Concept

This piece was a result of the automatic writing and cut up techique used by Andre Breton. The result of both techiques resulted in nonsense poetry. It was bizarre, surreal, musical, spontaneous, unexpected, emotional and featured many animals such as dogs, fish, moles and rabbits. The writing was full of emotional highs and lows, this was something I wanted to capture in my piece. The piece starts calmly, hence the use of the fish tail and flow of water. The eerie-like-singing transends after this. This singing and the beating of the heart accelerates as the piece reaches climax. I wanted the dog, in particular, to amplify this, through the sync of paws hitting the ground and the heartbeat. I also wanted to capture emotion through the unsteady, quivering nature of the animation.

The reason I animated the mole more illustratively was to make it more menacing and startling. My original piece of writing had continuous unexpected twists that inspired me. Finally, I will strain the fact that I did not want this piece to have logical order. To me the piece is fragments of emotional poetry and animals, it is not logical nor a narrative story.

Process

Video:

-Started with automatic writing.
-Wrote the text out on word and printed.
-Used Brenton's cut up technique to obscure text more.
-Condensed into script.
-Started conjuring storyboard and images.

- I Started animating in flash frame by frame.. My Iideas were limited at the time, all I had thought conceptually was was making text seem alive, breathing. I realised after animating the first storyboard, there was too much text to deal with.

-During the critique, Raef suggested I work with the emotion of words and imagery and to keep the clunkiness of the text, rather than unnatural tweening. Someone also suggested that the colour of the background was overwhelming, I played a bit more with colour but found black and white worked the best.

Video shown at the critique

-I referred back to the writing and circled the most meaningful bits to try and capture the true essence.

-I also started the storyboard again.


-For this storyboard I used more animal based movement throughout the piece, a dog running and the mole popping up from the ground to scream/sing.

-Another point to mention is what the background is; it was closeup shots of my beanie (which looks like multicoloured fur or silk), after taking the shots I blurred them into one another and desaturated and inverted the entire image in Photoshop. I then tweened the background to slowly move left.

-After I had animated all these concepts, I showed the piece to a friend, she suggested I change the begining where the fish tail interacts with the "oh god" text. I decided to remove the "oh god", it was just frustrating me and seemed to distract from what I wanted the viewer to look at, the fish tail itself.

Pre-animation sketches

Sound:

-I firstly thought about the different sounds the text and animals could make.
-I started to compose the sound of the fish tail in Audacity, I used my hand waving in a container of water, one side to the next.
-I also recorded myself breathing, and animated the text to breathe. I scrapped this idea and instead played with the syllables with my eerie filtered singing, this helped create an atmosphere for the piece I wanted.
-The heartbeat was used tapping a pen against a soft surface.
-And the mole was heavely edited sounds of my dogs barking.
-All sound editing was accomplished in Audacity.