Collaborative Practice: Week 7 - Animating and Compositing

Deadline is approaching, so we have to speed up the animation process. Some of the animations were done in fours like the parade scene to buy time. It was less smooth than how I wanted it to be, but it was not the most important bit of the animation. Galuh helped me out in making this scene, and I taught her to animate. I am glad that the illustrators I am grouping up with likes to watch films and are familiar with film composition and the golden ratio theory. I don't usually stick to the golden ratio, but I definitely find it handy to plan out the spacing of movements in this cutout animation especially for the parade scene. 

Montage is useful to convey tension for the climax. It was a scary and bloody scene, so the montage of the animal skin needs to move really quickly. The idea is to conceal the animal skin from the audience, so that they can focus on the disgusting bit of the fur coat. I applied this montage technique commonly used by Svankmajer in his films to convey passing of time.

This was actually the most spontaneous and the most fun scene to make. All three of us were responsible of the slashing and exploding the animals. I proposed the idea to the other two girls of live painting, and we all took turns and tried to impersonate Jackson Pollock when making the strokes. It was hella pretentious, but we had fun doing it.

We figure that we can use the shadow puppet in the title and end sequence of the animation. We discovered that we can do so when we were taking a break and Galuh's hand was resting on the set and it cast shadow in the live view on the computer screen.

I like the spontaneity in our group, even when we come up with the title of our animation. Our group dynamics also fit in with the experimental nature of cutouts animation seems like a better choice than if all these are to be animated on After Effects by myself.

Final animation:

I did not do any compositing to the final outcome because I think it will lose its organic feel even with the slightest editing, like adding a bit of vibrancy. There is a beauty in these unedited footages and all the imperfections in the lighting. We did realised the lighting is on the parade scene is not consistent to the rest of the scenes, but when we did realised it was a little too late to re-record the footage again. Although some of my animator friends raised up this problem, we are not too fussed about it. Instead, we liked the dimmer lighting because it foreshadows the dark and twisted climax of our animation.

Fur OR Animals from Galuh Indri Wiyarti on Vimeo.