I used as the frames for my animation experiment. Knowing this can be crude in its finish, this gave me a wonderful amount of freedom to explore the looseness of this type of animating. To start off with I compiled every ticket I owned, in no particular order, and then began to map out the mini-story. My idea was to simply have a spinning globe morph into a melting ice-cream, all within the space of a few seconds. This visually sends the message across and also adds the morphing aspect of animation often employed in works like this. With this being completely non-digital and all physical I had to ensure I mapped out a three second spin of the globe, based on a reference video I found on youtube. From there I simply divided the pack of tickets into the second-segments (24 frames) and made the plunge, a one time only attempt to animate using a blue marker pen and white tip-ex.
From here the morphing process became a simple task of setting the keyframes and then filling in the gaps- It really didn't matter how long it took to actually arrive at that morphed stage as the end result was always going to be short. After each aspect was compilled, I looped the spinning segment several times and then edited the remainder of the animation to create the final sample.
This was one of the key frames for the opening three seconds, where the spinning of the globe would be looped.
Stage 2.
Eventually the globe recedes into the foreground, revealing the morph into an ice-cream cone- symbolising the fragile state of the planet.
Stage 3. For the remainding few seconds the ice-cream then melts, highlighting the dangers of global warming.
Below is the finished result.
Again, like the previous samples, I really love he crude quality to these animations, and I also take great satisfaction from the fact none of these have been digitally manipulated, but rather have all been hand made the 'old school' way. This has meant I have had to put a considerable amount of hour's work into these, longer hours than would have been needed if this was accomplished in flash or maya.
These two samples didn't necessarily demonstrate my abilities in the pre-production area, as that wasn't the task I was assigned with, but rather this forced me into the actual production side of animation, and due to my fine-art slant of my work, I often appreciate and gravitate towards the old methods which, in these times, become strangely unique and original. Hopefully these two animations will be enough for Lauren in her overall project, and with only a week to accomplish this I'm very pleased with the fact I stuck to my mission to make something old school, rather than give in and use the modern techniques!
In future I would like to look into mixing these old school methods with modern techniques to create some interesting hybrids, as I think the industry is in demand for niche styles that compliment the modern standards and meduims used throughout. I would rather jump ahead of the craze and try something unexpected rather than be shoe-horned into the already existing trends. Having said this, my aim is to expore the pre-production side of animation and filmmaking, and most likely some of the projects I shall use in the coming year will test my understanding of the pipe-line. Live briefs can also be useful if storyboard or character designers are needed, plus making contacts with any others in that field to learn from and gain pointers in how to enter the industry.
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