Exploring Creative Histories

Our next brief is to produce a 1 minute animation expressing some component of our creative inspiration or history. Yet again the amount of possibillities made the initial stages quite overwhelming. The project tutor encouraged us to make a start by fleshing out some Motion Treatments, giving fledling ideas a bit more weight.

We were encouraged to test our ideas by applying different genres to them, as well as potentially exploring how they could be abstracted. I was interested in making type move, possibly linking that with the process of walking and the various ways adventure has inspired my ideas. Other ideas included delving into a hedgerow and finding various critters within, or a monster being assembled from my varied interests.

Research & Inspiration

Inspiration came in the form of cartoons, stop-motion animation, computer games and animated shorts. Something I was especially keen to get across was vivid colours. Hedges themsevles can often be fairly uniform in their ‘greenness’, but I liked the idea of using colour to express the creative ideas I’ve gotten whilst walking alongside a hedge. The colours in Ralph Bakshi’s, Lord of the Rings (1978) and Genndy Tartakovsky’s, Primal (2019) are what I imagined.

Cartoons like Over the Garden Wall were useful reference for the actual process of animating things from the natural world, as well as interesting character design. I found this really useful tutorial on painting gorgeous backgrounds from the art director of the series.