This ranged from a photo-timeline of all my grand 22 years of life, graffiti/toy related work, artist/architecture research and then onto photographs i took whilst travelling. After completely exhausting the sketchbook for all its worth, i came to settle on the ideas of doing a stop-frame animation of a toy spray can running round a scale model of the Hulme bridge, causing all sorts of colourful mischief...
I decided on this because i thought it would reflect my urgency for creation and within the blank canvas of the model i would be able to include references to my life, such as my girlfriends name or a favourite album.
I created a few trial animations to test out frame rates and the way in which i would apply paint to the canvas. Whilst i simultaneously created a beat in Pro-tools to synchronize my work to, which was constructed as a tribute to my favourite band 'Company Flow'. I also got my friend and graff writer 'Nayse' to create final designs for me to replicate onto a wall of my model, as i personally suck@graffiti. I then set about shooting my animation.....
The shoot took me 7 hours including set up and was a one time occurance as once i had applied the paint there was no going back. I used regular poster paint, toothpicks for application....
((Whilst performing the shoot i was mostly listening to 'Dark Side of the Moon' & 'Led Zep II'))
In my sketch book i had shown aspirations to edit the backgrounds of my animation and replace them with skylines from my travels, but this deemed to time consuming as i didn't have enough time to learn 'Photoshop'. I edited my piece together in 'Final Cut' to my beat@96bpm, this took around a week as i was still getting to grips with this program aswell.
I re-shot one of my opening scenes as it was out of focus, but found i couldn't replicate the correct lighting and camera angle as i had to try and exectue it on a different model, this led to the scrapping of this re-shoot.
As a project deliverable we had to design a CD cover to accompany our work, which i did as a paradoy of the famous Pink Floyd cover featuring a Prism, which i replaced with a silouette of the toy i used in my animation.
Everyone from the group had to present their work to the class individually, with our fellow students then helping in the grading process, so as to help us understand the course criteria better and thus developing our critical eye. I received a distinction for my work, but this was mainly due to sketchbook work i had done and not the final animation. Both myself and my tutors were disappointed with the out of focus scenes and the loss of narrative within the animation, but this only leaves room for improvement in future, which always is a good thing!
Hope you enjoy it and if you don't please tell me why...
