Out of your head– Research

Animation Research

In the Rotation courses, we learned about Jan Svankmjor. We watched a lot of his animation, among which his clay animation left a deep impression on us. Therefore, we initially planned to try claymation. But after the experiment, we found it difficult to control the body movements of clay characters. In our expectation, we needed a lot of body movements of characters, so we changed our idea and tried paper-cut animation.

After denying the way of using claymation to create animation, we began to think about trying to use paper-cut animation. At first, we were attracted to the elaborate construction Rose House. In this animation, its scenes are composed of foreground, middle and back scenes, which adds a sense of space to the picture. Although all the objects in the animation are 2D paper-cuts, the creator adds a three-dimensional sense to the picture by changing the front and back positions of the objects and different shooting angles.( For example, at 1:20, the sense of the characters enter the door, and at 1:40, the layout of the living room.) At the same time, we also noticed that in this film, the characters do not have facial expressions, which makes the audience pay more attention to the body language of the characters and the content of the story.

When we showed the first animatic, our tutor Luca introduced this animation to us. It is a children’s animation, in line with our animation style. We noticed that the artist does not use a single color to deal with the colors of characters, objects and backgrounds. Instead, he uses the strokes of the brush to add texture effects and enrich the picture. In contrast to “Rose House”, the whole picture is stacked to present the sense of space. What interests us is that the animator sets up the communication between insects through the waving of wings and tentacles without too much facial expression.

Sound Research

Physical and environmental sound are used respectively in these two animations. For instance, in “Bottle”, the place where the two characters are locate is the real seaside, so the creator adopts the real sound of sea breeze and waves in the whole animation. In “Going Fishing”, the environment is a closed space, so the artist adds ambient sound according to the needs of the animation in order to make the audience know the environment of the animation. For example, he adds ambient music of bird calls that the audience could take themselves into the forest environment.