Animated Narratives Week 9

By Harry Hughes

For this week's post, I wanted to explore the idea of revealing and concealing space by playing with camera movement. I followed a premise posted by Kate: "It only moved sideways, never forward or backward" and came up with the idea of a character who wanted to move somewhere in a 3D space but was stuck moving only left and right, until she hits a switch which opens up a new dimension for movement.

I wanted it to be difficult to tell that the heart - which the character is trying to get to - was behind her, so the character and audience would be confused as to why it was unreachable. Then once the switch was hit, the audience and the character would have the 3D space revealed to them at the same time. This didn't exactly work, partly because I made the heart and the character made of glass - something I've really enjoyed working with - and therefore transparent.

From doing this week's reading by Steven Katz I knew I wanted to have a diversity of frame sizes, something I don't tend to think about with Blender, preferencing long shots through which the camera moves slowly. Katz says "the eye are perhaps the most expressive feature of the human face" and that close up shots can "bring us into a more intimate relationship with the subjects on the screen". I added in a close up of the character's frustrated eyes, followed by a midshot of the glass heart so as to explain to the audience that the character was annoyed they couldn't get to the object of their desire. I'm not exactly sure this worked. I made the main clip quite short which doesn't give the audience much time to figure out what's going on. In this week's Every Frame A Painting assigned text, Tony Zhou explains that by lingering on the subject's face longer than you would normally study a person's face in the real world, cinema audience's can learn a lot about their emotional state. He then says that this seems to have been lost in the cinema of recent years, and so I had decided to think closer about this in my own work. Unfortunately this has not come out in this work- rendering out of Blender takes way too long on my computer, and I'm not yet skilled enough at creating believable looking characters.

I think this work is very in line with what I have been exploring through Blender. I'm interested in exploring and revealing new spaces by moving through 3D space, rather than editing static footage or making 2D spaces which are ways in which I am used to working.