Talking About Birds

So I'll be posting up my final animation piece (aside from the showreel of course) tomorrow so I figured I would say a few words here about it. As this thing's probably been marked already this will mostly be for my own gain when I write this lot up in my sketchbook. So yeah, given it's late at night  and the stuff mentioned above, I probably won't put any pictures in much. Maybe a couple.

So a quick overview first: it's an animation about art movements. I couldn't find quite enough to sink my teeth into with modernism or postmodernism I had an idea about how to do an animation based around art movements. As I still wanted to get a bit of focus on modernism and post modernism I based the movements on the ones before and after modernism. So there's Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Pop Art.

The project went through several shifts in perspective and style over the time I've been working on it. Even to the stage where I was planning on a very different ending just a few hours ago. So I'll start at the most appropriate part for this: The End. You see I was initially planning a slow zoom in through the window where the title would appear after the fighting artists are offscreen in a nice hand-drawn font and the first bird would fly by. But it was then I realised that because of all the horribly complex animated action at the bottom I'd have an extremely hard time pulling that off. perhaps if I were using aftereffects it might've worked but I was so far down this route that I had no options to change. By this point I'd already finished the fight section for the end and it had ended up a bit more brutal than intended. And I don't quite know why I though of this but I remembered the ending of one of my favourite horror-ish films: Funny Games. If I get time I'll do a spotlight on it. I mean generally speaking it's not a film I'd thought I would like. A thoroughly harsh film that's really unpleasant to watch, it has just enough satire and taste to pull it off. But the point I though of was the very end. After the film ends in a pretty spectacular manner the title hits the screen on a black background with red text (I ended up using white on mine though) with heavy thrash metal cutting in. It's an unpleasant ending for an unpleasant film. And I love it. And despite my animation not having sound at the moment I'll try and emulate that ending.

Whilst i think of other influences I'll just jot down where the inspiration came for each bird. The first one was done in my standard cartoony style but with the eyes borrowed from the very glossy eyes of my robot drawings and a couple of touches from Girls With Slingshots. The second and third just used generic google searches to find some inspiration. I'm not that happy with them really. I did them a week or so before the second batch and it kinda shows. For the modernism one I borrowed heavily from this picture:

I sadly can't find who did it. I'll try and get it for the sketchbook though. The postmodernism one was quite fun to do. As postmodernism is so varied I decided to give it a shot myself. I took the theory of minimalism, and employed it to a bird. I managed to reduce it to a square with a triangle for a beak. The wing was added just to give me something to animate. The pop art one was a mixture of lichtenstein and warhol's styles, using a very comic-based bird picture partially inspired by the bird logo of Darby Productions and my general experiences reading comics, and the duplicating picture style of warhol.

So onto the animation itself. I'd done three animations at this point. Or at least done a good chunk of three. The first was a decent length and looked fairl nice, but the animation was really clunky and the dialogue was terribly done. I'd also tried to hide how basic it was and probably made it worse by doing it. The second was my attempt at doing really smooth and decent animation. I used aftereffects for the first time in a final piece. And the last time too it would seem for this year at least. The animation was smooth and really nice but rigging up the characters took an age, and the animating was very slow. It's something I might revisit in the future though. I also tried to return to it recently but the layers are so badly organised it would take forever to do more work on so I'll just sew on the other pictures I'd done. So I'd done really clunky before and got a decent amount from even if it was very badly executed. And I'd done smooth animation that looks almost professional but it takes too long to put together a decent project. So for my 'third' project, the one I replaced Kelly's sessions with, I tried simplifying the art (and doing it digitally) and attempting a more frame-by-frame style. It turned out fairly well but used up that option for the final project. So I went back to the start, and used the same techniques as the first animation but with a knowing attitude, and far more experience. I also found inspiration from The Darkness's latest music video, which was made by one of my favourite comic artists ever, Nick Roche. The video's called Barbarian but I'm too tired to link it now. But yeah, I made this animation knowing immediately the limitations I would have and that instead of going for massive quality, I';d craft the whole thing with some preset boundaries in place. And through doin g this I was able to deliver on some of the best art Ive done for an animation yet.

So 'Birds: An Animation About Art' will drop tomorrow, and it's a weird one. I think I like it.