If you sought to live, you had naught but run and hide yourself away. ░

Evaluation

Pandora & Times Up

In this module I’ve submitted two animation briefs. The first was for Pandora, where I constructed a brief around a video they made of a surprise ballet performance in New Street Station, Christmas 2016. The brief was to re purpose the footage into an animation, in a hypothetical situation where Pandora would re release the video in animated form the following Christmas. All of the footage used for reference and sound was taken from the original video. This brief took about 10 weeks to complete, as it also ran alongside my dissertation, where the question was ‘How does successful sound design convey emotion to a viewer in animation?’. To begin with I had a vague idea of this subject, but hadn’t used sound before in my own work. While writing the dissertation I learned a lot about storytelling theory as well as applying this to sound design and animation, which can now be applied to all my work.

The second project I worked on was a 3 day brief, for the TIMES UP campaign that is actively trying to put an end to gender inequality. After Pandora I wanted to work on a short editorial brief since that one took so long to complete. I found that this was the day after the Golden Globes 2018, where almost all female and male attendee’s wore black in support of the TIMES UP campaign. The cause itself is something that everyone should be in support of, so I was excited to create a brief around it straight away. The brief was to make a 10-20 second animation that illustrates the black outfits worn at the event, as this had already gained a lot of media attention just 1 day after the event, so the aim of this brief was to create something that the campaign would use across social media platforms to further promote it. The reference images used were sourced from a BBC news story about the event, and the  footage used for the animated elements were sourced from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2018.

Both of these projects were really different in styles and concepts. Looking back I’ve enjoyed working on the TIMES UP brief more than Pandora, but I learnt a lot of the techniques in Pandora that I feel were applied in a more refined way in TIMES UP. My intentions in terms of personal development with Pandora was mainly to create a full length animation by myself, since the only full animation I have worked on before was the collaboration in RSA. I also wanted to apply my existing drawing skills to animation in ways that I hadn’t tried yet, and have a go at lots more styles. In this sense, I definitely got out of it what I wanted to, however I didn’t think it would take quite as long as it did. I had planned for this brief to run for 1 month, and it ended up taking about 10 weeks. I had also planned for it to be around 1 minute, where as I had to end it at 30 seconds in the end due to running out of time. I’m happy with the outcome I’ve submitted, however I would work more on it if I had the time. I did however learn a lot of digital skills and knowledge that I applied to the TIMES UP brief, which helped me generate work a lot quicker and get the quality of work that I wanted to. For TIMES UP I worked completely digitally even though I wanted a hand painted feel to it. I decided to do this because of one of the experiments in Pandora where I hand painted each frame in watercolour. I liked the result but it didn’t look how I wanted it to for the context, as I found watercolour can be quite hard to control. I then chose to use watercolour textures as a layer mask and then reveal it with watercolour brushes, I found this gave me a much cleaner result when animating.

For my research process in Pandora, I did some research on their company mission and how they described themselves, for example the keywords like ‘luxury, contemporary design and personal storytelling’ stood out to me. I think as a whole I managed to construct a narrative from the footage and although I used lots of different styles, they were intended to compliment each other and reflect the aesthetic of Pandora. I then looked into animators and artists that I know of who use styles that I  wanted to try something similar to, including the work of ShiShi Yamazaki, who created a 1 minute long watercolour rotoscoped animation for CHANEL. Seeing this really helped me start quickly on the project and not loose confidence in the idea, since it’s clearly a well recognised style for high brow brands at the minute. Throughout the Pandora brief I continued to look at animations for their techniques, styles and concepts. My main point of research for the TIMES UP brief was their campaign website, where they explain their mission and reasoning with statistics. I also looked at the book YELLOW, which is made up of illustrators creating work around specific issues. There was a couple of illustrations I found that were really refreshing to see, as the idea behind them was really simple. I found in Pandora that I was over complicating a lot of sections, so wanted to try something a lot simpler that still got the message across.

One issue that I found in both projects was that when using videos for reference, sometimes the footage would cut something out like a foot or hand, which I’d then have to image how this would look in the pose of the figure. I found this a lot in Pandora because I’d sometimes be taking just one figure out of a full scene, so it took a bit of time to overcome this. I also had this problem in TIMES UP where I wanted the figure to be wearing a black dress, so I had to draw it on the figure and imagine how the figure would flow correctly with that movement. Another problem I had was that when working on Pandora, towards the end I started to loose momentum with the project. I had expected that this could happen at the beginning at the module, but I expected to be finished a lot sooner. After this module I’ve got a much better idea of how long a rotoscope animation takes me, and I’ve refined a lot of the visual skills that I’ve used.

I did want to give myself enough time to learn more about After Effects and create a gif for an editorial brief. I did a small experiment on my blog where I use the puppet tool on a simple character, and learnt how to do this quite quickly. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time for this but will definitely be organising my time more in the next module to do smaller briefs that explore new animating techniques. I also wanted to apply what I learned in writing my dissertation more to the sound elements to my own work, for example I really wanted to put sound on the TIMES UP final outcome, however I ran out of times. Despite this I had a constant interest in writing this and know it will continue to inform my work.

In the next module I would like to have a few small briefs going on at the same time. I want to continue with the TIMES UP campaign and finalise the animation with sound, and also create some other elements for the campaign itself. I also want to work on a D&AD brief, from the ones I’ve looked at already I would like to do the Bacardi one. As well as this I would like to learn more about after effects, possibly do an RSA brief and re purpose the Penguin Random House competition briefs to create animated title sequences. Overall I’ve learned about my own time keeping and how long specific elements will take me to do, but I’ve also learned how to work a lot quicker and how to achieve the quality in style that I want to.