Rainy Day thumbnails

Here are a few thumbnails to explore some of the ideas I have for the introduction of the song. Due to the length of the song and the time available for this module, I'm proposing to explore the first 30-60 seconds of the song.

Rainy Day Brainstorm

Here are some ideas for the Rainy Day idea:

Idea development

So now that I've experimented with some animation techniques I've begun developing some ideas for the second part of the brief.

As my interests have generally been rooted in animation created for use with music, I thought it'd be a good time to realise some of the ideas I've had in my head for some songs I love. I want to explore these ideas in a way that relates to the exploration of the mind, disregarding the need for believable and realistic elements and opening up opportunities for fluid and spontaneous experience-style animation.  

Jimi Hendrix - Rainy Day, Dream Away

I have been developing visual ideas in my head for various parts of this song, some general and some specific to certain instrumental sections.

The song (and dramatic moment) is all about all about a rainy day and how you should simple 'sit back and groove on a rainy day'. The song could incorporate various dramatic events that are possible during a stormy/rainy day such as flooding and falling trees. As my time is limited for this module I will probably work on the opening section of the song up to around the 40 second mark where the dialogue establishes that it's raining.

Character 1
Character 2

"Rainy Day, Dream Away"

Hey man, take a look out the window 'n' see what's happenin'
Hey man, it's rainin'
It's rainin' outside man
Aw, don't worry 'bout that
Everything's gonna be everything
We'll get into somethin' real nice you know
Sit back and groove on a rainy day
Yeah
Yeah I see what you mean brother, lay back and groove.

Rainy day, dream away
Ah let the sun take a holiday
Flowers bathe an' ah see the children play
Lay back and groove on a rainy day.

Well I can see a bunch of wet creatures, look at them on the run
The carnival traffic noise it sings the tune splashing up 'n'
Even the ducks can groove rain bathin' in the park side pool
And I'm leanin' out my window sill diggin' ev'rything
And ah and you too.

Rainy day, rain all day
Ain't no use in gettin' uptight
Just let it groove its own way
Let it drain your worries away yeah
Lay back and groove on a rainy day hey
Lay back and dream on a rainy day

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jimihendrix/rainydaydreamaway.html

The Doors - Riders on the Storm

This song is another that I've been wanting to animate to as the song creates a visual story with lines such as: 

"There's a killer on the road 

His brain is squirmin' like a toad 

Take a long holiday 

Let your children play 

If ya give this man a ride 

Sweet memory will die 

Killer on the road, yeah"

These lines create an image of a sinister murderer hitch-hiking on a stormy night.

"Riders On The Storm"

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Into this house we're born 

Into this world we're thrown 

Like a dog without a bone 

An actor out on loan

Riders on the storm 

There's a killer on the road 

His brain is squirmin' like a toad 

Take a long holiday 

Let your children play 

If ya give this man a ride 

Sweet memory will die 

Killer on the road, yeah 

Girl ya gotta love your man 

Girl ya gotta love your man 

Take him by the hand 

Make him understand 

The world on you depends 

Our life will never end 

Gotta love your man, yeah 

Wow! 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Into this house we're born 

Into this world we're thrown 

Like a dog without a bone 

An actor out alone 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm 

Riders on the storm

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/doors/ridersonthestorm.html

Riders On The Storm

Here's a brainstorm that explores some of the ideas I have for an animated music video for 'Riders On The Storm' by The Doors.

Dramatic Moments

Here's a brainstorm going through a few ideas related to a 'dramatic moment'.

Music-driven animation

After working on my animation to 'Teardrop' by Massive Attack I decided to look for examples of animations of a similar nature. One particularly interesting piece I found was created by a student:

Kasabian - I.D (stage visualisation)

It seems a few bands/artists have made use of music-synced animation, using it for music videos and stage visuals. I found this example particularly interesting and feel it relates to my animation in some ways .

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

This animation to me seems inspired by the Rorschach inkblot test. This has some really nice ideas in it and seems to be a mixture of rotoscoping, and digitally animated ink brushes, with the use of a vertical mirror effect in the centre. I'm becoming increasingly more interested in this style of animation as the opportunities to explore ideas and events with fluidity and spontaneity are much greater.

Sound based animation

Len Lye

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1901, Lye developed a style of art based on 'doodling' from an early age, which stirred his interest in the 'pre-rational'.

He was deeply interested in movement and wanted to portray kinetic energy within artistic works; he also drew on aboriginal art, which for Lye again represented a 'pre-rational' artistic tradition.

Tuslava

Walther Ruttmann

A German film director, an exponent of both avant-garde art and music, he became a
practitioner of experimental film.

Ruttmann studied architecture and painting and worked as a graphic designer. His film career
began in the early 1920s.

"Opus I" (1921) and "Opus II" (1923), were experiments with new forms of film expression, and
the influence of these early abstract films can be seen in the early work of Oskar Fischinger
Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriching the language of film as a
medium with new form techniques.

Opus I:

Opus IV:

Stuart Hilton

Born Preston in Lancashire 1965. Studied Graphics at Liverpool Polytechnic and then went onto a Masters at the RCA, Graduating in 1990. Through Arts Council Funding he made Argument on a Superstore (1992) and then “Save Me” in 1994.

His work echoes experimenters from the past in the pre-occupation with sound and image. He is not interested in conveying a ‘different world’ .His drawings are not meant to possess their own sense of life, as he states, “through the process of tracing”. Sound is integral in his work. Seemingly random yet with a sense of drama the sound disparately interacts with the images – “the space between what you see and what you hear is full of possibilities”.

Save Me 1994:

Clive Walley

An artist-filmmaker whose work in animation is understood to be some of the most beautiful and purest expressions of the form.

He has successfully bridged the divide between the commercial and art world with his award winning body of work. He works with a multi-plane rostrum technique combined with oil paint on glass.

Life Study:

Love Song:

Synaesthesia

What is it?

"What colour is the letter "A"? What does the number '1" taste of? Does listening to music, speaking or eating food produce colours, shape or texture? For most people, questions such as these will either yield a look of bewilderment or an emphatic "No!"

Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses. Sensations in one modality (e.g. hearing) produce sensations in another modality (e.g. colour) as well as its own. Synaesthetic experiences are often driven by symbolic rather than sensory representations, such as letters, numbers and words. It is also often experienced in the absence of external sensory input, such as one's "inner speech"."

http://www.uksynaesthesia.com/UKSAWHAT.html

Here's a great animated video that explains the condition of Synaesthesia:

For a while now I've been inspired by the idea of Synaesthesia. Specifically in regard to interpreting music as colour, shapes and other imagery. For the sound-based animation task I decided to experiment with this concept using the song Teardrop by Massive Attack.

I began experimenting in Flash with shapes and colour in time to the beat, the acoustic guitar and keyboard, here's my first try at testing the ideas:

Once I had the ideas together for each element of the track I decided to have a second go at it with better alignment and timing.

To make sure the alignment was better on this one, I created this alignment template in Illustrator:

My final attempt:

My second version turned out a lot better than the first due to the alignment template. I created the layers in Flash and exported them separately with transparent backgrounds for maximum control. I then imported them into After Effects. I created a solid object for the background which I was able to animate for the colour changes. I quite like the ideas in this piece and I hope to develop this idea further at some point.

Animated music videos

Peter, Bjorn and Peter - Young Folks

Here is a music video that makes use of a combination of rotoscoping and cut-out animation. It's a simple but effective style of animation that takes this catchy song and turns it into a story about the care free journey the band went on to create the song. This is a nice example of how you can enhance a song with characters and narrative.

A example of an artist/music collective that are well known for using characters and narrative to create a music-animation relationship that works well together is Gorillaz.

Clint Eastwood

On Melancholy Hill

They often experiment with a combination of techniques and treatments to create an interesting and original look to their videos. They mostly use a mixture of 3D CGI, Traditional 2D animation and live action.

I'm really interested by animation created for use with music as it's a brilliant middle-ground between the commercial and experimental sides of animation.

Cut Out Animation

Cut-out animation is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: cut-out shapes arranged on a flat surface, and manually moved and repositioned to simulate animation. Cut-outs can be colored paper, white paper with drawings on it, even photographs, and can be completely flat or can sometimes be 3D objects, though this ventures away from cut-out animation and into stop-motion animation. Many often use cut-out animation to make photographs of people and animals to make it seem as if they're talking or moving, often resulting in a 2D marionette effect.

The actual step-by-step process of cut-out animation is somewhat related to the process in stop-motion animation, and can be just as tedious because it requires manual intervention. First the scene is created using cut-out objects, laid out flat against the background image. This scene is created on an animation stand, with the rostrum camera positioned above the animation stand and positioned to pan or zoom over the scene. The camera is used to capture the scene created with the cut-out shapes.

Here are the examples we looked at in class:

Lotte Reineger - The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926:

Yuriy Norshteyn - Tale of Tales 1979:

Hedgehog in the Fog 1975:

The Overcoat:

A modern example of this style of animation is the famous cartoon show 'South Park'. Despite their incredibly simple animation style the show is a huge success and is currently on it's 17th season. They have recently made an attempt to modernise their iconic intro by incorporating 3D techniques along with the cut-out style to create an interesting new look:

It's been met with mixed reviews but I think that the mix of cut-out and 3D works really well to create a modern take on a dated technique.

My Attempt

I created this character in Illustrator, keeping each part of the body on separate layers. I then imported the layers into After Effects and moved the anchor points of each limb in the appropriate place to mimic the joints of the character. The body parts were then parented to keep them together. For example: Hand to Forearm - Forearm to Upper Arm - Upper Arm to Torso, this is essentially like pinning the pieces together.

I found this quite difficult due to the limited movements possible with this method. Once I created a fairly smooth walk cycle I decided to create a quick background in Illustrator to make the test more interesting. I also added a camera in After Effects to track with the character just to make it more believable. I'm reasonably pleased with what I came up with but I'm not fond of this technique as I find it too limiting.

Rotoscoping

In the second week we looked at the technique called Rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is used to capture realistic human movement by drawing over film footage of live actors frame by frame. Perhaps this sounds like cheating, but adding an artist's vision to the movements of a human actor can create a unique storytelling medium that is just as stylistic as any other form of animation

Patented by Max Fleischer in 1917 – the projection of film onto a glass plate on an animation stand, in order to create movement that was ‘enjoyable to watch rather than jerky’.

Here are some of the examples we looked at in class:

Out of The Inkwell 1921:

Betty Boop - Minnie the Moocher 1931: 

Jungle Book - Bare Necessities 1967:

These animations make use of rotoscoping in order to create realistic and believable movements for stylised cartoon characters. Video references or using a mirror can be very useful tools for figuring out movements for your characters.

Life - Richard Linklater: One of the more sophisticated examples of rotoscoping is the film Waking Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy. Waking Life took the 2001 Sundance Film Festival by storm, impressing audiences and critics with not only its animation style, but director Richard Linklater's ability to tell a moving, rich story using a frenetic animation style like rotoscoping. We watched a clip from this film during class, I found it appealing and decided to watch the whole thing. I found the animation style very interesting, the characters are fully rotoscoped whilst the background is traced and animated on separate layers in order to reduce the time taken to recreate the scene. The way this is done creates an unsettling sea-sick dreamy type of effect which I found quite interesting and related well to the purpose of the animation.

My attempts

For my first try at rotoscoping, I took a video from YouTube of someone demonstrating the dance from the video for Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'.

I applied the 'find edges' filter to this footage to try to make it easier to draw over however I found that due to the lack of contrast against the white walls, it made the arms difficult to see. This was especially a problem during quick movements as the motion blur made it almost impossible to trace. Another factor that accentuated this problem was the low resolution of the source footage.

Here's what I came up with:

For my second attempt I wanted to capture the movement of something interesting that I hadn't animated before. I found some fairly good quality footage of a seagull and decided it would be interesting to use.

This footage was much easier to trace but it was difficult to trace in a different way. For many frames at a time, the  bird doesn't move very much meaning that each frame had to been drawn more accurately in order to capture the movement effectively. I tried to keep the drawings accurate but some guess work had to be done when tracing frames with motion blur. Footage captured with a fast frame rate is essential to reducing motion blur, this would make each frame much easier to trace.

Under the camera

At the start of the module we began by looking at under the camera animation techniques.

Caroline Leaf

Caroline Leaf, Canadian Animator, is best known for her method of animating under the camera, using ‘straight ahead animation’ method – an on-going process of drawing, shooting and re-drawing the image. This is really interesting because animations made in this way often differ greatly from animations made using the pose-to-pose method, making for some interesting timing and motion.

She has used sand and a lightbox underneath, creating strong silhouettes and subtle movement, oil paint (removing lines/shapers and re- painting them) – in her later work she has used 70mm film stock to scratch into. Her work celebrates the special language of animation in terms of being able to shape shift – to move from one idea or memory to another, unlike the harsh cut of the live action film, animation can represent the way we experience memories and think fluidly, therefore making animation the art of the subconscious.

The Owl Who Married a Goose 1974:

The Street 1976:

Two Sisters 1990:

http://www.carolineleaf.com/work_biography.php

For our first task we were asked to experiment with animating to a sound clip using either charcoal or tea on paper under a camera. In our group we decided to use charcoal on paper for our animation test. We looked online for sound clips to use and found the sound of a matchstick lighting. We rotated the paper in order to create the movement of the matchstick and simple added and smudged the charcoal for the flame and burning. Some frames had to be repeated in order to sync with the audio.