Since finishing our cats and dogs project, we have 2 weeks until our animation arts classes start back, and until then we have been set a small 2 week project; We will all complete a short animation and they’ll be combined into one film at the end, similarly to the exquisite corpse task we did in toolkits 2.
The objective is to complete a 5 to 10 second animation following the theme ‘observations of irrational relations between human and nature’; In teams of 2, we have to discuss our ideas and come up with two separate animations. Once we’ve finished the animations, we will swap with each other and add sounds to each other’s work,
The first thing we had to do was to brainstorm rough ideas; I created a mind map for this, to get what I was thinking down somewhere.
Here was my mind map. While writing down my ideas, I found that a lot of them had a common theme; reversal of roles, whether that be between animals and humans or humans and other things. I felt that this idea opened up the doors to what could be a humorous and fun animation, which I wanted to aim for. I generally liked the idea of switching the role between an animal and a human, and seeing if it made me uncomfortable or more newly conscious of my own relations with animals.
I followed this up with some drawings to capture some of these rough ideas;
I completed drawings of possible themes I’d go with for the animation; animals who eat human meat and wear human hair, dinosaurs who study humans in an exhibition and fish who go ‘humaning’, baiting humans into the sea, were all fun ideas to me. I chose to go with the chicken eating human meat, as this idea appealed most to me and I felt it would make for a weird and funny animation; we were also told to not include too many scene changes, and I feel like this idea only really needs one camera angle. I stuck with a simple style, as I feel that if I combine a simple style of animation with some wobbly lines, the overall aesthetic of the animation will be unique and stand out.
The general idea is to have a businessman chicken enjoying a human arm on his lunch break, In a similar fashion to the way a lot of us go to fast food restaurants and eat meat during our breaks. Here is the logline;
‘Have you ever gone for a quick piece of chicken on your break from work? well in this universe, the chickens bite back’
One of our challenges was to try and be experimental with the medium we chose to animate with; I couldn’t think of many different techniques since I don’t know how to 3D animate and can’t learn during our time frame, and I don’t have the equipment for stop motion, but after some discussion with the teacher I came up with a fun idea; to create a collage-esque background, filled with both my own pictures, artwork and things from the internet, and a 2D animated chicken. I feel that this will make for an interesting looking end result, so I’m going to try it.
I took this picture of my desk with a plate on it. My idea is to cut this out digitally and use it as where the chicken is sitting. I want to set my idea in a restaurant, so I might change the chair out for one that looks more like a chair you’d see on a restaurant. I also took this picture of some tiles in my shower, which I think could work for the wall in the animation, as some restaurants have tiled walls. I’d like to add some things to the walls, to give some context to the scene.I’m going to try creating some graphics like these for my restaurant, as I feel they’ll bring it to life a bit and add a sense of reality to it. I want to achieve this through digital collage, which I’ll try completing on Krita. I started by combining the table and plate with the design for the wall. I liked how the chair looked, so I ended up keeping it; I wanted an overall odd and slightly misplaced aesthetic for the animation to match the theme, and I thought it fit well.Using a free photo editor called Pixlr, I played around with the light and exposure of the image. I liked this look for it, as it brought out the colours more and added more of a mixed and matched collage look to the whole thing.I worked on two graphics for the background, starting with this one. I used PNGs from the internet, as I wanted my graphics to have a really rough, spliced together and somewhat comedic element to them, parodying real life restaurant graphics. I tried to be comedic with my wording and choice of imagery to really bring home the sarcastic and somewhat unusual theme of this animation. I thought it would be funny to parody brands who boast about their meat being fresh and treated well, as I’ve always found that comedic because either way, they’re slaughtered; combined with the animation, I feel this background will be funny and make people smile.here is everything all put together. It’s all very rough and copy paste, which I like about it; it almost feels like a meme or a parody.
With my background done, I’m ready to animate my chicken. I look forward to finishing this animation and seeing people’s reactions to it.
