Notes From The Animation Station
By the end of last weekend there were around 300 frames of our film - only 362,619 behind Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! This amounts to somewhere between 10-20 seconds, dependent on how the final piece is put together - whilst film runs at a standard 24 frames per second, it's not always necessary to use 24 unique drawings; it is possible to double up and show each frame twice, or even more times. It all depends on what works for the movement on the screen.
Depending on the decision to shoot on 'ones' or 'twos', the timeline could look like either of these:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 ,18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9, 11, 11, 13, 13, 15, 15, 17, 17, 19, 19, 21, 21, 23, 23
So, with a few days remaining of Gallery Closed, Studio Open, there is plenty of opportunity to head down to Utrophia and use the Animation Station to make a contribution. With that - and in the interests of inspiration and encouragement - here is a selection of moving image films which illustrate how particular aspects of the medium can be used (colour, composition, frame rate, etc).
Fantasmagorie (Emile Cohl, 1908)
One of the earliest examples of a hand-drawn animated film, it demonstrates from the outset the boundless possibilities of the form. Lines and shapes wriggle around, transforming from one object to another, leaping from the imagination onto the screen. A plant turns into an elephant, which turns into a door - yet with the same strange coherence of a dream, it all seems perfectly sensible.
Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921)
A silent film which uses musical elements in a visual composition. Rhythm is established through repetition and the movement of light and dark across the frame, and there is a sense of harmony as the rectangles glide at varying rates and in different directions.
An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938)
The relationship with sound is more overt in Fischinger's film than in Rhythm 21, as he uses colour, composition and motion to synchronise with Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, aiming to translate the mental images one might experience whilst listening into a 'visual music'. The tone and timbre becomes visible, and even with the sound off one can see the character of the different instruments. Check out the plinking of the cimbalom!
Swinging The Lambeth Walk (Len Lye, 1939)
An example of direct film, where the patterns and shapes are painted and scratched onto the celluloid itself, without the need for a camera. It features various versions of the title song, strung together and accompanied by jauntily waving lines and carousing spots. Less precise in its translation of the music than Fischinger's treatment of Liszt, each visual element has more of a improvisational feel, like a dancer finding its way around a beat.
Fuji (Robert Breer, 1974)
A collage of rotoscoped film (where footage shot on a cine camera is traced over by hand). Colours and images alternate and flicker in and out of the screen, giving the impression of a rumbling train journey past Mount Fuji, with a landscape passing by at the same time as a host of thoughts and memories - like looking out of the window and thinking of something else. Rather than the objective gaze of the camera which was the source material, the end result is much more subjective, almost representative of the conscious mind.
There's a lovely part where a simple shape like the peak of the mountain is inverted, becoming a bird in flight. ^ v ^ v ^ v ^ v ^ v ^ v
The Dante Quartet (Stan Brakhage, 1987)
Another direct film, split into four sections of coloured paint, luminescent like stained glass, each given a different character and tied together by the choices of colour, brushstroke, film stock and occasional photographs used. The frame rate also changes throughout the film, with some sections being a constant, almost arbitrary shift of images - each frame a separate painting - and others holding on the screen for just a bit longer, like a deep breath.
Brakhage had apparently intended for this to be shown on IMAX screens, so as you can imagine, YouTube doesn't quite give the full experience...
Pencil Dance (Chris Casady, 1989)
A tribute to the work of Oskar Fischinger (recalling his Studies series and Wax Experiments) but with the added zippiness enabled by advances in technology. The most striking aspect is how such a sense of space and depth is created with flat white objects on a black background, simply through their size and relative positions.
The Comic That Frenches Your Mind (Bruce Bickford, 2008)
Similar to Fantasmagorie in the way that a line becomes liquid, solid, gaseous - a free-association in pencil - as shapes drift into one another, coalesce and disintegrate.
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
kaledo-art