Assessment 4- Work in progress blog post #1
The plan so far…
After my interview with Felix I was inspired by a lot of what he had said, mostly about how you don’t have to follow old rules and practices like their dogmatic law just because they worked for the old masters, but rather you should take inspiration from them and find the way that works best for YOU to express your ideas.
Felix directly cited Terry Gilliam an inspiration and for his own work and went on to mention Terry’s work mantras and attitudes (most of which reflected his own). From what I was told, Terry wasn’t a huge fan of Disney amination and the work ethic their animators had. He believed that if you had a good idea, message or joke that the visuals didn’t need to be clean or well animated. He believed that if you could find an easier way to do things and it still communicated your original idea that you should utilise that method. That going against the grain always made something that would stand out more than other work that was trying to emulate the old, something that Felix himself said that strives for with his own work.
This Inspired me to try to and express my ideas through cut-out animation, but not exactly like Terry did with his animations. What I am going to try to do is to work with that mantra that both Felix and Terry talked about, to take inspiration from the old but to not constrain myself to how they worked. This way of working is mirrored in the rise of today’s ‘good enough’ movement and style of thinking, something which that I will be reading more on as the project progresses.
What I am planning to do as of now is to have a mix of images cut out of old magazines, record covers, postcards with images that I source online as the assets of my animation and utilise programs on my computer (probably Photoshop, After effects or Flash at the moment) to create the animation. This will probably change as I go on depending on how much time it takes to acquire/scan the physical assets or how challenging the animating process turns out. At this point, I’m not sure which will be the best way to digitise the physical assets so I’m also going to be looking into ways in which to do that too (either that or just try and source older images online as an alternative if). So far the only work I have been able to put into the project is drawing a storyboard and procuring some old magazines for posible assets.
The actual idea for the animation came from a conversation I had with Quinlan in class about his family and their use of social media at home and from a friend who I had lived with last year who is what I could only describe as a social media addict. The story is about a man who is so consumed by social media that he only notices the bare minim around him, which in turn almost kills another man (it’s a pretty visual idea and hard to explain via text).
I’m looking forward to how the project will change as I continue to work on it and what challenges/ lessons will come to light from trying to combine physical and digital media in the way I’m attempting to do so.