It was 3am...ish and I was a bit stumped for visual inspiration so I started looking through the old old archives of the Drawn! website and came across this:
This film, "Le Papillon" by Antoine Antin and Jenny Rakotomamonjy, has many parallels with my current film idea. Now, I had never seen this film before now so am in no way influenced by its story or visual style...it's just a bit spooky eh? Not that animating with watercolour and Chinese brush lines hasn't been done before...
I absolutely adore the simplicity of the drawings! The animation is smooth and beautiful too...now I'm fired up to do the same!
Before I go here's a another film suggested to me by one of my tutors Leonie Sharrock.
Another French animation called "Signes de Vie" by Arnaud Demuynck and AGAIN, it uses some brush lines and touches on the topic of death. I can't help feeling a bit negative about having such similarities to two (and possibly more) films...it's not like anyone is original nowadays but I don't want to be compared too much or have people think that I'm just copying another one's film. If I am optimistic though, I'd like to think my film's really quite different too! :P
Friday 30 October 2009
Thursday 29 October 2009
The Initial Idea...
For the pitch I didn't have much work prepared so I just outlined the general idea I had, the message behind the film and showed some work from the Illustrator Mirko Hanák.
Hanák's work is GORGEOUS, I love how free the brush strokes are and how the lines are carefully chosen to create a sense of movement and form without looking overworked. It reminded me very much of some Chinese brush painting styles and sumi-e but with a distinct European flavour. It's tough being Asian...with all my Asian influences I sometimes feel like I'm becoming a cliché and IDEALLY I'd love to be able to represent the British animation industry...but I'll work on that in time :)
In short, the film will be about a man who dies right at the beginning of the film and throughout the film we see him fade as people start forgetting about him until finally, he is completely forgotten and he disappears. Sounds simple...and the message I wanted to convey is there...but that's where the simplicity seems to end for me! I've had the most troubling time trying to develop a story for this...even now at the current stage of my storyboard I feel like it's lacking excitement...hopefully I'll get some feedback to help me on the day of the animatic presentation.
Fingers crossed I'll get it done on time. luckily, it's like a draft animatic so I have time to fix it and make it look prettier :D As for the visuals, I'm stumped...I want to animate in a similar style to Hanák but with a slightly more refined edge...I'll post what I come up with eventually...
Hanák's work is GORGEOUS, I love how free the brush strokes are and how the lines are carefully chosen to create a sense of movement and form without looking overworked. It reminded me very much of some Chinese brush painting styles and sumi-e but with a distinct European flavour. It's tough being Asian...with all my Asian influences I sometimes feel like I'm becoming a cliché and IDEALLY I'd love to be able to represent the British animation industry...but I'll work on that in time :)
In short, the film will be about a man who dies right at the beginning of the film and throughout the film we see him fade as people start forgetting about him until finally, he is completely forgotten and he disappears. Sounds simple...and the message I wanted to convey is there...but that's where the simplicity seems to end for me! I've had the most troubling time trying to develop a story for this...even now at the current stage of my storyboard I feel like it's lacking excitement...hopefully I'll get some feedback to help me on the day of the animatic presentation.
Fingers crossed I'll get it done on time. luckily, it's like a draft animatic so I have time to fix it and make it look prettier :D As for the visuals, I'm stumped...I want to animate in a similar style to Hanák but with a slightly more refined edge...I'll post what I come up with eventually...
Wednesday 28 October 2009
After a long wait...there's some progress?
At university we had to prepare an initial pitch for the third week of term...funnily enough I did NOT have an idea for a long time! It is rather difficult to find the inspiration and even when inspiration hits you it's difficult to choose something suitable for the 3-minute film format...
Of course, I was stuck in this phase of having NO ideas but with too many at the same time. This was going to be a film that I'll be working on for the entire academic year - so it must sustain my dedication and interest until the final deadline! Alas, for two weeks and five days I still could not dig out a standalone idea until one cloudy day...(it may have been sunny but it's been a while since then...)
Well, it was actually an evening but I was thinking about death (as you do...) and I had all these thoughts about why we have religion and why there's so many overlapping cultural beliefs about aspects of an afterlife. Then it struck me. I had always found it strange that people believed in souls - all these ideas that even if you bring back someone's body [through cloning] you cannot bring back their soul. As another example, twins are genetically the same person - I always suggested that cousins born from twin mothers/fathers are actually half sisters/brothers but that's another story altogether! Even if twins are the same person in body, they are different people in the mind. Which leads to another thought...
I find an uncanny resemblance between our brains and a computer (ironic that in Chinese a computer in literal translation is "electronic brain"). Like a computer's HDD our brains store memory. In the heat they can grow slow and sluggish, too much new information may require removal of old information to create space. We have short term memory like RAM, doing too much at once may cause us to "crash" and staying "on" for too long can cause all sorts of problems. Hard knocks may delete our memory entirely (or partially...) but I'll end the analogy here since I've gone majorly off-topic. The main thing I wanted to explore was, objectively thinking, our soul is just a memory - or rather, a collection of our own memories mixed with the memories that other people have of us. The things we experienced, how we behave, our personalities and things that define who we are - almost like a proof of our existence.
To conclude, two days before my pitch I decided I wanted to make a film that made people think about what a soul really is. One day before the pitch, it became a film that told people our existence relies on us being remembered and once we are forgotten, we no longer exist.
Of course, I was stuck in this phase of having NO ideas but with too many at the same time. This was going to be a film that I'll be working on for the entire academic year - so it must sustain my dedication and interest until the final deadline! Alas, for two weeks and five days I still could not dig out a standalone idea until one cloudy day...(it may have been sunny but it's been a while since then...)
Well, it was actually an evening but I was thinking about death (as you do...) and I had all these thoughts about why we have religion and why there's so many overlapping cultural beliefs about aspects of an afterlife. Then it struck me. I had always found it strange that people believed in souls - all these ideas that even if you bring back someone's body [through cloning] you cannot bring back their soul. As another example, twins are genetically the same person - I always suggested that cousins born from twin mothers/fathers are actually half sisters/brothers but that's another story altogether! Even if twins are the same person in body, they are different people in the mind. Which leads to another thought...
I find an uncanny resemblance between our brains and a computer (ironic that in Chinese a computer in literal translation is "electronic brain"). Like a computer's HDD our brains store memory. In the heat they can grow slow and sluggish, too much new information may require removal of old information to create space. We have short term memory like RAM, doing too much at once may cause us to "crash" and staying "on" for too long can cause all sorts of problems. Hard knocks may delete our memory entirely (or partially...) but I'll end the analogy here since I've gone majorly off-topic. The main thing I wanted to explore was, objectively thinking, our soul is just a memory - or rather, a collection of our own memories mixed with the memories that other people have of us. The things we experienced, how we behave, our personalities and things that define who we are - almost like a proof of our existence.
To conclude, two days before my pitch I decided I wanted to make a film that made people think about what a soul really is. One day before the pitch, it became a film that told people our existence relies on us being remembered and once we are forgotten, we no longer exist.
Tuesday 6 October 2009
Hello!
I have another blog over on Tumblr (I like it because I could use MY NAME in the URL) but blogspot is also very nice to use. Maybe I'll update both with the same content? Hmm...I should at least start customising this page and make it look pretty. Apologies for offending anyone's eyes.
Now, must find some inspiration *wooosh*
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