From the 26th till the 28th of November, our class of Master students Animation went on a 3-day meeting in Landenne. During these days, many sessions with different guest teachers were held. Most of them came to give us more feedback on our work in progress. In order of appearance and meeting, my report on the three guest teachers
26th November - Alexandra Crouwers
Alexandra Crouwers is an abstract audiovisual artist. She works with installations and uses projections of her computer animated work, mostly done in CG technique in Cinema 4D. Mostly an intuitive artist, she makes no use of storyboards, but rather with texts which serve as a guideline. In all her works, an element of slowness is incorporated. This is to capture and hold the attention of the audience. At the same time the audience is experiencing an uncomfortableness due to the breaking point in the use of time. In other words, the brain of the viewer gets a sort of reprogramming for looking at visual images and as they change slowly, the time perception of the viewer changes and slows down.
During her lecture, she showed some excerpts of her own work, and also excerpts of the works of Sean Gladwell, from 'Matrix 162', and Kelly Richardson, 'The Erudition'. Both artists act like an inspiration source for her work. Even Lars Von Triers 'Europa' and 'Breaking the waves' came in the revue. Some screenshots of Alexandra Crouwers' work that interest me below:
26th November - Alexandra Crouwers
Alexandra Crouwers is an abstract audiovisual artist. She works with installations and uses projections of her computer animated work, mostly done in CG technique in Cinema 4D. Mostly an intuitive artist, she makes no use of storyboards, but rather with texts which serve as a guideline. In all her works, an element of slowness is incorporated. This is to capture and hold the attention of the audience. At the same time the audience is experiencing an uncomfortableness due to the breaking point in the use of time. In other words, the brain of the viewer gets a sort of reprogramming for looking at visual images and as they change slowly, the time perception of the viewer changes and slows down.
During her lecture, she showed some excerpts of her own work, and also excerpts of the works of Sean Gladwell, from 'Matrix 162', and Kelly Richardson, 'The Erudition'. Both artists act like an inspiration source for her work. Even Lars Von Triers 'Europa' and 'Breaking the waves' came in the revue. Some screenshots of Alexandra Crouwers' work that interest me below:
One Short Story Dunsmuir TV Sky
Afterwards, Alexandra and I were up for an individual session about my work on 'The Big Mystery'. The first point she remarked was that in my script an obvious struggle for the man and woman to come together was present. This would result in a confusing message, as it was my intention to tell about a common ground between the two, instead of further dividing them and drifting them far from each other. For this, she suggested me to look up for 'sexual dimorphism', or the phenotypic (what is observable with the eye) difference between males and females of the same species. Between most animals the differences are easily to spot, as for humans, the difference is no longer apparent with the modern gender issues. Another addition to this point was to look at these things on atomic level. This should work for keeping the story abstract, with the image of the cube and the sphere representing the male and female part respectively.
Breaking with clichés is also a must.
Breaking with clichés is also a must.
27 November - Geert Van Goethem
Next day, a second meeting with animation producer Geert Van Goethem was planned. In the beginning of this meeting, I told him that I wanted to change my concept and make it an all abstract film. In return, he gave me some tips on working more intuitively for making abstract films by watching the films of Richard Reeves (scratching directly on film, direct animation) and Oskar Fischinger (direct and stop-motion animation). Also the suggestion of working with key images, similar to storyboarding, rather than struggling with precise scriptwriting, came up. The element of time is very important to create 'area of tension' and rhythm so watching this would be appealing to the audience. This is something I should work on by making several animatics with different timings, to see what works best.
27 & 28 November - Truusje Graste
Last but not least, a big class with all of the Master students came together for our last guest teacher. Truusje Graste is a teacher in 'Movement Teaching', simply put the class where you learn about your (animated) characters and objects by analysing all of their movements. She gave a short but very interesting class about movement analysis. There were three main elements to consider in the dynamics of movement analysing and their two fold qualities:
- Time: Sudden or Sustained
- Space: Direct or Indirect
- Force: Strong or Light
With these, any movement could be described with three qualities. Some examples were given with eight main movements.
A scheme of these main actions below. The upper element in each cell represents a sudden movement, the lower a sustained one.
Last but not least, a big class with all of the Master students came together for our last guest teacher. Truusje Graste is a teacher in 'Movement Teaching', simply put the class where you learn about your (animated) characters and objects by analysing all of their movements. She gave a short but very interesting class about movement analysis. There were three main elements to consider in the dynamics of movement analysing and their two fold qualities:
- Time: Sudden or Sustained
- Space: Direct or Indirect
- Force: Strong or Light
With these, any movement could be described with three qualities. Some examples were given with eight main movements.
A scheme of these main actions below. The upper element in each cell represents a sudden movement, the lower a sustained one.