Exercises/Research
The start of this project was relatively slow, but eventually I came up with a simple idea that I wanted to execute because I felt it perfectly fit the description of the project. We were to make “Cyclical narratives”, and what better way to portray a cycle then life itself. This idea grew into doing the lifecycle of a flower. My concept still remains a bit ambiguous, but in summary, I wanted to represent the stages of life in a way that would show the growth, decay and renewal in a universal way. I chose to follow through with this by doing my idea of a flower, and representing these stages through the different frame views. For my first frame I would represent this early renewal stage as the sprout of a flower. For the second, I would represent the growth stage as a mid-bloom flower, the third would be as fully bloomed flower to represent adulthood and prosper, and then the final frame would be a dramatic decay of the flower, with the dust of the petals drifting away. Somewhere along the ideation course I had the idea to make the backgrounds that corresponded with each stage the four seasons of the year to represent the passing of time.
I did the practice exercise for the assignment and it sort of solidified the idea I had in my head about my narrative and what I wanted to communicate with it, here is the outcome of that:
I started drafting with very rough sketches on small flippers and this is what I ended up with:
Production
I liked this as a starting ground and wanted to move this idea to digital. I started by continuing to sketch stuff out and then manipulating the images to where they would properly represent my ideas. This is the first run of my digitally made flipper:
I liked how it came out but there was a few things wrong with it. First of all it was too big and difficult to actually operate as a flipper, secondly the first and last frames seem very disconnected. These were the main issues I wanted to fix in my final rendition.
This is my final flipper, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The changes from the first digital to this are the artificial components of the last frame are now sort of included in every frame to an extent, there was some color correction, the sky from the last frame was incorporated into the spring scene to connect the two, and there was some effects added to the decaying flower to make it stand out from the background. I also shrunk the size of the flipper to a quarter of what it was for easier operation, and the pictures were fitted better to the frame.
Final project: Infinite Story