Experiment: Shadow and light

While at the end of the last semester I went back to creating everything digitally, the idea of using physical spaces and lights has come back to me. As such, I am working on building a city street out of cardboards, and I’ve been thinking of populating it with silhouetted people, and only having the giants as colour within the frame.

Part of this new development comes from the feedback I have received on my work from the last semester. This stated I should look at using a different medium. While I disagree with the idea of finding a completely different medium, as I believe this story can only be told in animation, it did make me reconsider how I can use the medium and my own strengths to my advantage. This move was also influenced by the evening of Colombian Contemporary Animation I went to recently. This evening showed me many ways animation can be made, but also showed me that mixing a medium can work very well. The idea of rotoscoping to create lifelike animation is something I want to return to, as this is something I have done before, and which will give the viewers a better connection to the characters on screen

The use of projections on the cardboard street I am currently building seems like the logical next step in the process. This is inspired by an attraction I used to go to as a little kid in the Netherlands. It was called ‘the little match girl’ in the Efteling theme park. The use of mirrors and projections to create the inside of a living room is now inspiring me to see if I can use projection to have me characters move. Some experimentation on this technique can be seen in the video below, preceded by the hand drawn animation trial for the giant's walk.