Mars Advert

While making my storyboard I remembered an advert which followed a similar kind of story to my idea. It was used in 2005 to promote Mars bars and it followed a character who walked around eating a Mars Bar but as he passed things, lights switched on and things began moving. I thought this was quite relevant to my work as it seems to follow the same idea of changing your mundane routine with imagination and colour.

Michel de Certeau

This week I have been thinking about the narrative of my work and it's context and I remembered coming across Michel DeCerteau in my Culture and the Everyday module in my first year.
Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday life was a theory which interested me on the course and something that stuck out was when he writes ‘If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it’. (De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life)
I would like to explore this idea visually in my animation and show ways in which you can escape the grind of everyday and look for poetry within routine tasks.

Rotoscoping

My research into Video and Animation has led me to a technique known as 'Rotoscoping'.


Film director Richard Linklater has produced some films using a rotoscope effect which I looked at. His 2006 film 'A Scanner Darkly' was filmed digitally then animated using interpolated rotoscope over the footage to create its original visual style. I watched the full length film and was really inspired by how it looked and just how effective the technique was.

I also looked at another of his films called Waking Life. I liked the slightly more surreal style of image in this film and the way the lines an edges are less refined and quite blurry. It creates a dream like feel to the film which definitely inspires my ides for my own work.

Another Kanye West video cropped up during my research but this one was for his song 'Heartless'. The video has a rotocoped style to it but I particularly admired the detailed backgrounds used in the video. I liked the way that even though he was formed from simple colours and lines, the backgrounds stand out and are still an important part of the visuals.

During the week I watched Jason Reitman's 2007 film Juno.
This film has influenced my ideas massively as I really like the visual style, the use of colour and black and white and the way she walks past different styles of background. I also thought the movement of the text worked well with the music.

After looking at such a big variety of hand drawn / rotoscoped animations, the Juno sequence really stood out for me and I've decided to use it to influence my ideas further. I think the simplicity of the backgrounds but detailed character animation could be something I could recreate in my own way. I now plan to come up with a more solid narrative and idea for my work now that I have a visual style to work with.

500 Days of Summer

Yesterday I watched 500 Days of Summer which had some short animated sequences in it.

The top image begins as video footage and slowly becomes drawn bit by bit until the finished product. I like the illustration style and I like the way it changes from film footage to a drawn image, I think its a really interesting technique and very eye catching.

The second image is only partly animated but I included it in my research as I liked the use of a minimal amount of colours and the way the buildings are drawn is a style which could be transferred to my own work.

Animation & Video

I've thinking about how I want my animation to look and what style and technique I could use. I wanted to do something hand drawn but don't feel confident enough to do it from scratch so I have been looking at different kinds of animation which use video footage and illustrations.


The first example I came across was Aha's video for Take On Me. I like the style of illustration and the use of black and white sketches with colour video. I would like to have this sort of look to my own work.

Another example is the 1964 Disney Mary Poppins film which also uses film footage as well as animations. I watched various clips on youtube and looked at how the two formats interacted which was really effective and I began thinking about how a character would fit into it's surroundings in my own work.

Initial Ideas

My idea so far is to have a parallel narrative which follows a girl walking a regular journey home however, one of the clips will be realistic and normal and the other will be dream like and colourful to suggest that she is using her imagination to alter her everyday. I am unsure at this point how to display the narrative, I could either have a split screen playing at the same tame or make a menu page which chooses which narrative you watch.
I have included my initial story board: