Test Animation

Presenting...

The Profound but Unthinkable Adventures of Anusface and Monsieur Wormington

A little test cell animation me and Dan Bylo worked on together in the workshops

Figure development

Started making the protagonist for my animation. Then I ran out of plasticine.

I will upload more photos as he comes along

Inventory

Stuff I'm gonna need (in order of appearance):

Planet - Papier mache on chicken wire frame

House - Card and paper - needs separate facade and interior

Curtains - Fabric with wire supports to show movement

Bulb - white LED, electrical wire, 9v battery and connector (maybe too time consuming, we'll see)

Figures: Him - Plasticine, wire frame, fabric clothing
              Her - Rubber or plastic skeleton (ebay), plasticine, fabric clothing

Sofa - cardboard frame, fabric covering, stuffing and springs (to poke out through the person-shaped hole)

Action cloud - cotton wool

Voodoo doll - Fabric and stuffing

Storyboard

I decided the 3 key words I would use from my original list would be Loneliness, Death and Interstellar. Basically I want to do a condensed version of the story of Carl Tanzler and Elena de Hoyas (previous post) but with a Tim Burton-esque dark sense of humor and borrowing techniques from the Quay brothers. Set in space.

I plan to use stop-motion animation.

Scene 1 (Approx. 3 secs). Camera zooms in on a solitary house on an otherwise deserted planet/asteroid. I have chosen this location not only because of the "interstellar" mood of the music, but also because i reckon this setting will add to the sense of loneliness.

Scene 2 (Approx. 4 secs) Male figure cradling lifeless body in his arms. the shoulders rise and fall to signify weeping, the curtains flap to add a sense of tension and the light bulb flickers in time with the music to emphasise a sense of fear.

Scene 3 (Approx. 4 secs) This one is going to be tricky but i reckon i can do it. I want to show a long passage of time in a very short space of time so i am going to animate the flesh disappearing from the corpse very quickly whilst the male figure moves around the room at ridiculously high speed, like a time-lapse video. 

Scene 4 (Approx. 2 secs) Camera pans left to right to reveal the now skeletal face of "the Missus"

Scene 5 (Approx. 5 secs) Camera pans right to left. As the camera settles on the male figure's face his expression changes from sadness to that of having an idea.

Scene 6 (Approx. 5 seconds) Looney Tunes type action cloud with hands coming out holding various tools used for sewing.

Scene 7 (Approx.3 secs). Camera zooms out from a voodoo doll type face to reveal the sofa with a person shape missing from it. Hopefully at this point the viewer realises that the man has used the shape cut from the sofa to recreate his loved one's flesh.

Scene 8 (Approx. 4 seconds) Story ends with the man kissing his re-formed but still obviously lifeless love. Camera Zooms out. Maybe her head falls off or something, I haven't decided yet.

Carl Tanzler and Elena Milagro de Hoyas

Looking at my brainstormed list of words got me thinking about a story I read a while ago about an American doctor called Carl Tanzler and the patient he fell in love with, Elena Milagro De Hoyas. 

Carl lavished her with gifts and became a close family friend, though Elena was diagnosed with and died of tuberculosis before anything happened between them romantically. Upon her death, Carl insisted on paying for her to be given a crypt rather than being buried. He would go to visit the crypt regularly until one day he decided it would just be easier to steal her body and take it back to his house to save himself the effort of having to go all the way to the cemetery to spend time with her. As the body decomposed in his home he would replace the parts that fell off it using home-made prosthetics, to the point that when she was finally discovered by the authorities the result was a frankenstein type amalgam of mummified  human flesh and papier mache.

Although this is a pretty grizzly story I think that at its centre lies a feeling of loneliness and despair on the part of Carl Tanzler. True love eh? 

I would like to take this story and use it as inspiration for my animation. As I have only got 30 seconds to tell it, a lot of the factual details will have to be ignored but I'm sure that I can take something from it.

Concept/ Inspiration

After listening to the piece of music we were given I wrote a list of words which summed up my personal response to it. These were:

Robotic

Interstellar

Loneliness

Despair

Solitude

Post-apocalyptic

Haunting

Fear

Repetition

I particularly wanted to focus on the idea of loneliness with a haunting aspect, and I remembered an animated video for a song by Tool which I thought i might be able to take inspiration from.

The video has an especially sinister feeling, emphasised by the moody lighting and jerky stop-motion animation. I like the way this video has its own narrative, completely separate from the theme of the song but still fitting the overall mood perfectly. Although the movements of the figure itself are not necessarily in time with the music, the strobe-esque lighting and percussive changes of camera angles give the video a sense of rhythm.

As it turns out, the video was mainly conceptualised by the band's guitarist, Adam Jones who was accused of totally ripping off some guys called the Brothers Quay.

And after watching some of their work its easy to see why.

I watched an online documentary with the Quay Brothers, and although their work seems a lot more surreal, their process is fairly similar to that of a music video director - the music is composed and a video is put to it afterwords - the only difference in this case is that, in the end result, the video takes precedence over the music.

Timothy Quay describes their use of lighting as "on the edge of corpuscular; somewhere between that of light or day but at the same time being neither". I think that the lighting is key in giving a sense of tension and hopelessness in their videos and would like to try to use this in my own animation.