Way back in October I searched through YouTube looking for examples of experimental animation, when I discovered an animation by HistorianHimself (which I blogged about). It featured a composition of film of ink in water, expanding, exploding and dissolving and it was this aspect that I found appealing and wanted to emulate in my animation. However I didn't want my animation to be composed as 'messy' in its composition as HistorianHimselfs video was. I chose the music Alsema-A because it had beats and a steady harmonic part, that to me, would help visualise ink dissolving.
Experi-mental - Blog Post.
To start with I tried stop motioning the ink drops into the water, for a start I didn't have any ink so I used juice and food colouring. I used the burst mode on the camera and started to drop the colouring into the water. Only after I uploaded the photos did I realise how shaky the photos were due to me holding down the button and how it missed the initial splash which was vital to the video. So I opted to film the splashes since the footage would be still and I could choose whatever part of splash I wanted rather than it luckily landing on the right photo burst. Also in this blog I involved more videos similar to what I wanted to achieve, though the videos I put up were CGI they had the clean and crispness I wanted to get into my video, also one of the videos had a cool moment that involved birds flying out of one of the splashes which I wanted to involve in my project.
Experimental Test Two - Blog Post.
In this post I featured a video of footage I had shot in the week. I tried to see how each bit of the footage could fit together, from being side by side to being mirrored. It worked relatively well other than the positioning of the camera which caused a white line to appear just below the surface. Also I planned on using a higher quality camera. One of the main problems I had was getting a white background. I put the glass tank in front of a white wall but I still had a really dull looking water. I tried changing the saturation of the video but that didn't work, I also tried masking around the solution but that didn't work as I couldn't mask out the whole solution as it too vast and spacey.
Experimental - So Close - Blog Post
This featured my near final video, it had all the footage I need, all composed how I wanted it to go all that was missing was the stop motion birds coming out of the ink. Rather than doing it all at once I wanted to see what the footage looked like without the birds and then also decide where the best place to put the birds would be.
Experimental Cut out Birds
The last production part of my project was the cut out stop motion birds, I started by drawing the stages of birds flight from what I could find on the internet. I wanted a range in animation, so I has a smooth 9 drawing animation and a stuttered 3 drawing animation. I then retraced the birds onto a red textured card that matched the colour of ink in the video and cut them out. After taking photos of them I cut them out in Photoshop and made them into TIFF files ready to composed into the video.
Finished Experimental - Blog Post and Conclusion
In conclusion I'm pleased with the video I produced. The main problems I faced was the fact that I had no control over the substance that I was using. Ideally I wanted to change the opacity of the footage rather than having them separated off but when I changed the opacity of loss quality in footage and the ink drops became hard to see. My main goal was to make visual sound, so that when I beat happened or an octave changed then something different would happened. The sound was great to use, it had a lot of long harmonics that greatly represented the ink dispersing and it was very natural which meant the birds fitted in well and had that shock factor I was after.
