Growing up I went to an art school where we were encouraged to try different techniques and broaden our stylistic repetoire continually, which is exactly what I’m attempting to do through 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 experimented with the technique by painting a large geometric mural 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 leads me to what I will be investigating this semester, as a stop motion piece will allow me to create something that fits my goals and which will challenge my skill set. I am doing this through paint-on-glass animation, a form of stop-motion where oil paint is painted onto a sheet of glass to create an image, and 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, while capturing each change through photographs. I was introduced to this technique in class, through Caroline Leaf’s short film The Street and was amazed by both the beauty of the film and the difficulty of the technique.

I’ve been 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 muted white, grey and black colour palates, 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, which will help extenuate the images that I paint and assist with lighting the photographs. 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.