New benchmark

I'm going to draw up the ending section while I try and figure out how to make the transitional work. Or, if it doesn't seem to be working, perhaps a different, less fail, way of making them happen. At the very least I'll make an attempt to make it fit.

Goal for Thursday 9-28

My goal for Thursday is to experiment with using the overhead sheets to draw on pictures. I will be able to finish the building/picture portion of the storyboard (the part that occupies slots 15-19).
I will try a couple different methods, doing larger amounts on a single picture as well as cycling out the pictures though at a significantly slower rate than previous. My original idea was to have close to a hundred different photos, but I'm cutting that down to 5 per photo section (give or take a couple). The primary problem will be attempting to create a transition between the black and white of the pencil images to the colored images of the photos.

Potential ideas to offset the transition...use black and white or gray-scale photos; derived from this I can use more sedate images in terms of color. Also, it may be solved simply by using simpler images as opposed to some of the, even moderately, complicated ones.

Storyboard

Do-Over

Since pretty much the only thing that changed in my idea was the transfer of following a figure into the process following a leaf. Hence, I have merely switched out the words figure/person with leaf.


The motif of my piece is constant change or growth being cyclical, with everything building off of what came before. That is to say, change is constantly occurring throughout the piece, whether it’s something actually growing and changing, or if it’s using the method of rapid replacement to rapidly switch out images, and in the end the whole thing becomes too large and crumples; it then starts over from the beginning.
I’ve broken down the structure of the piece into four sections. There’s the birth, growth, fall, and rebirth. The birth consists of a tree growing, then dropping a leaf, which then begins to float through nature, until coming across budding town. It watches the town grow, then moves through the town. It then observes a building grow and change and grow some more, until it becomes a skyscraper. It becomes so large, however, that it pushes against the paper, and the paper crumbles, bringing the building down with it. The leaf also sinks into the ground. Where it sinks, a plant blooms to bring the whole thing full circle.

I want to show the changes using draw and erase on paper as well as rapid replacement of drawings (on top of pictures) at certain times. I also plan to bring the paper itself into play later on in the piece, as a means of showing the breakdown and fall section of the cycle. Once the paper is settled, the cycle will begin anew.

Pitch

The motif of my piece is constant change or growth being cyclical, with everything building off of what came before. That is to say, change is constantly occurring throughout the piece, whether it’s something actually growing and changing, or if it’s using the method of rapid replacement to rapidly switch out images, and in the end the whole thing becomes too large and crumples; it then starts over from the beginning.
I’ve broken down the structure of the piece into four sections. There’s the birth, growth, fall, and rebirth. The birth consists of a tree growing, then dropping a leaf which turns into a human figure. The figure then begins to walk through nature, until coming across budding town. He watches the town grow, then moves through the town. He then observes a building grow and change and grow some more, until it becomes a skyscraper. It becomes so large, however, that it pushes against the paper, and the paper crumbles, bringing the building down with it. The figure also sinks into the ground. Where he sinks, a plant blooms to bring the whole thing full circle.




I want to show the changes using draw and erase on paper as well as rapid replacement of drawings (on top of pictures) at certain times. I also plan to bring the paper itself into play later on in the piece, as a means of showing the breakdown and fall section of the cycle. Once the paper is settled, the cycle will begin anew.



My inspiration examples are:
Regrowth
Don Herdzfelts' 'Rejected Cartoons' Specifically at 7:55 when the paper crumbles (then again, Don Herdzfelt is a large part of my inspiration to be an animator in the first place)
Tree Cycle
and
Human Cycle

I wish I could have found the animation I was thinking of when I first had the idea, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called. Oh well.

The general theme of my final idea is a basic “Cops and Robbers” type chase. It starts out with a blank page then a doodle of a cartoony criminal figure is made, who then comes to life. He looks around, and a cartoony police caricature comes onto the page. A chase begins across the original page, and the robber stops at the edge, back to the edge, and eventually jumps off. He appears on a nearby piece of paper, surprised and excited to have escaped. But the officer appears on this page as well, and a chase proceeds around the room, over various blank documents, photos, copies of paintings…perhaps some real paintings, with the characters changing to fit the style of the painting they are in. Eventually, the cop catches the robber, drags him to a drawn incinerator and tosses him in. A burned, crumbled up piece of paper appears behind the incinerator, and the police officer pushes the paper into a trash can (the burnt paper is 3d, the cop is 2d). After a few moments, a different crumbled up paper climbs out of the trashcan and lands on the floor. It opens up, and the robber is there. He runs away, end.

I admit the main reason for the chase scene is I needed a reason for a character to want to jump off a page, which for a drawing would be essentially like jumping into the middle of the ocean (I assume). I’ve also thought of having the beginning page become a kind of insular world, where the only time the character would jump off the page is when he is driven to it after doing something wrong. In this setting, it would begin with the doodle looking fairly normal, but would warp into a criminal as the nice looking setting began to fall apart and start to look destitute (a nice looking area turns into a slum). After committing some wrong, he would be chased by a cop, as described in the paragraph above.

This idea still needs development, but I think this is a good start to it. From here I have a good base to expand on.

3 ideas

My first idea is based on a video I saw by a band, Mogwai. It constitutes having an array of objects in a line. Either it can be done in the same manner as the video, with the objects already there, or the objects can either appear or else move into the line. I’m also considering having the line lead to something, though I’m not sure what at the moment (incinerator, trash compactor, etc). This is probably the easiest of my ideas to implement.
The video relating to this idea is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC_3alnTE9g


My second idea is based on the BLU animations mixed with the Kentridge animations. It’s also mixed with the reoccurring idea in a lot of cartoons where the characters will enter paintings in a museum and jump from painting to painting. I see a blank canvas, either hanging on a wall or maybe on an easel. A painting/drawing begins to happen on the canvas which culminates into a creature/figure of some sort, who begins to jump from the first canvas to various painting/pictures/canvases strewn about the room.


My third idea is perhaps the most complicated and probably the hardest to implement since it would take a significant number of pictures to pull off at anything close to the quality of the video. But it would be amazing to attempt, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a person involved. The thing most appealing about this though, is the double layer of stop motion going on, added in with creating space within a different space. It boggles my mind…my mind! It burns! Anyways, this is my favorite of the ideas, but again, it might be outside the realistic.
The video related to this piece is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkLlVzUBn4