Non-dualism

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Final photos.

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Here is the sample video of what my final film would have looked and sounded like if I had had the facilities to make it this year, unfortunately due to COVID I’ve have to do most of this on my desk.

Overall I really like the outcome, I think it’s unique, definitely inspired by a lot of different artists but is still my own. I think I did what I set out to do at the start which was to make a film, characters and a story which would convey the message of overlooking our differences with others because we are all in some way connected.

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Here is my final storyboard, I have drawn my characters in a more simple style for efficiency and to make it clear what they re doing in each frame.

I will be submitting this as one of my final pieces as making a fully finished film was not realistically for me during COVID as of my lack of space and equipment where I have to do most things on my bed or desk.

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I also enjoy this outcome and would like to use it in my final piece, I like it’s playful bright colours, contemporary style but you can tell that I’m inspired by older art films and sci-fi.

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A multimedia gif of the girl character, putting a photo of my puppet into procreate and airbrushing, smoothing and drawing over the top i mixed it in with my edited photo of the puppet theatre, took a photo and edited it for the background then animated it on animation assist mode. I really like how this looks and think I will use it as a finished piece in the final film.

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Some extra notes

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Alan Watts 1915-1973 was a British philosopher who popularised eastern religion in the west, he was an author and speaker who often spoke on non duality. He described it as like “being two waves in an ocean”, and that once you experience and understand non duality you no longer have to fear death, as their is no line between life and death, everything is just two sides of the same coin.

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‘Selki Girl’s album [for the profane] and her podcast ‘The Qabalista podcast’, the album takes a journey through the qabalistic tree of life which is a map of spiritual development.

Jewish mysticism, appropriated by western esoteric tradition, adapted hermetic qabalah which consists of a philosophical framework with ideas borrowed from a group of separate spiritual traditions, mainly using the kabalistic tree of life. The first stage on the tree ‘Keter’ (crown), is explored in the song ‘You/Me/Us/We‘, keter being the energy which all things originated from goes hand in hand with her exploration of non-dualism as we all are from one substance. Lyrics which show this are, “the Crown is in the Kingdom And the Kingdom in the Crown...There's no "i" in team There's no line between”.

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Some photos in front of the green screen before editing!

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Some character design working out.

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Concept piece showing the layers of using puppets and a stage to uniquely represent our inner self and our projection, done with ink and imported to procreate and collages with photos of my puppets.

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Some more photos of the mask

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I also had the idea that part of the film could be live action with psychedelic masks! I got a base, papier-mâché over the top and then plastecine on top of that the same colours as the other character designs.

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Development pictures of the clowns face, I have now painted their face, sort of like a psychedelic Mr.Punch, as I wanted to make the, kinder and fit the mood of the piece more as this film will not include violence.

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A big inspiration with the story and the characters is ‘The Dark Crystal’ by Jim Henson ans Frank Oz (1982)

I used ‘The Dark Crystal: The ultimate visual history’ by Caseen Gaines as another great source of information on further contributors such as Ellis Flyte and Polly Smith who designed the costumes for the gelflings and the pod people. I chose The Dark Crystal as inspiration because of the overarching message being that good and evil, or all things are connected. At the end of the film after the skeksis and mystics (good and evil) merge into one, the urskek says “hold her to you, for she is part of you, as we are all part of each other.”

This is a very similar message as to what I’m trying to convey in my film, I also enjoy the mystical and lovely style of the world of the dark Crystal, my first characters facial features are loosely based off of a gelflings.

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Progress pictures and sketch, originally she was going to be dressed like a bride but i altered it just to be like a regular white dress as a wedding dress seemed too irrelevant.

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Here is one of the animated backgrounds I’ve made for the film which will replace the green screen. The clouds are made from cotton wool, the box I found in a charity shop and I thought would suit the style of the puppets and the colours, I then took different pictures of the box opening to animate it and edited it in procreate along with moving the clouds to animate them.

The setting is a colourful, weird dream like place as I want it to fit with the spiritual and non dual theme, questions and topics like this are often related to psychedelic drugs , which is also why I wanted to include this imagery.