Inky Messing About

After discovering that animating with inks could be done by putting a sheet of acetate on top of a light-box and filming the ink movement using a pixilation method. It's not exactly easy but it's an interesting way to animate and creates a really lovely fluid quality to the film. It's also a good method to use if you're struggling for a theme or need a bit of inspiration, as it almost creates itself. I suppose it's part of human nature to find recognisable images in something that isn't necessarily figurative, like those pictures of houses that look like faces. I sort of stumbled across the rabbit image (probably because it's an animal so dear to me). I might adapt this technique for creating single ink drawings too as it is a lot freer than any other technique I've tried and can be changed easily if I don't like the direction the drawing is going in.

Definitely something to consider for future projects. :)

Bunnies and Buddhism

I love rabbits, having always owned them as pets; and I think their movement is fantastic for animations, as it's such a fluid, joyful motion. I wanted to somehow include my love of these little creatures in my animations, and discovered that Fibonacci came up with a hypothetical situation involving rabbit breeding habits, which followed his mathematical sequence.

Until now however this only allowed me the possibility of including bunnies in one of the films. After some further research into shape symbolism in Buddhism and other religions/cultures, I found these images of Buddhist and Celtic triskelions. 

I may not include these in the final films as there is already a lot of imagery and content relating to my subject, but for my own personal interest, I'm really pleased to have discovered these quirky little images. They are especially interesting to me as I have Irish celtic roots as well. 

Mr Rufus Immortalised!

Since a print workshop at the start of 2014, during which I printed an image of my pet rabbit, Mr Rufus, I have been wanting to animate him. This opportunity presented itself when I was taught how to create a .gif animation on Photoshop. I used both my new printing and computer skills to create this .gif of Mr Rufus running around.
I took many films of him running, jumping and cleaning himself, from which I edited the film I wanted. Using iMovie, I then separated out the image sequence, rotoscoped the images into a hand-drawn storyboard, and then photocopied these images onto acetate ready for screen-printing. After screen-printing the background and rabbit onto handmade paper, I then scanned them into Photoshop to create the .gif.