Review of Final Major Project

STUDENT NAME: Qandeel Anjum
PATHWAY: Lens Based Media
FINAL MAJOR PROJECT TITLE: The Dark Mind


My final outcome is an animation that uses mixed media, 2D and stop-motion clay. I believe I have progressed well during the seven weeks, I am confident with my final piece. It was by means a smooth journey, there were many bumps and hardships along the way, which I found to be very exciting because I knew for sure that I was not playing safely and experimenting enough for it not to be too little.It is not too far off my Project Proposal as it is still very much about the human mind and how dark it is, the mental illness the mind can very easily cause a person to obtain.

To make a check list of how my learning has effect my project I have done: an FMP plan, blog and sketchooks.Making a physical plan of what I was going to be doing throughout the seven weeks deemed to be very useful and helped me visualise how much I should have done so far, what I should be doing now and what I need to prepare for, for the week after. Having to update the blog everyday was a very helpful end to the day, as I can evaluate my days worth of work and revise what I have just learnt. This would reflect what I have done in my sketchbook and express in a more sophisticated manner the process of my journey and reflection upon work

Upon beginning the project, I knew I had to do something to push myself, something I haven not done before. I am glad to have met that target by making a film with an animation style and material I have never worked with before.

The development of my research is the key to where I have ended up with my FMP. My research is in depth enough for me to move aside from what I would have intentionally done and dived deeper into my topic to find something more effective as a final outcome.

I often asked for advice and others opinions on what I was doing, because as the audience they are entitled to their own opinions. Votes for best plot ideas were taken from group evaluation sessions and tutors, along with valid reason as to why the vote was being made. I also took professional input from tutors and took in their opinions and advice to apply to my work to increase the quality. For example having a well thought out story is just as important as the way you convey it.

If I was to do this project again or be given a few more weeks, I would really love to improve on my time management. I was very ill prepared and found myself really stressed and in a rush towards the end. If I could just fix the flaw I believe I would have a more clean and easier to understand animation. This would also mean more enjoyment in my work rather than just the feeling of want to get it over with. Never the less, I can confidently say I have successfully leant how much in depth research pays off in regards to the final outcome. These are important skills I have learnt and while definitely apply next year so I can be more at ease than I was this time around. It will only get harder from here so I should understand how important time management is.

Porcelain Flower

"When a woman is referred to porcelain, generally it is the skin texture that is quite delicate and flawless. There is certainly an aspect of beauty which is so perfect and beautiful, that you don't want to touch it for fear of breaking the delicate beauty of it.
Similarly, a flower is delicate and flawless. Alluring you with it's natural beauty but too beautiful for you to want to touch it for fear of breaking the delicate beauty of it".

The term porcelain occurred to me from a conversation I had with a friend a while ago as we were discussing my theme and ideas I could explore when trying to come up with a story. The word stuck with me and it just seemed to fit the storyline so well.
Flower came from the form of symbolism in the animation. The more Agnes harmed herself to look "beautiful" the more petals fell from the flower, causing it to wilt away and die.

There's been a pattern in my work which uses some sort of symbolism somewhere, even if no one can see it. I know it's there and if people did search it up, they'd find it interesting too. I though the use of flower as symbolism for her progression of loosing herself was quite intelligent and it proved to be because everyone who watched it pointed out that it was a very good idea and was pleasing to the eye and theme. It also got the message across since people do sympathise with innocent like a flower, more than they would a person.

Taking the tutors advice into account throughout this whole project was the best thing I had done. It meant that I had much better results that I had intentionally hoped for. I am very proud of the results of my animation.

Flowers? Symbolism?

The idea suddenly occurred to me when I was got into bed at 5am and had to wake up in two hours to go to university. I was extremely restless due to high stress levels and insomnia. I just couldn't calm my mind down and rest, all I could think of was work while I lay wide away with tired eyes that seemed to be open wide.
"A flower getting damaged: dying alongside her losing it and ruining herself.
As she peals her skin away, we change to a shot of her shadow on the wall and the flower has a lot of petals that’ve fallen as she flattens herself we views outside her flat and zoom out, seeing the shilouette of her flower petal falling and sounds of rolling are heard.
Plucking yawn hair off and replacing with paper Opening title sequence.
TV screen, Chanel change: a film by Qandeel Anjum.
Her walking down road and some girls laugh, road us cleared “film name” switch to her sad face and black screen. Now film starts."
I remember trying to fall asleep and being unable to I grabbed my phone and started typing whatever came to my mind instead of wasting ideas and my current strength which is somehow keeping me awake.

For a while I was wondering why I suddenly had the idea of adding a flower in my animation. It happens so that I had been thinking about a name for my animation that related to the film and sounded catchy enough; people often relate flowers to beauty and when having a chat with a friend about body dysmorphia a while ago she kept using the word porcelain so it just stuck to me and my brain just happen to be constantly repeating that word.
Also, very early in my first sketchbook, on the first page, I made a mindmap of psychology and drew a few images aground it, one of which was a flower.

I though the imagery of it was just beautiful and the way there was quite a lot of detail on something so small, especially because it was enlarged so and drawing with a few scribbles of pen. The fall of petals also looked amazing and I though it'd be a wonderful thing to animate in such a dark and somewhat scary animation. A little bit of a juxtaposition is never bad. It's visually appealing and relaxing to see something with as lovely connotations as a flower in a film that's generally the complete opposite.

Somehow I had also been unconsciously inspired by Beauty and the Beast, although the flower wasn't exactly symbolical as it had meaning and played a huge part in the plot. It's just the imagery of something so beautiful belonging to the beast who's described and seen as ugly, scary and mean.

Drawing falling petals and leaves seemed to be a recurring thing in my book. Maybe the fact that it's finally spring finally hit me?

I love me some symbolism and  I usually manage to get it in  my animation somewhere, somehow. Whether it's very noticeable at all or not doesn't matter so much, because I know that there is a reason each object is placed in the image and if people were to be critical and search it up if they wanted, then there will be answers for their questions.
It also adds depth to the film and gives it some more meaning that isn't everything you see the first time, you might have to watch it twice or three times to understand the little scenes and why they're used.

Another reason for having petals for symbolism is because I know that if, hypothetically, this was to be a full length film I would want it to be rated PG. Most film makes try and get as low a rating as possible for their films, this way more people can watch it and that means they'll earn more. This means I couldn't possibly have graphic scenes or anything that could break the PG rating boundary and venture into 12A or 12. As long as I am to follow the PG rating list and not raise higher I will be satisfied.
So, to fill the scenes where there would be gore or some sort of inappropriate scene I could replace them with the flower and show what's happening through the plant.

Animatics

The first thing I'm hoping for is that the animation lasts longer than a minute, because I gave myself two weeks to animate and it usually takes me a week to animate a little under a minutes worth of animation, therefore I'm hoping for something longer than a minute.
I also have a rough idea of what the background are going to look like but I've yet to decide the full details. Lately, I seem to be really enjoying background art for animation seeing as I put quite a lot of time and effort into it, and really study the accuracy of surrounds from different angles. So I'm hoping to have well drawn scenes for my final animation, that compliment the eeriness of the animation.

After finishing the animatics, I immediately started animating without consulting with anyone and merely showed it to the people who had a clear idea of what's going on. Only after having finished my animation did I show it to my tutors on the day it was due for adding to the showreel. It made clear sense to me about what was going on. However, when showing it to a few tutors who didn't have a complete grasp on my theme, they got lost towards the end of the story. It isn't clear enough what was happening. I had to explain the storyline to them causing them to let out and "ah" and finally understand. We agreed that this was a bad point of the story because along with the lovely concept of the story, it's not very clearly shown through the animation which is a disappointing waste of a good message in a story. I just wasn't working well enough.

I hadn't spent too long working on the clarity of my story because I knew exactly what I was trying to do and forgot that the audience, who know nothing about what's happening, wouldn't understand a single thing and would just be thoroughly confused.

I took this criticism into account and went to think about how I could improve the storyline and make it easier to understand without having the audience have to leave with confusion and disappointment.

Attempting Stop-Motion

I never though stop motion to every be easy. Especially after watching the making of Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, it's a very long and slow procedure that requires a lot of patience and endless motivation. You need to have a set goal of finishing and ignore the fact that you'll have to do hours of endless editing and cleaning tomorrow, before actually putting the figure into the frame that needs to be created.
I tried to work chronologically because during the film my model will have to get flattened and cut up so I wouldn't be able to switch the order of  photography sessions. Therefore, I made a list of scenes to photograph so I wouldn't possibly miss anything that is if importance to add.



Walk cycles are much easier said than done. Still I think a walk cycle done with clay is much easier than it it when drawn frame by farm for 2D animation, especially when the legs are touching in any way. I had to learn this the hard way, inset of a simple side view, I decided to make my first walk cycle of a 1/3 turn and have very slow movement so it took forever to animate a simple walk cycle. Each frame in the of just the walk cycle consisted of at least 8 layers if drawing.
The clay walk cycle was much easier to do, because moving the legs physically is a lot easier than redrawing it over and over again. A few test shots of people walking did the job and make it easy enough to make a walk cycle to actually look like the character is walking.
A downside to this was, as previous describe in a post, the high temperature of lighting making the clay extremely soft and malleable. So when moving the figure into it's next position it would slightly flatten down every time.



Along the way I had to add and remove scenes in accordance to relevance and because I was constantly thinking about my lack of identical model. So I photographed extra scenes just in case I needed to sue them at some point in the animation. Even if I don't use them, it won't go to waste; it would still be worth the photographs because it would cause me to gain more experience and practice more.
Realistically, not every scene recorded and animated goes into a film, depending on level of relevance, some scenes have to be removed and whether they're useful or not depend on how the film turns out in the end.



I quite like how this turned out when placed together and exported as a video. The hand in the frames appearing and moving as the clay model was moved, it just looks good in my opinion. I already really liked the consistency of the figure and how smooth the movements were. Although it meant much more frames to edit and clean, it also meant I could slow down the animation and still have smooth movement.



Sometimes it's just easier to record the action and import all the video frames into photoshop and turn them into still then. Although it is a much longer procedure, at the moment of doing it, it just seemed like the easier way out. I hadn't realised that the trouble would be the same every time. I either move the figure ever so slight slightly and take a new image every single time, or I record a video and go through 5 rounds of editing on phototshop to get it into the frame.



There wasn't much to this, but it does have significant relevance to the plot of the film, wherein she puts her 2D paper hair on and believes she's now a 2D beauty just like everyone else. Small arm movement and every so slight movement of the hair as she puts it on is what makes this scene.



Again, I used the idea of recording it instead of animating each scene. This was die to the fact that it would be much harder to pause and hold the model in the air and mange to get a smooth animation scene than to record and go the long way about it. It wouldn't be an accurate  get of photos if it wasn't recorded. I tried that method and it would work because holding the model in the air with tweezers was difficult enough. If I held too tightly it would make a hole and/or rip off and if I held it too gently it would slip right off and fall down. Therefore I had to record a quick few scenes so I could pick and choose which scene or frolic I preferred from the selection.

Clay model

Making a clay model isn't particularly easy, especially if you don't have the right clay. I used come cheap clay for kids to try and construct my first first model, but it didn't work out because the quality of the clay was horrible. It just wouldn't mix, nor would it get out of the shape it was bought it. It was too tough on the hand to work with such material so I had to change to a clay form I'm more familiar with.

Polymer clay is this beautiful, soft, easily blending and malleable, but it's most commonly used for making jewellery and can be baked hard. This had both it's positives and negatives.

On the bright side it was very easy to mix with other colours, gentle on the hands of rolls and can easily stick to other parts without having to press on it. Because it has to be baked to turn hard, it would remain soft without air drying like usual clay.

On the other hand, it was too soft so it'd catch finger prints very easily, it would also loose it's shape and flatten very easily went being constantly touched and moved. It also gets softer in a warmer environment so it had to be rather chilly in the room for the clay to not loose it's shape and be malleable at the same time.

Having long nails is also a positive and negative thing for figure making. It's easy to stick parts to the figure without too much trouble and damage, it's also convenient when trying to gently move the figure's arm for example.

However, because it is sharp, the nail more than often leaves a print of some sort, especially if the temperature in the room would increase too much suddenly.

I suppose I should have bought different clay for this, but for experience sake it was much easier to use something I'm very confident with. Because I often make jewellery that has to be flawless before hardening, I had the confidence not to damage the model too much.

It was very much on the difficult side because I'm not used to fiddling with the final model too much and hitting straight for the oven to harden.

I decided giving her facial features as they would be so much more easily drawn on as 2D animated images. It would also be much easier to manipulate than having to change the facial expression along without moving the body every few seconds for the next frame.

I chose the colour green because, looking back to the first questionnaire I did about my theme, people often considered been to be a colour that would disturb them in some way. Colours such as green, burgundy, grey, dark blue, mustard and black make for a very grimy looking animation, especially if they're desaturated and of darker shades. It gives a very good visual effect if the animation is to be disturbing in any sense.

Having a green screen and lighting system in a dark room was a very enjoyable feeling, even if it was at five in the morning. It looked so professional with all the technology surrounding the little figure as I moved it ever so slightly every few seconds.

This contained another struggled I had to face. Because the lighting had to be very strong on the figure and have a very strong light on the background, it would heat with quite a lot and cause the model to skin ever so slight and soften even more than it already was.

Overall, the experience was very enjoyable and kept me excited because I knew that the little insignificant movements would turn into smooth enough animation in the end. I only regret making just one model because it would be convenient to have an identical one incase I needed to animate new scenes. I did however keep the remains of the flattened and cut up model [along with her remains].

Character Design

Personally, character designing I my most favourite part of animating. This time it seemed a little awkward because I was going to work with stop motion, clay animation, which would be my main character. Therefore I couldn't draw really exciting characters because I'm not very experience with animating with clay and I would have to design something simple and easy to do. This left me without much choice of a large range of different characters to design because I'd have to make it in the end and edit it and animate it.

The easiest idea seemed to work with simple shapes like circles and squares.

Designing her 2D version was much more enjoyable because this is something I know how to do and can animate. I found that using colour pencils as the base to be a very convenient method. It makes for a simple and effective base for facial and body structure while also making the page appear more appealing. It also doesn't get in the way of easily making out the characters features that have been drawn in pencil over it but rather enhances them and makes them look more three diminutional and realistic.

For all my designs, I chose a hairstyle from what I thought would be most convenient and stuck with it throughout the designing, it made it easier to see what and who each character was, that along with the colour pencil I used for the base of the character.

I can easily say that I had the most fun when designing the other characters that could appear in the film. Simply because I went al out with different design styles for characters and simply had a lot of fun in the process. I also applied a lot of my live drawing practice into the body structures, making them appear more accurate and realistic enough. I challenged myself by stepping out of my comfort zone of my already established art style and tried to experiment with new styles that I could come up with. This helped me broaden my knowledge on character designing and made me see it on a more wide aspect.
Considering character designing is my favourite part of animating, I wouldn't usually spend a lot of time on it because I would simply use an already established art style, simple because I'm comfortable with it.
During this course, I've had one specific recurring style of character deigning in my doodles with I seem to really like doing and I do quite like the look of them. In all the drawings above, I have characters with long, displeased faces; looking back through my earlier sketchbooks I see that I've used this style quite often. It's a rather appealing style and shows enough body language and facial expression to understand what the character's personality would be like. If not now, I would like to try out and work with this style int he future.