Growing up I went to an art school where we were encouraged to try different techniques and broaden our stylistic repetoire continually, which is what I’m attempting to do with this investigation. I’m interested in creating a beautiful and emotionally evocative piece, that utilises colour and form to draw in the viewer.

I’m currently doing the Alternative Animation course as an elective, which has reignited my interest in stop-motion animation and the amount of freedom that it affords. In the past I’ve played with the technique by painting a huge geometric design on a wall and photographing every different line and colour that gets added, to both simulate and speed up the creation of the pattern. I love the fact that in animation there are different limits to creativity than there are in live action filmmaking and while I love both, I want to challenge myself by trying something new. This lead me to what I will be investigating this semester, as stop motion would allow to create something that fits my goals and that would challenge my skill set. I am doing this through paint-on-glass animation, a form of stop-motion animation where oil paint is painted onto a sheet of glass to create an image, which is captured through a photograph, then due to the slow-drying nature of oil paint, you are able to move the paint around a sheet of glass before it dries to mimic movement. I was introduced to this technique in class, through Caroline Leafs short film The Street and was amazed by both the beauty of the film and the difficulty of the technique.

I’ve struggling with whether to create an abstract or story driven piece, and that’s something I’m going to determine as I do more tests, but I do know that whether it’s abstract or story driven I want to capture a particular theme and that is to represent a journey in some way and so many facets of my design can contribute to this theme, particularly the colour scheme and while I was initially inspired by Caroline Leaf’s film, she goes towards the more creams, whites, greys and black tones whereas I want mine to be more vibrant so I’m planning to stick to differing shades of blue and purple.

I was planning on doing some tests of the technique, before this presentation but I’m currently quite poor and oil paint is really expensive, so I have to wait before I can purchase the paint and the sheets of glass, but I plan to buy the materials during the mid-semester break, so I’ll do some tests during that period. I also have to source a light box that I can lay the glass over and which will help extenuate the images that I paint. The tests I plan to do are critical as the technique is both time consuming and daunting and any mistake made could mean I have to redo an entire scene and put me hours behind schedule. Testing the technique will allow me to become familiar with the technique and the final product will be all the better for it.