My initial idea for my thesis was to do a series of animation dedicated to several friends of mine who were born in February, March and April. It started with a conversation online between me and “February”, who at that time had a story for an animation and hoped that i could make it for her. However during the process of developing the story, it became more and more a story for “February” instead of a story of “February”. I couldn’t help adding my ideas and feelings to it and ended up doing my own story instead.
It has always been an issue to think about that I can never stick to the originally story i made. and I’m still not sure if that is a “problem”. “February” specifically, first I’m lack of the ability to coherent with a complicated and detailed storytelling in case of clay stop motion. What i shot is not what i pictured in mind. The animation worked well this time, on some level, due to the fact that I did want this piece to be abstract. But there were some other time when I had to make it abstract because I couldn’t tell the narrative the way I wanted it to be. The second reason that i altered the story this time was because I had this new idea about what the flower would served in the animation as one of the two characters. It also related to the fact that I kept adding my feeling to the story. In that case, it’s fine with me that I keep developing the narrative while working on it.
I guess what I will do differently next time would be to start with a larger picture at the beginning and get to the details step by step. Do an animatic with the real audio before jumping in mass production. This time although I started aiming to do an animatic, somewhere during the shooting, not far from the start though, I completely lost and got myself deeply involved with the details and as a result, went straight to the major shooting. First because it was fun to do, and I just got drown in that easily. Also I was worried about time and just wanted to see a complete,though rough, piece as soon as possible. Looking back, I think an animatic could help me to clean and deliver the story.
“February” is really big for me. I got very emotionally involved in it, which I don’t usually do in my animation. Also a general idea about working flow of animation,for example mood board, model sheets, animatic,etc. I definitely need to look at learn a lot more. But this feeling of finding something I am passionate about and starting to be serious about it is awesome!
thank you dana, marina, lovely class and itp.
2 years ago • 0 notes