Assessment 4- Work in progress blog post #2

Since the last time I posted, I have been working on and off on my cut out inspired animation. I went out and sourced some old magazines from a few op-shops and began scouring them, looking for inspiration and possible character and background assets for my animation. I found it quite difficult to find assets that were going to work within my animation let alone ascetically match up with each other. At the end of the process of flicking through page after page of old magazines, I managed only to find and cut out a small amount assets that would be appropriate for the animation that I want to make.

In that moment two things dawned on me, the first being that I would have to abandon the use of old magazines since the sourcing, cutting and scanning process would ultimately take to long for me to do. This was a bit upsetting to me since I really thought that in using older magazine’s I would end up with a unique look to the animation I was making. The second thing that I realised was that I was basically just trying to copy Terry Gilliam’s style of cut out animation rather than take inspiration from his work.

With this in mind, I decided that it would be better/ more convenient for me to try and source the assets I would use online rather than go out and physically find them, cut them out and scan them. At the end of the day, I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time or money to find more suitable physical assets to use.

The nature of the animation its self has forced me to do a lot of experimentation. Most of my time is spent in Photoshop making the assets and figuring out what parts of the image need to be able to move and in turn, figuring out what parts I need to cut of the original image, parts I need to copy and parts that I need to visually alter for them to work within the animation.

The actual animation process has also required me to do a lot of experimenting. Making an estimate of how an asset will look and move on screen is quite different to how it actually looks once I begin to animate it. Even though the style of “tween” animation I am utilising for this project is relatively simple in its look and is meant to a degree look somewhat shoddy, I still am having to go back and re-design assets and backgrounds so that the assets will animate properly.

I am looking forward to getting further into the animation its self and being able to experiment more with the programs I am using to make it, as well as thinking about what affordances and constraints will come of utilising a digital medium to make something (cut out animation) that was historically very physical, hands-on and time-consuming in nature.