Monday 25th September 2023
Today I started thinking about how I would represent myself using simple shapes, and made various sketches:
I really like this idea of a fish-like shape, with these things on the side that could be ears, or arms, or wings, or fins. What I like most with this shape is its fluidity, how it bends as it moves.
Tuesday 26th September
Today I tried to make this fish-like shape in After Effects but I couldn’t get it right. I also wasn’t sure how I’d be able to animate it in the way I’d wanted to in the time I had. So I decided to strip back to even simpler shapes. I experimented with various colours, but eventually chose these pastel colours. I get a lot of inspiration from pre-school TV shows like these:
These often use a limited colour palette of muted and pastel colours, and I wanted to use the to help represent the theme of the inner child that often crops up in my practice. This theme is also present in the simple, familiar shapes I chose:
Wednesday 27th -Thursday 28th September
Today I animated the circle and the pentagon. The two shapes aren’t physically touching each other on the screen, but I wanted them to move as one. I applied the animation principle of secondary action and follow through by making the pentagon move as a result of the momentum of the circle ‘rolling’ across the frame. Figuring out the physics of this was somewhat experimental, and I used a combination of what ‘felt right’ alongside slightly more precise calculations to figure out how the pentagon would fall back and forth. The final result isn’t exact to a specific object or movement in real life, because I want the scene to have a subtle feeling of existing in an alternative word where physics and gravity maybe don’t work the same way. It’s quite tricky to find that balance of believable movement with creative freedom. Sometimes when something is only a little bit off from believability, it has more of a dissonance for the viewer than something that is so far from reality that the viewer just accepts it as something completely different and suspends their expectations.