This was the first brief we were given of the academic year by our tutor Gareth Sleightholme. We were given the freedom to make some research documents for it over the preceding summer, generating possible ideas and have a think what sort of medium we wanted to use, whether stop-motion, digital traditional or experimental, and discuss together in our own free time about our ideas and developments.
There were one or two ideas, which I came up with for the project, which never really came to fruition. One was doing a small documentary piece on sea life or the pursuits of one particular breed of aquatic creature. For this idea, my research took me to The Deep, Britain’s number one submarium, located in Hull. Another idea, which came to mind, was in a similar vein to the first one, in that I wanted to observe the behavioral patterns of common birds such as pigeons. Not only would they be an easy source to reference – them being everywhere, but also there is plenty of information on them because of their being so common.
I had a look at examples of documentary and educational animations, particularly those published from the 40’s / 50’s, to gain a sense of how I wanted to have the layout of my animation. Out of all of the animation companies back then, it seemed that Disney were producing quite a hefty amount of informative animations aimed at children and young adults, as well as parents.
One quite well known piece used heavily in high schools since its creation, is a biology documentary on the Menstrual Cycle. Another, more controversial piece which has since seen its way into becoming banned material is the 1943 animation: Education for Death, which displays a somewhat biased representation of how children were educated in Germany during the war, through the use of Nazi ideals and emotional shock treatment.
In a slightly different tangent, I then looked towards commentary animations. Commentary, in the sense that the animator has looked up a particular subject of concern or common knowledge, and has created a piece displaying it – whether it be a biased view or not. Our Father (2012) is an animation which comes from the design school Gobelins, created for the Dessins Pour la Paix / Cartooning for Peace competition in 2012. It depicts a child innocently walking along before being consumed under the robe of a Catholic priest. This being a subject which is prevalent across much of the western world, it has been met with mixed criticisms by viewers online.
I then started looking into the format of interview. This was suggested as a possible starting point in the brief, which were given. It then got me thinking about possible interview clips online, which I could use as the base for my animation. Someone in the year previous to us did something similar, animating to a lecture he had found online. The RSA Animates lectures were also a popular series which I made reference to in my research. They adopt a whiteboard speed animation technique, which looks visually stimulating and keeps viewers highly attentive.
The research element of this project was as fun and interesting as it was enlightening. I looked at some primary examples of interview-based animation, such as the Aardman series Creature Comforts and the increasingly popular HBO based series The Ricky Gervais Show. I really liked the candid speech in the videos; it gave them an honest feel, which really added to the success of the humor.
There was one idea in particular, which I dabbled with, that really got me feeling passionate about the project. After a visit to my then-91 year old grandmother, I decided that I wanted to interview her about various subjects, or rather, let her talk away to her hearts content. She was always full of observations and ideas, whether they were logical or made much sense or not, but nonetheless she always had us interested, hook-line-and-sinker.
Looking at possible style references I could use for the video, I did a quick google search on something along the lines of elderly person illustration / elderly person drawing / old person drawing. This brought me to discover a pivotal piece of Brtiish illustration history from World War II – Ol’ Bill. A character created by illustrator Brice Bairnsfather after his time spent in the trenches of World War II, Ol’ Bill became a household name. It depicts the small witty comments and little adventures of a gruff old man serving in the trenches and battlefields of the war, often displaying a certain sense of dry British wit, which to this day can be found absolutely charming.
To acquire the clips I would need to animate to, I set up a voice recorder or a camera in a room with her, and asked her questions from various starting points, which I had compiled during a brainstorming session at University. Some of these would be based on previous conversations, which I had held with her, which I found quite interesting and amusing, and which I thought that viewers would also gain a laugh from. Others would be standard questions about her life and family and so on. The list was as follows:
- How are you?
- How did you meet grandad?
- What was your first job?
- Tell us about the German Spy you caught.
- Tell us about Uncle Len.
- Tell us about Auntie Clara.
- What was your first pet?
- What did you do during the war?
- What is your favorite TV program?
- What is your favorite drink?
- How many grandchildren do you have?
- What is your favorite film?
- Who is your favorite musician?
- What is your favorite book?
- What was dad like as a child / teenager?
After doing a few sketches of how I wanted her to look in the animation, and producing a little bit of concept art, I settled on a design, which I was comfortable with, and went about doing some incredibly basic animation tests. I even produced a quick video on Youtube, showing the process I went through to draw Betty digitally, which my tutor thought was quite a nice visual addition to my coursework.
Most of the tests were not successful by any means, but they helped me along regardless. I was wanting to rotoscope over the video footage that I had got, but felt that it would be a far too ambitious endeavor, so instead, I wanted to animate it as though she was staring at a camera, and was being interviewed from behind it. This would give the viewers perhaps a bit more of a feeling of personal inclusion with the video.
I started off with a very basic lip synch. I kept the same base image and just drew up the different phonetic shapes for the mouth so that I could piece them together in a test. Originally, I did a mouth shape for each letter of the alphabet, but found that this was far too time consuming to create and to edit together. So, through the suggestion of a classmate, I took the phonetic sounds down to basics, and looked up some lip synch charts from various animation sites online.
After watching one of my tests though, my tutor Gareth made the suggestion that I make the animation look more traditional – even though the test was done in digital – by adding a textured background. First off, I looked at textures online of distorted / crumpled / stained paper in order to figure out which aspect I found more appealing, then I set out to make my own stock images. I took some scrap sheets of paper, screwed them up tightly, and flattened them out again. I scanned them in, and applied them as backgrounds to my animation frames. Whilst it wasn’t the best looking attempt on my behalf, it still gave the animation a bit more character, which was the main objective.
Taking all of the ideas mentioned above into account, I did one last bit of experimentation before the deadline was due. I drew up the phonetic lip synch images of her, from the front and from a side-on view, in pencil, and animated to a small bit of speech from the footage I got. Instantly, I felt that it looked much better. Diversifying the camera angles offered some sense of expression as well as complimenting the speech quite well with the slightly over exaggerated mouth shapes which I drew. When I drew the first set of lip synch images, I made no alterations to the jaw, only moving the mouth. In this test, I rectified that, and instantly it looked so much better.
Looking back on the project now, I could have made so many more strides into getting more animations finished. Originally, I was never going to have it as one, long, continuous animation, I rather wanted to have it as a series of small clips divided into subjects and so on. I will definitely be creating more of these over the summer, taking from the sound clips I obtained and finishing off the series, in the pencil format as opposed to the digital one which I started off with.
I could have definitely better organized my time on this project – though a lot of the lack of work was due to illness and other personal issues. In the future, I won’t let these become a distraction, and get them completed regardless. I will be writing up a schedule for any future animation project I take up, so that I know where I should be at, how much time I have left, and better use I could be making of said time.
Upon showing the animations to Betty after the assignment had finished, she thoroughly enjoyed them, laughing away t the caricatures of herself, apart from making the cheeky comment “I hope you won’t draw me looking that old in the next ones!” after asking her what she thought afterwards. The rest of the family found quite a lot of amusement in watching them, and that’s what I was aiming for since the start really, so I definitely got the job done in that respect.
AbbieSTABBY 