APD Week 9 - Play and Force

Theme
Play and Force

Method
I imported a random real life footage into Adobe Animate and then animated 2 characters reacting to the events being presented through the real life footage.

Context
GRADES (2015) - King
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_kQAn9vBI4 

Gave me the inspiration to use animation on top of real life footage (begins around the 40 second mark).

Response
We talked about how with this exercise, the outcome of the product shouldn’t be something that’s predetermined and planned. As an animator I wasn’t sure how to create something that derived from spontaneity. However, I was able to come up with something where I wouldn’t be able to point out how my animaton would turn out before I had created it. My approach was using real life footage as the external force that would drive my animation. But for this exercise to truly allow the force to open dynamic and relational systems, I had to choose a footage I was unfamiliar with. So I browsed through some stock footages and landed upon a footage of seagulls at the beach. This now allowed me to animate something where I had no control of the direction it was heading, but rather had to follow through with the motion of the footage to get from Point A to B.

Animating on top of a real life footage gave rise to a few issues that I did not foresee. For example the footage was filmed without a tripod so the canvas was constantly moving. This meant while I animated my characters, I had to also rearrange his position to match with the movement of the camera. Also, because I had to have the character closely interact with the seagulls and I couldn’t slow down the footage, I wasn't able to use any double frames to edit my animation as that would cause the character to be misaligned with the footage.

I’ve related this to my studio 3 animation a bit differently than my previous exercises. For this week, I focused specifically on one element in my major project animation which was having the character interact with a liquified ground. Of course in that animation the liquid and the character are both 2D and digital. This exercise helped me understand that external forces like the wave or any element that isn’t the main character can still have enough pull power to engage the character to behave in a certain way, rather than having the elements respond secondarily to the main character.

Reflection: Looking back at the exercise, I could have taken a bit more of a risk in a way that would affect my 'making'. For example, I could have applied another external force into play by forcing myself to animate without an onion skin. So anything that would further support the notion of having a product that I was unable to pre-plan or pre-determine would have been beneficial as it would have allowed me to truly understand how forces could affect the final product of my animation and obtain the most information out of this exercise.