Stuart Livesey EMP

EMP Evaluation

At the start of this project I really struggled with figuring out what exactly it was that I wanted to produce. I knew that I wanted to continue doing animation or motion graphics work like I did in my specialist project, but choosing the subject matter was pretty difficult. I had an idea in my head of the graphical style I wanted to achieve, and wanted to further develop the style from my specialist project videos - but finding a subject or reason to base my work around is what I alway find the biggest challenge when starting a new project.

After tutorials and discussion with Liam, I came upon the idea of creating visuals to a pre existing narrative, such as a fairy tale or children’s story. I ended up deciding to look in to things more along the lines of myth and legend. Nearly every fairy tale or kids story has bits in it that would be awesome to create visuals to but normally feature quite a heavy message or moral at the end, which I wasn’t too keen on. I then started to look more in to stories of legend and myth, stories that have really cool ideas and imagery, without the moral cliche bolted on at the end. This then led me on to looking at folk lore and tall tales.

From wikipedia - A tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. Some such stories are exaggerations of actual events, fish stories (‘the fish that got away’) such as, “that fish was so big, why I tell ya’, it nearly sank the boat when I pulled it in!” Other tall tales are completely fictional tales in a familiar setting, such as the American Old West or the beginning of the Industrial Age.

The type of stories that really grabbed my attention were the american tall tales. These tales were often told by people when traveling across north america, and the people they told re told the story, but added their own twist on it, or a new addition to the story. The stories become very exaggerated, and I like the way that there are so so many different variations of the same story.

There are many great american tall tales, such as the famous Johnny Appleseed - a young man who traveled the west of america planting apple trees or Pecos Bills, a legendary cowboy who ‘tamed’ the wild west. The tale I ended up settling on is that of Paul Bunyan, a giant lumberjack of great skill. There are so many ‘facts’ added to the story of Paul Bunyan now that it is hard to see what the original story is. In america it is a way of jokingly explaining things to do with the environment to kids. For example, one of the myths is that Paul Bunyan was so big that his footsteps filled with water and created the thousand lakes of north east america, and he dug the great lakes to swim in. Another is that he created mountains to hold up the sky. I found it really interesting how there were so so many different versions of the story of Paul Bunyan, and it excited me, as there was so much material to create my visuals from.

I did some research, and watched and read loads of different Paul Bunyan stories, always making notes of ‘facts’ I found particularly amusing or could create interesting visuals from. Once I had gathered all my ideas together, I found it alot easier to get started with my work. I spent a lot of time in the specialist project creating a visual style, so storyboarding and getting started was easier than I usually find it.

As with my previous project, I took visual inspiration from many illustration based artists who all use an organic hand made feel to their work, and I wanted to give my visuals this same organic feel – create them as if they were cut out of materials and filmed as if it was a stop motion piece from above. I used the techniques I perfected working in After Effects in the specialist, such as layering everything in the scene and adding a spot light focused in the middle of the scene as if it was being looked at from a top down perspective.

I started off creating what I then wanted to be an opening scene, with a floor level view through the trees. I used the lighting and shadows to create the atmosphere, and finished the scene, which looked great. But there was something missing, the spark I had last project and the enthusiasm I had to create visuals on the computer had gone. I found myself really lacking motivation and I just wasn’t getting excited to do more. This was obviously a bad way to feel a third of the way through my final major project, which was really worrying me.

With my work this year I have always been trying to do one thing - make my computer created shapes and compositions look like they have depth, and that organic, material feel to them, as if they are layered on top of each other and filmed form above. So why not do exactly what I’ve been trying to digitally imitate - create a hand cut stop motion piece filmed from the top down? 

I had a choice - either carry on going with After Effects, and not enjoy it, or take the leap and just create a stop motion piece. I decided to go for it, and I don’t regret that decision at all! I was really worried that if I carried on doing what I was already getting sick of doing then I wouldn’t be excited by it, and it would really show through in my work. Switching mediums was great because I got back that fresh, exciting challenge of working with something I had little experience with, and it was all new. It was healthy to be outside of my comfort zone.

I had already seen a lot of stop motion, and stop motion style work, and I definitely knew what I liked and disliked, so I took a look over bookmarked favorites with a fresh eye, looking at the techniques used and the composition. I got the feel for it pretty quickly, and this all made me really excited to get started, so I started on setting up a dodgy camera rig in my living room - filming top down on to a table.

After figuring out how it all worked and conducting tests to figure out lighting, the camera’s aperture, frame rate and many other things, I worked my ideas and sketches for my would-be After Effects animation in to ideas that could work with cut out bits of paper, felt, foam and string on my table top.
I think I did a good job in getting ideas across with this medium, as I had to simplify a lot from earlier ideas. I used this to change my story from having a more ‘traditional’ narrative, with shots of the lumberjack walking through forests and such in to a more simplistic, stylised and possibly abstract take on animation, using block shapes instead of going into fine detail. I think that this gives my animation a really nice aesthetic, and I’m pleased with how it looks. I made conscious decisions such as to move the camera around a bit, leave cut up bits of material around the side of the frame, and not worry about things moving around slightly to add to the hand cut and home made aesthetic.

I was quite lucky in this project, I didn’t run in to as many problems as I anticipated. Being able to have it not be the end of the world if I jogged a bit of felt or knock the table out by a millimeter was really helpful and healthy for me whilst working, I could concentrate more on the composition and the feel of the piece. Last project I was driving myself crazy, always spending, or perhaps wasting, a lot of time on the smallest details that no one would ever notice. I guess in retrospect that this project was the opposite to this problem - I wanted all the mistakes to be there. I’m glad I did this, as I love the way it looks, and I think it really adds to it.

Having used – and loved – Adobe After Effects for previous projects I thought that it wouldn’t take as long as before to produce my work, as I would be using this software and am no longer ‘learning’ it, as I had experienced it all in the specialist. When I changed to doing a more traditional stop motion piece it naturally meant that I was learning how to do everything again, so it took me a bit longer to produce my visuals than I had initially planned.

I found myself really really enjoying doing the transitions between the scenes, and I think that these are really strong in the video. When I was storyboarding, I was thinking back to how fun it was last project, creating mini scenes. My downfall last time was the transitions between the pieces, which ended up getting watered down and watered down till it was just a fade to black, and then a fade back in from black. With this project I really tried to creatively tie all the scenes together in an organic way, which I think comes across in the final piece. Doing this meant I didn’t get bored of one certain piece, and had the freedom to play with lots of different ideas in different scenes.

I have learnt lots of things from this project. I greatly benefited from having the confidence to change my medium after I had already started animating - completely throwing my time plan out the window! It felt like a fresh start, and gave me the motivation I lacked when I started off on After Effects. I also think I have improved the way I think about things and how important it is to have a solid plan of what ideas you want to get across and the feel you want to give your work. If I hadn’t established this before I switched over to stop motion then I would have been back to square one, and wouldn’t have been able to produce the same level of work.

My project may not be the most ground-breaking piece of stop motion, but I feel that I used the medium in a simple way, and concentrated on the look and composition of my work rather than the technical side of things. I’m really really pleased with how it turned out, and I think that the medium worked better for the style of my shots and the story that I was telling, and I think I achieved my goal of making a modest piece of work that I would be proud to show off.