Presentation

So my final major project for third year is going to be a sound piece accompanied by a series of moving illustrations. My idea is to use links to my dissertation topic (general theme of it is how fantasy stories and fairytales effect the development of children) in my work.

Fairy tales are written by people with their own political and social agenda, to mould the views and thoughts of young minds into what society desires them to be. An example of this would be the use of gender roles in the stories, in that they have always shown the desired role for women to be submissive and polite and to do household chores and their aim in life to be to find a husband and have a family.

My idea is to produce a set of illustrations that model a different version of fairytales, not necessarily total role reversal but just a more diverse and progressive approach. For example, a female lead fighting the dragon, two princes getting married, people of different races being the hero etc. Obviously this is something that has been happening more in recent years in some television shows and films but not as much as it should be, especially in mainstream media and it's something I really wanted to explore in my work as I have a lot of interest in the genre.

I want to use After Effects to create a parallax effect in my drawings to make them seem as if they are moving, and over the top I will have a soundscape (need to work on)

I chose the parallax effect over regular animation or another technique because it's something I had seen in previous years and had always wanted to try. I want to develop my after effects skills and this seemed like a good opportunity to take to push my adobe knowledge further. 

I have also found some artists whose work i'm finding really inspiring, once of them being Paula Rego. Rego is primarily well known for her paintings based on storybooks and folktales she learnt as a child. Her work is full of symbolism and feminist undertones, which is something I am going to explore in my own work.

Swallows the poison apple

War

Snow White playing with her fathers trophies

Semiotics is something I want to look into further in my piece, as I think there will be a lot of opportunity to add symbolism into my drawings which will enhance the depth behind them. Fairytales and folklore have a lot to draw from in regards to this topic which I intend to take advantage of, using artists like Paula Rego to help me.

I have begun doing some practice drawings and sketches for my piece, and I have been trying a few different techniques.Initially I wanted to produce a really detailed renaissance vibe with my illustrations but it has been a long time since I've properly drawn and I don't enjoy nor am I particularly good at realism/detail/colouring etc. I began one small drawing of a scene from sleeping beauty which I quickly abandoned as it just wasn't working. 

I thought about how I used to work best, and that was by going straight in with pen, and drawing roughly and quickly and then adding more detail later. I experimented with this style of drawing on a character idea for one of my drawings, a woman in battle armour, wielding a sword. This is one of my base ideas for one of the illustrations, having a woman fighting a dragon.

I discovered dragons were a lot harder to draw than I thought and spent a long time practising drawing them and I think this drawing will be one of the more challenging ones of the series. I still need to figure out the rest of my series, for example how many drawings there will be and exactly what they will be of.

Final Piece - Wait, What?

Analogue scratch film animation from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

An experimental film inspired by people with ADD and ADHD. Using archive footage of an office scene I wanted to almost recreate the scenario with how someone with ADD or ADHD would be viewing the situation. I wanted the camera to be the eyes of the viewer, so that they can see into the scene as if they were present - they are looking through the eyes of someone with ADD or ADHD. I deliberately chose a stereotypically boring segment of footage as that is when distractions and lack of focus most obviously occur, with the person losing track of what is being spoken about and thinking about something else and making their surroundings more interesting with their imagination. I used colour, bleach and scratching to show this.
I also used sound to reflect what was going on, using a variety of office sounds and adding someone whistling so depict the way the persons thoughts are in the clouds and they're thinking about other things.
The title 'Wait, What?' I chose because it is what I find myself saying in like 60% of conversations when I realise I haven't been listening to what someone has been saying to me for a solid 5 minutes. Hopefully it will strike a familiar chord with others as well, as it's such a relatable ADD/ADHD phrase,  or some variety there upon.

Soundscape and Final Export

For my sound piece I spent quite a lot of time deliberating what kind of sounds I would want in my piece. I took a lot of inspiration from the other artists work that I've referenced and built up my idea from there. I knew very early on that I wanted to make a soundscape and not have music, as I felt it would suit my work best. That being said I did add whistling to the piece as I felt like it added a distracted and 'in your own world' sort of feeling, which I felt was an important feeling to be giving out for this piece specifically. I found my sounds from online archives and spent a lot of time sifting through different sound files and testing out which ones worked well together.

I aimed for there to be a certain level of background noise that was pretty consistent throughout, so that there wasn't actual silence at any point as with ADD and ADHD it's really difficult to get your brain to calm down and stop making noise. I wanted sounds from both environments, so there are some office noises mixed in with sounds from projectors. I shifted the arrangement of the sound files multiple times to test out which orders they sounded best in and where I needed to remove or add sound.

Once I was satisfied with my sound piece I exported it, but when I added it to my film I didn't like it, it was louder in parts that I thought and some bits just didn't work with the film. So, I went back into Audition and re-edited. 

Before I did this bit, I imported my film into premiere. I initially had to make a digital copy of my film so that I could hand it in properly to my tutors, but this did then enable me to add sound so it worked out pretty well.

I used a DSLR camera and tripod and set up in front of the screen that I was projecting on. I was then able to film my analogue piece and import it into Premiere where I cut the beginning and end where there was just blank screen. I used the motion effect to adjust the framing as the camera had been at a slighting off centre angle, and so I was able to rotate it just a little to line up horizontally.

Then once I had added the sound, I lined it up and then I was ready to export.

Creation of Final Piece

For my final piece I wanted to work much further into the film than I did for my initial experiment. I felt with that piece there was a lot of decorative work that I did, which partially I wanted but I found that it was a bit too much for the piece and made it look like it lacked in any deeper meaning. I thought a lot more carefully about my next piece and what I wanted to draw and include on it.

The major decision I made was regarding the scratching out of the people in the film. I did this for like 80% of the scenes. I made this creative choice because I felt that removing the one thing that you're supposed to be focusing on would be an accurate way of depicting ADHD and ADD within the film.

To do the scratching I used an etching tool commonly used for plastic etching for prints. This enabled me to easily scratch into the film emulsion repeatedly frame by frame. The designs that I drew I thought about in relation to my base topic and whether the represented what I wanted. I knew that last time I did too much decorative work but at the same time I didn't want to lose that completely. The elaborate designs were an aim to help visualise the distractions of ADHD and ADD and so I wanted to keep some of those elements in my work. I ended up just toning down the jazzy designs and just keeping a few to help with the vibe of the piece.

Something I felt was quite important this time around was editing the footage. For my initial experiment I didn't cut the footage at all and I just grabbed a massive chunk and worked with what was on it. This time I was more picky. I sifted through loads of the footage and added different parts throughout. I still wanted the base storyline to be there so it kind of made sense but I wanted it to me much more erratic and to jump around a bit through the piece, to show to the mercurial nature that often shows up in ADHD and ADD. 

I used a splicer to cut bits of footage together and a light-box so I could see what I was doing and what the film was looking like so far.

I then began doing testers on my film, because I knew that this time I wanted to do more than just scratch into it. I looked into using bleach for my film and found that it could have some interesting effects, and decided that this was something I wanted to incorporate into my film. By using bleach, this would add to the distortion and eccentric tone of the film creating a sense of agitation and restlessness that I wanted to show. I did several testers of bleach on film as I had never used it for something like this before and knew I should try it out before putting it on my final film.

I began by using a paintbrush to just lightly brush some of the bleach over the film to see what happened. It slowly began to take away layers of the emulsion on the film and reveal different tones such as purples, greens and yellows. I liked this effect a lot but it took quite a lot of time to get to this stage, and so I tried out some other methods.

I wanted to see what would happen if I just submerged the film in the bleach. This experiment quickly revealed how corrosive bleach actually is, as within seconds the whole segment had been dissolved from the film and there was no image left at all. The scratches were still there, but barely visible.

I tried using a cotton bud, just to see if there was a different texture than using a paintbrush and there was. I liked this technique quite a lot, the stripes looked good and it was a lot easier to get the effect I wanted quicker with the cotton bud. I thought this would probably be a good method to use for my final film.

I decided to try the submersion technique again, but this time to remove the film a lot faster. I quickly lifted the film from the container and removed the excess bleach with a towel and I got this effect. This was my favourite so far, I loved how it sort of faded away and had this fuzzy texture to it. I thought this would work perfectly in my film and add to the idea of zoning out of conversations and losing focus.

I also tested out the effect a sponge would have. I did like the effect but it was similar to the submersing, in that while the final effect was interesting it could be easier achieved using the submersion method.