Week 10
Stillness
Aim
Stillness often helps to bring about a point of interest in a given animation. For this week’s response of stillness for IOL, I decided to find out the points in my studio animation which were the most interesting, and would best be depicted mostly still and work on those scenes.
Method
As this week’s response, I experimented with 2 scenes from my animation. The first scene is where a car is leaving with the watch that the bird really likes and the bird actually can’t do anything about it and stays on the road, helpless. In this experiment, I generated 3 variations and two of the variations also portrayed a small sad response from the bird’s side as the car leaves with the bird’s favourite watch.
In the second scene, the bird is flying towards the watch shop. I decided to portray the scene as a still scene mostly, with a slight movement of the tree every now and then because of the wind and that is the only movement in the scene. I created 3 iterations of the same scene, with varying speeds of wind depicted through the tree on the left. The tree experiment was very enjoyable and fun to me, in addition to being a little challenging too, because of the depiction of various types of winds in the scene, just through the leaves of the tree, and sometimes a slight movement of the plant below it.
In order to carry out and achieve both experiments, I set up the scenes in Maya, used my bird from the studio animation and experimented with stillness in the scene in order to depict the most impact.
Result
In the end I had a series of experiments related to two major scenes of my studio work. The experiments provided me with an alternate way to depict the scenes, with impact only with the help of stillness. These experiments were quite helpful to me for my studio work and also helped me cut short some portion of animation. The scenes and experiments came out to be successful, but were a little challenging too, because when there is little motion in the scene, it often becomes unnoticed, and when there is a lot of motion in the scene, the scene loses its impact of stillness. So keeping this point in mind, these experiments have been created.
Reflection
Through this experiment, I realised that many impactful scenes, where we want to depict a point of interest to the audience, can be depicted with the help of stillness. Stillness also helps to add a very dramatic effect to the animation, and encourage the viewer to realise that the scene contains something important. It also evokes a feeling of anticipation, from the 12 principles of animation, as following a scene full of stillness, something important originates. This experiment has been very helpful and insightful to me and has also helped me save some time by cutting short the animation. This experiment can be very useful for the animation industry to cut costs and save time. I would like to experiment with stillness, further in other animations, as it is a very enjoyable, minimal and impactful experiment.
Documentation of work
The documentation of this work, the work in progress screenshots are included in the ‘documentation of work’ pdf attached to this post