Latest Line Tests

After a few camera issues aka me being clueless with technology again, I managed to get a few seconds of animation into iStopmotion. I had wanted to get the whole film done in the afternoon, but I severely underestimated the amount of time it takes to capture over 720 frames! It takes FOREVER! Especially when the camera is on auto-rotate, keeps changing its view and you don't know how to fix it. (It's actually really easy to fix...)
This time I definitely captured each frame twice so the animation is running to a normal speed, meaning no going back and adding in frames thank goodness! Good to know my intuition in timing is fairly sound. 

Fibonacci Music

I knew vaguely that the fibonacci series related to music, for example that the keys of piano are in the series. 

I wanted to find some music for my animation which had been written with the fibonacci series in mind, so that hopefully the music would compliment the images on another level. In my search I found this TEDtalk about the power of the sequence within music. I might use something similar to this simple percussive music in my film, although I do like the power of the maths within chord progressions and harmonies so I might go for something with a bit more depth to it. It would be brilliant if the music I chose ended on a point like this video, but I think my timings would have had to be planned out earlier to match the music rather than finding music to match my video. 

Ishu Patel

After telling my friend Cat about my film ideas, she recommended that I look at Ishu Patel's animations. Patel is originally from India, but has taken his work across the world with the National Film Board. His animation Perspectrum was of particular interest to me as it used a soundtrack that I think will be quite similar to what I'll be using for my mandala film. It was also very abstract and used only simple shapes but the movement links so well with the music that it is beautifully entrancing. I think this has highlighted for me that the film doesn't necessarily need to have an obvious theme, it an just be about the joy of patterns, colour and balance.
Patel's other animations, Afterlife, The Bead Game and Paradise are lovely too because they really abuse the freedom animators have in creating an entirely new world where anything can happen. In The Bead Game and Afterlife, Patel merges characters and shapes into new ones in the blink of an eye, or dissolves them into a mass of colour before transforming them again. He works seamlessly between the shapes, like clay being remodelled. I love the way he merges between different colours as well, using a chromatic spectrum it seems. Part of me wishes that I had not worked on white paper for my peg bar animation as Patel's use of colour against a black background seems to make them look like they glow like coloured lights and therefore the background could be anything if it wasn't in darkness.

A real line test! Finally!

So I've finally managed to get into a studio and capture my frames for the first proper line test of the animation. Normally I would prefer to get this done earlier than 629 frames in, but whatcha gonna do...? Luckily, my instincts seem to have served me pretty well whilst drawing and I've only got a few timing discrepancies that I need to sort out. 
The start of the grid formation in the beginning of the film and some transitional sections are far too fast for my liking but they can be easily solved by drawing in extra frames and taking double captures of the frames where necessary. 
The parts I'm happiest with are the meteor at the start of the film and the hand at the end. I like that the arc in my meteor's trajectory worked out well and didn't just look like I couldn't draw in a straight line, because meteors apparently never come straight at the Earth because of the gravitational field <(Fun Fact) I think the hand worked out well because I really had to research how a hand moves by filming my own and studying it frame by frame. I feel the extra time invested there has paid off. 
The only thing that worries me about my animation is that after connecting two line tests together on Final Cut, the length was only 33 seconds. 629 frames caught at double capture in iStopMotion ought to create 52 seconds worth of film... Where have my other 19 seconds gone???? My only explanation for this is that perhaps iStopMotion was not capturing the frames as doubles. Need to investigate this, as it might affect my timing problems in the animation. 

Using Zeitraffer

I've been experimenting with filming a wire toy I have that reminds me of a 3D version of a mandala. It's very delicate and can be manipulated into different shapes. It's so 90s too; a relic from the age of mood rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and dungarees. 
I tried to create a pixelation of it at home, but without a tripod, proper lighting and just your basic digital camera, the result is a bit poor. I think this needs to be re-shot in the studio. The only part I like really is the section at the end where it gets squashed down, because you can see the transition quite clearly. (I used my suitcase as a homemade tripod there). Really I wanted this film to be used in my second animation, and reflect the paper cut mandalas, which will be revolving. I'm not sure how clear the transitions are though because the object is so complex, so I'll have to retry the pixelation and then see how clear it is. 

Chakras and Palmistry Experiment

To compliment a section of my hand-drawn fibonacci animation of an outstretched palm, I've been looking into Buddhist ideas of chakras in the hands for my mandala film. I've discovered that different parts of the hand relate to different areas of the body according to the chakra theory, and this correlation is shown by colour-coding the matching areas. The complimenting film section that I could create for my mandala film could therefore be a pixelation of the coloured areas spreading across my left hand (to mirror the right hand in the fibonacci animation). The film section needs to only be 3-5 seconds long which is plenty of time to paint and draw across my hand and map out the basic chakra areas. 

 < Section of the hand-drawn fibonacci animation. Right hand holding a nautilus shell. 

< My left hand painted to demonstrate the areas of the palm relating to chakras in the body. I painted onto my palm using acrylic paints which come away easily afterwards, as opposed to inks, which stain. 

< My painted left hand with patterns drawn on using biro pen. I thought the colours alone looked a bit bland and bare, so I experimented with shapes and lines I've used in my mandala creations. I might alternatively just write onto my palm which sections relate to which chakra in the body, as they all have different names. 

First-hand research

For a section of my fibonacci animation I wanted to animate a hand picking up a shell, but having never drawn  something like that before, I wasn't sure of the exact movement. After the gif I made ofMr Rufus Rabbit went so well though, I figured the best way to handle my problem would be to film my own hand picking something up and then watch the movement until I could replicate it. There is a certain amount of intuition that still goes on with this method, as this time I'm not rotoscoping the image the way I did for the rabbit gif. 
Using first-hand research (pardon the pun), is definitely the best way to approach animating something new, otherwise it is very easy to get the movement wrong. For something as commonplace as hand gestures, I did not want this to happen as it would be very noticeable if the action wasn't naturalistic.