Final Experimental Film In All Its Glory

So yeah that was my film..... below is a lot of ramblings pinpointing my reasonings and thoughts....... read on if you're bored and you have some time to kill....... 

I decided to use the track 'Billy The Kid' as it had both fast and slow parts so that I could have calm and dramatic sections to create variety and interest. The music sounded very dramatic in places and through brainstorming sessions I decided it sounded like a war, due to the track's use of call and response. The sharpness and sinister quality of many of the sounds led me in the direction of a nightmare and the strange, flowing quality of dreams lends itself to morphing and random imagery. This brought me to the theme of someone trying to wake up from a nightmare, when there is a battle to become conscious.

I listened to the music and made notes of what I associated the different sounds with, then thought up imagery that had a slight sinister quality to it and I also included repeated imagery of wide open eyes, linking with the waking up theme. I decided that the animation would start and end with pixelation, with the middle 'dream part' being created with charcoal, paper and paint as the use of a person as the thing being animated is visually vastly different to art materials being used, emphasizing a change in state (the real world vs the dream world). I planned my animation out thoroughly, working out how long I had to make sections last in order to hit the beats, which actually ended up being fairly accurate, with only a bit of tweaking needed during editing. I then photographed the whole dream sequence in one long shot as the whole thing morphs from one thing to the next, leaving the shooting of the actress until the end.

Creating the right lighting was difficult during the first and last scenes of the person as I wanted it to look like night time. This did not work well as the photographs came out quite grainy due to the low light and the light source ended up too close to the person's face making them too bright. The face paint was also very difficult to apply and looked quite messy, again the light was far too bright and gave quite bad images. My actress had to turn away from the camera to let me apply the face paint, so the images jump around a lot. I had an issue with the morphing from the red dripping out of the actress's eyes and into the next scene. It was meant to flow but the change in background and difference between ink and face paint meant it did not flow as I had hoped and I had to have a change in shot rather than a downwards pan which is what I wanted. There were no further problems and the rest all went quite smoothly, apart from the paper curling when the winged creatures dive bombed the ground.

The sections that worked especially well were the charcoal runner which then morphs into birds which fly off and the very fast moving scribbles and stripes, as I think they fit the music very well and look good visually. I decided after I finished that I no longer liked the look of the paper winged creatures as they looked quite amateurish, although I do think their movements work well with the music. It probably would have looked better if I animated them in charcoal. The entire dream sequence may have worked better if it was all done in charcoal as charcoal's smudgy qualities do have a dreamlike, half formed feel to them and its dull black colour is very sombre (the reds I used were too bright for the sinister atmosphere I was after). Perhaps it was wrong to mix media as drastically as I did during the middle section but I do believe it was worth trying out, as I did want it to be quite chaotic.

If you bothered to read all that then respect is due! And I need to thank Olivia for letting me scrawl all over her face and shine bright lights in her eyes, so yeh, thanks dude!