Friday 15 December 2017

Animating Snow

One of my animation tasks on this project was to animate the snow effect on the winter page. For this I created a snowball PNG file with paper texture and drop shadow added and brought this along with the page background into Adobe After Effects. I used the CC Snowfall particle effect in this program and generated a simulation of snowfall, remembering to place the photo frame and Dwayne on a higher level so that the effect would pass behind the picture.




Wednesday 13 December 2017

Extended Essay - Notable Quotes

One of the interesting and challenging aspects of writing an academic essay is extracting pertinent and valuable quotes from the research. They should be insights into my chosen subject matter and themes which illuminate or contend with the view which I'm attempting to convey. I feel like I've found some very valuable and worthwhile quotes which would be beneficial to share here.

'The essay is always concerned with something already formed, or at best, with something that has
been; it is part of its essence that it does not draw something new out of an empty vacuum, but only
gives a new order to such things as once lived. And because he only newly orders them, not forming
something new out of the formless, he is bound to them; he must always speak “the truth” about
them, find, that is the expression for their essence.'
(G. Lukacs, Soul and Form 1974)

I am intending to use this quote at the beginning of my essay. I feel it gives a good introduction to the importance of an essay film creator owning their subjectivity. The essay here is seen as a reflection or deepening of the subject matter it is preoccupied with.

“characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of artand
documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on
public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with
audiences.”
(Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film 2017)

“ability to carry on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors.
It does not merely answer, correct, silence or extend a previous work, but informs
and is continually informed by the previous work”
(M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 1981)

“conceptual, psychopolitical, and representational dance with wolves, the drawn-out
imperative of the film is then to answer the silence that follows the death of the dogs, to
unmask an aesthetics of violence...to make the present of current events a far more
conceptually complex and vexed place for the subject experiencing that present as a past.”
(Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne after Marker 2011)

“science affects us by its contents, art by its forms; science offers us facts and
relationships between facts, but art offers us souls and destinies”
(G. Lukacs, Soul and Form 1974)

“one of the key elements of the essay film is the direct address of the receiver,
and voiceover is the most simple and successful way of actualizing such address”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)

“The essayist allows the answers to emerge somewhere else, precisely in the position
occupied by the embodied spectator. The meaning of the film is constructed via this
dialogue, in which the spectator has an important part to play; meanings are presented by the
speaking subject as a subjective, personal meditation, rather than as objective truth. It is this
subjective move, this speaking in the first person that mobilizes the subjectivity of the
spectator.”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)

“Humanism is, indeed, implicit in the essay structure—the assumption of a certain
unity of the human experience, which allows two subjects to meet and communicate on the
basis of this shared experience. The two subject positions, the “I” and the “you,” determine
and shape one another.”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)


Tuesday 12 December 2017

Book stop-motion

We shot the book before the Christmas break and I'm happy to say that the wire technique worked out. We were able to manipulate the pages into position and they held without any need for outside support. Due to the book not being traditionally bound some pages went a bit off-centre while lying flat. This has the advantage though of communicating age and that sense of Dwayne carrying the book with him through his life. I added corner registration marks to aid the compositing of the digital elements onto the footage.



Book footage.


Digital Page Layouts

The pages of the album follow a seasonal theme, there are four pages for the four seasons and the four stages of the journey that Dwayne describes. The album begins in summer with the first page illustrating Dwayne leaving the hostel. The animation will be occurring inside the frame so I was free to fill the outside with decorative features, bearing in mind that I would have to be prepared to let some of the details go if they took away from the animation.


Summer page.


The next page is autumnal in tone. The goal here was to convey an abundant harvest, celebratory feel as Dwayne describes being able to have his family over for dinner in his new home. The film here cuts to a pan and the internal frame fills the screen so I felt freer to illustrate the external with some more minute details. These included leaves and acorns, fruit and tree roots. The internal frame has to act as a stage for the animation to play on so is less detailed. I attempted to convey a homely sense through the flowery wallpaper pattern. 


Autumn page.


Turning to the winter page, the colours change to cool blues and whites. The page design also turns more minimal. This hopefully communicates the starkness of the season as Dwayne describes being unable to have people over while living in the hostel. I added a wallpaper element to help emphasise the coldness but again with the caveat that if it interfered with the animation it would need to go. For this page the we are going to animate a snowstorm occurring outside the walls of the internal frame. This hopefully communicates the protection the hostel offers.


Winter page.


The last page is the spring page and the colour theme here is green. The main job for this page is to act as a stage for the cut-out animation which will occur. Paper hands will reach in to pick up the picture of Dwayne's daughter and we will transition to the hands placing the picture on a wall of pictures in Dwayne's home. This page has been made simpler than the concept as that seemed too busy when actually creating it digitally.


Spring page.


Sunday 10 December 2017

Main Film Title

Trying to create a title for the film that represented its themes and complexity was a challenge. My initial thoughts were quite obvious with titles like The Dance, but this seemed quite on the nose. Brainstorming it resulted in some more nuanced ideas; Untethered Tread, playing with becoming lost in a memory through the sound of a footstep, and tread/thread; Tread and Temper, again referencing tread/thread, following a thread, unravelling with the alliteration of temper to evoke the emotional challenge; Soft Floor/Bare Boards, softness/toughness, flow between the two. The title that I hit on as seeming most evocative and descriptive was Sound Holds the Distance Travelled. Referring to the power of sound as the catalyst for the Melancholic Wife's journey back into her memory and the temporal distance between her present and past self. The whole of this journey is held in the sound waves.


Alternative Opening Sequence

In trying to create an opening to the film I was conscious of wanting to represent the creative heritage from which the film has evolved. The themes and subject matter explored within the film began in a web-comic strip called Splitting Borders developed with my creative partner Sadhbh Lawlor. We made our own handmade books of these strips which brought a tactile element to the work. From there we moved to short stories, again making our own books from the work. The film now represents a deepening of the work and with this opening I wanted to make a nod to that lineage.

The opening consists of a montage of photographs displaying the physical artifacts of the previous work.



I've maintained the black and white aesthetic of the film in the opening to maintain a visual relationship between the two mediums of photographs and drawings.


For the transition into the main film the camera zooms into the notebook, representative of where the work begun, as written words on a page.


Friday 8 December 2017

Opening Sequence Reference

Part of the inspiration for the new opening sequence which uses photographs of some of my previous work came from the opening titles of To Kill a Mockingbird. I felt that this opening sequence was very effective in giving a sense of the world in which the story would take place. It uses objects to represent each of the characters, their personalities, their age, their preoccupations in a meaningful way.


Dwayne's Photo Album - Adventures in Bookbinding

We have decided to make a real book and shoot a stop motion animation of it to act as the stage for our pages. Further down the line this will require compositing with the digital pages. But first to make the book. Fortunately I have just recently completed a book binding course and while most of the binding techniques won't be applicable, it has given me a grounding in the principles.

I decided to make the book A4 size as this would be the most manageable to deal with physically. Testing the page dimensions against a 16:9 ratio beforehand also let me know that it could work within a film context.

What I decided to do was to use quite a heavy grade card and sandwich wire loops between two sheets. I then glued these two sheets together to create essentially one page. I made the wire lengths long enough to be sandwiched between two of these 'sheets'. This meant that when we went to turn the pages that half the wire would be embedded in the book which would enable the other half to have a solid foundation. This foundation would enable us to manipulate the wire.


 Book pages and notes.

Creating the book.


For the cover we decided to experiment with textiles. This could bring some interesting texture and add to the individuality of the piece. It came down to two;


Book cover textiles.


We decided to go with the floral pattern. we felt it tied in well with the overall theme of the book and contributed a more homely feel. It was the harder of the two to manipulate,being thick fabric, so a lot of compression was required after gluing it to very heavy card stock to ensure it stuck as firmly as possible.

The next step was to finalise the emblem for the front of the book. In the storyboard a key as used as a central symbol on the cover, communicating access and an unlocking of a doorway into another's experience. The power of the key as a totem of freedom and development feels strong with people afflicted by homelessness.


Key design ideas.


The final key design incorporates plain and patterned paper.

Final book cover.

Thursday 7 December 2017

Character Sketch

The design for the Melancholic Wife exists in the comic pages but her face has never been shown so a big challenge will be building on that existing aesthetic and deepening her personality.


Tuesday 5 December 2017

Closing Sequence

For the closing sequence we felt it would be potent to use visuals that illustrated the 'unromantic walls of her real life' These include representations of the Melancholic Wife's furniture, bookshelves and many elements of her creative process.





Opening Sequence

For the opening sequence we have decided to try and use design imagery that already exists from the comic work.


Sadhbh had the idea of the camera following the line across a long pan which the character portraits emerge from and the titles sit above.



Monday 4 December 2017

Melancholi Wife Animatic Version 14


Changes here include a modification to the narration of the final sequence. It is now spoken in the present tense rather than the past tense, this will hopefully add to the delineation between her teenage self and her adult self.

Saturday 2 December 2017

The Melancholic Wife Storyboards - Sixth Sequence





The Melancholic Wife re-emerges back into the real world, the 'unromantic walls of her real life'. She moves through the room, giving us an opportunity to see the world she inhabits, the objects that make up her life. She turns on a lamp, she has gained illumination and she reaches for her journal to record it, 'trying to hold on to the nuances of her transmutations'.

Visual Reference - Character