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.