APD - Week 10, Stillness (A Long Car Ride)

Theme: Play and Stillness

Method: I will make a short animation that responds to the theme with looped animations that allow me to extend a scene to focus on the 'ma' of it.

Context: In Illusion of Life and in this week's APD presentation we have touched on the Japanese idea of 'ma', as described by Hayao Miyazaki in an interview with Roger Ebert from 2002.

...instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.

"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."

Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?

"I don't think it's like the pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."

I was particularly taken by this quote, and noted how my work tends to go straight to specific moments with less of a regard for the quiet times. I have been trying to correct that with my animated work this year but wanted to use this week's theme as an opportunity to more directly approach this. I also wanted to utilise some of the juxtaposing words we had written on the whiteboard during the class time to inform my animation. Thinking about the words Life, Death, Activity, Lag, Horseplay and Waiting I immediately had an image in my head of a scene to look at.

Response:

I created my first complete animation in TVPaint, which I am really proud of. I wanted to work with something more textured and less with linework. I haven't done this before, and I've always been unhappy with my linework so wanted to try something that would let me get my idea across without it. I thought about long car trips as a kid, when I would play my GameBoy Pocket until the battery died, and then read a book. I remember if it was a trip at night I would practice reading by the streetlights as they zoomed past, keeping an eye on the line I was hoping to read in time before the light went away. I thought about stopping at the traffic lights and looking out the windows, and I have had an image in my head for probably twenty years now, maybe more, of an elderly woman walking a dog that was way too excited and energetic for her. The dog would run to the end of the lead, wait for the woman to catch up, then run ahead again, to repeat ad nauseam. I always thought it was very funny and thought this juxtaposition of playfulness and stillness would work quite well for my animation. I animated each frame in TVPaint before compositing in After Effects, then bringing the scene with the woman and the dog back into TVPaint to animate the lead, and then back out again to Final Cut Pro where I brought in sounds from the BBC Sound Effect Library and the YouTube Audio Library.

Reflection:

I am really happy with how this animation turned out aesthetically. I would like to explore this style further, potentially in a major project. I think I potentially went overboard in not making it still enough. I think I could probably slow it down. I got cold feet animating the dog the way I remembered it, which led me to make it run back and forth off screen. I think it's pretty funny though really, I didn't think that far ahead and animating the leash really made me laugh as it wound itself around and around the woman. It might be fun to make a little series of this car trip in fact.