Research
The research I conducted was mostly looking through youtube channels and watching videos such as…
as well as Cut / Fold Templates for the purpose of creating physical prototypes.
For what my project ended up being, “Dots” by Norman McLaren was a huge inspiration in regard to the stop motion approach as was this video on Vimeo by Chris Turner.
Exercises
Exercise 1 – Paper Mechanisms
The first exercise I did was just building very basic paper mechanisms. They weren’t perfect but they were something for sure. One was a practice “sliding” mechanism with a pull tab and the other was a popup flip mechanism. As a kid, I used to actually make my mother’s birthday cards using this pop-up thing cause I saw it in a book once.
Another exercise focused on the music of the project and experimenting with visualizing sound in abstract but understandable ways. I took several notes with abstract shapes and lines that demonstrated various aspects of the songs my partner Brian and I were planning on using for the project. What I was doing mostly was listening to the beat, the tone, and what emotions they make me feel, but a lot of them focused more on the beat of the song and the rhythm.
After the exercises in class, Brian and I started discussing what songs we should be narrowing down to and what medium we want to use for our final version. We both thought stop motion would be interesting since we’ve never done anything with it so we ended up deciding that day to use stop motion. To get a better grip on it, I watched videos from the resources in the Research section and downloaded an app called “Stop Motion Studio”, a free program that helps you capture images in numbered frames. The greatest feature is that it allows you to see your previous image to help you. I crumpled up some paper and tested two animations: one where the paper uncurls and reveals text and then another where hand-drawn elements begin to appear to the beat of one of the songs.
Iterations
Brian and I agreed on some things that would keep our compositions connected. We would both work with monochromatic blue. We both agreed that the somber melody translated to “blues” in our minds so we chose that as a prominent color. To be more specific, I would utilize darker blue backgrounds with lighter, contrasting blue foreground subjects and he would do the opposite. We felt that mine being darker and his being lighter helped represent our opposing themes. As for how our stop motions depicted our themes, he went with some form of upward movement visualization whereas I went with downward movement.
I started storyboarding some stuff when I realized ProCreate allows you to make animations using your layers. This changed the way I started ideating the final animation. A lot of what I did focused around “descent” as a literal thing which lead to some struggles coming up with anything that I could actually work with. I started to think more broadly about “descent” as an abstract thing with no true definition and rather examined all of them. This led to some ideas revolving “madness” such as the descent into it. I created very short glimpses into what the subject matter would look like.
The last one above got me thinking about the feelings of the song (specifically the part I was focusing on which is the beginning of the song). It also made me think about the general emotions of “descent” and what feelings could be roped into that as a theme and how it relates to the song. These are some abstractions of feelings I created thinking about organic and geometric shapes and how their forms communicate emotions. For example, guilt is a spiraling form moving inward towards itself. To me, guilt as a feeling does that. It twists the stomach and the mind. Fear is malleable, impatience is wavering and its shape is an ambiguous back-and-forth, and anger is sharp and jagged and more geometric than the rest.
Another thing I was thinking about with the theme was how descent based on “physics” or just the literal act of falling could still be present in my composition. It’s the most direct way of representing it but only in the action itself, not the subject which is meant to be abstract as per the guidelines of the project. So I started testing this out and animated a little ball to be falling toward a vanishing point.
These are more concepts I created. Spirals appear in two of these (one just demonstrates a back and forth “wave” like animation) as a visualization of the rhythm being very repetitive and winding. The piano moves up and then peaks before coming back down and then it repeats which made me think of a spiral.
Descent slowly became less and less about the depiction of downward movement through something like a staircase moving downward and rather something that was more up for interpretation with visuals to guide what it could be about. That being said, time was ticking and I had to come up with something that I felt was a viable concept. Combining both the use of scale and movement in morphing forms, I created an animation that would then be translated onto paper.
Concept Statement
Music can be a tool for guidance and uplifting one’s spirits, or it can be soothing and evoke emotion. It’s a very broad thing, but music can generate emotional responses from the listener. After examining an instrumental song, I want to capture the themes and emotions that I feel are present in the composing of the song. The song my partner and I chose called “O (Fly On)” by Coldplay, uses a gentle piano rhythm that carries for the entire song as more and more instruments come in later to aid in creating a very somber tune. The very beginning of the song is empty, only a piano carrying the song. It sounds almost cyclical and the repetition of the lonely piano evokes a sense of melancholy and depth. A couple of minutes in, you can hear the bass pickup, the piano rhythm changes and you can feel a sense of a new and uplifting tone as the song begins to end. My partner and I took these two very different themes of downward descent and upwards ascension and created two different stop-motion movies that visualize them. To capture my theme of “descent/descension”, movement plays a huge role in showing the direction in which the forms travel in toward the focal point. Scale helps to create a sense of depth as the forms slowly fall inward toward a vanishing point in the composition illustrating the descent I want to capture. Two differing shades of blue, one darker and one lighter, will help to provide contrast between the background and foreground making the shapes visible and each frame visually consistent.
Production
Production was fairly straightforward with this. I would copy screenshots of each individual frame from ProCreate into illustrator and draw over the forms, separating each. There were about 50 or so frames in this animation so it would take a decent bit.
Frankly, I’m surprised my iPad could handle all the shapes being on one screen. After I got it all cut out, I laser cut the biggest forms first and then did as many of the smaller shapes as I could. Many flew away in the cutter or some were just too small for it to cut without it blackening it so I kept the ones that were easiest for the laser printer to handle and then cut the rest by hand. Once I got everything cut out and situated, I sorted all of the pieces using my files as a reference for quantity.
It was time to shoot the animation. I took my lamp and propped it on a piece of furniture. On the big blue book, I placed my iPad with the animation’s frames up in order and as I placed the pieces together I would snap the image, changed the frame on my iPad, and then used the ghost image left behind in the app to organize the next frame as well as using my iPad for reference.
The very last step was to move the video onto my iPad. Once I got it there, I recorded a snippet of the song I was using and the exact part, inserted the audio into iMovie along with my video, and made the final video. I’m still gonna work on ensuring it retains its quality cause at the moment it is definitely suffering from a little compression being moved from place to place.
Final Production