Our assignment last week was to create a cut-out animation based on surreal animations, the 1970s hit Frank Film, or Terry Gilliam's work. I mixed Gilliam with surrealism--the opening walk cycle was based on one he liked to abuse. I was really loose with this assignment, and had a lot of fun creating something funny and straight out of my head and humor.
So Jabril and I collaborated with The Artsy Hipster Gamers (a freshman interactive group) on a Global Game Jam Project. The Global Game Jam requires teams or individuals to create a game within 48 hours. This is what we came out with. In the game you play as this elephant-tree-force-of-nature-monster, who tramples the bleak concrete buildings to reveal beautiful green grass. However, as the monster you must avoid trampling the same ground twice. If you do, the grass becomes infertile dust, and you decrease your score. Even while worrying about not retracing your steps, you as the monster must avoid small red soldiers wielding swords. You must also terminate the blue hammer men who will attempt to rebuild the suburban jungle. To destroy both these hammer men and the red warriors, you can place your cursor over them and then click to kill. Green vines will rip from the ground and drag these poor souls through cracks and into the Earth.
Our final project assignment for our first semester frosh animation class was to create 3 books that used 2 or 3 of our assigned objects differently, giving them different contexts or meanings. Can you guess what my assigned two reoccurring objects were? Some of my classmates couldn't. (Answer at end of post.)
A walk cycle experiment made difficult because I noticed too late the model I used had scoliosis.
What's happening here, because I know it goes pretty fast: A girl in rags gets a fairy godmother, she gets a dress, the fairy talks to her about the midnight clause, then with a lecherous smile and wink makes a line of princes she can choose from poof into appearance, the girl looks turned on, she inspects the line, she chooses the ugliest one possible and attacks his face with her mouth, which he somehow doesn't want.
My animations seem to flip back and forth bipolarly from Disney-inspired to nightmare scrawl.
This is a self-portrait type animation, and is rather on the sloppy side. Mostly I just wanted to relax and see where the style I was experimenting with would take me so as to develop it further.
This animation was based upon the portrait I doodled of myself, as seen below:
So we were supposed to be spontaneous this week--that was the prompt for our flipbook. So we went to a museum and were supposed to find our favorite room and animate something there. As I admitted to my animation professor in class, a walk cycle isn't exactly spontaneous. But I did make the spontaneous decision to teach myself walk cycles this week, and I did decide to make a walk cycle from scratch--based on a youtube video of a gorilla--come hell or high water. There's a lot of mistakes with this cycle--ones I don't feel like pointing out--but considering this is my first effort with walk cycles, I feel pretty good about what I did this week.
This week's flipbook is dedicated to my dad, because I was listening to a bunch of 1970s protest/political activist songs this week, most of which my dad showed me at some point, and one that stood out was "The Pretender." The lyrics I used in this video are my favorite, and I thought they would be pretty funny/ironic when applied to a gorilla walk cycle.
Yes, the USC animators, collaborating on just one entry (Aha Moments under the direction of Jabril Mack), conquered the USC Freshman Short Film Competition, beating the dozens of other live action entries submitted by the rest of the cinema school. That said, all the other entries were amazing--most incredibly funny, and some surprisingly thoughtful and emotional. It was a great competition.
(Please listen with audio, as the music enhances the meaning of the film.)
So the theme this week was color, and the color I was assigned was yellow. While people typically associate yellow with its positive connotations--such as sunshine, energy, happiness, youth, and enlightenment--there is actually a darker side to the meaning behind the color. Yellow can also represent loudness, decay, cowardice, age, waste, and sickness. I was very interested in the fact that yellow means both youth and old age/decay/sickness. I also wanted to incorporate the loudness of yellow, making it feel like my character was screaming or moaning. Enlightenment and cowardice were also contrasts I wanted to work with. I thought following the life span of someone who could not come to terms with their aging process, body, or mortality--and who faced both their birth and death with gracelessness and fear--would be an effective means of exploring each of yellow's connotations through my character's facial evolution and expressions.
Miscellaneous symbolism: Upon their death my character reluctantly receives enlightenment as signified by the growth of long hair that halos their face. When you see the character at 30 with a mohawk, the orange tears he cries are actually the male sign (O-->). This represents his inability to accept his adult form or the gender roles society imposes upon him. The opening and closing doors illustrate the rapid speed at which life passes him by. Doors of opportunity open for him, but he is too caught up in his imminent death to notice. The doors then close for him forever.
This is probably my favorite animation so far. In this short film I am telling a story that is actually important to me, in a style that is very much my own. I hope I can continue to tap into the source I used for this in the future. I think it actually helped that I did not use any pencil work in this animation, so my lines were bolder and more free. I enjoyed this loose, flexible style.
This week's challenge is dedicated, of course, to my twin sister. This may not be her favorite song anymore, but I thought she'd enjoy an animation about Dylan. I like the characters in this piece, but next week I want a real story and not just reactions, and I want to animate a more realistic character--maybe even use sources. I keep jumping to cartoons without exploring the 3D realm.
I actually stayed up so late making this, that I was still shooting it at 9 in the morning though I started work at 5 the night before. I was so exhausted that while the file was converting to Quicktime around 12, that I just laid down on the classroom floor and slept. Forget that I was using the room containing the graduate students' cubicles and that many of those cubicles were occupied at the time. I was so tired that sleeping on the floor in front of strangers without warning seemed perfectly normal. I was only hours later when the adrenalin hit to keep me up the rest of the day that I started facepalming myself.
When I made this Tuesday I knew my teacher wouldn't like it all that much--she desperately wants me to stop using characters. But after animating dead grass and ant-infested dirt last week, I decided this week I'd animate what I wanted.
By the way, this animation is dedicated to my father, because his birthday occurred upon the day I began this. The content doesn't match him, but he wanted my flipbook dedicated to him, so there it is.
