Making Moving Image Tells - Part II
Let’s discover the art of storytelling through a variety of animation techniques and find your meaning of storytelling with animation.
Part 4 - Making Moving Image Tells (2022-08-24) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
When an animated work is shown, the story never ends (nor could it ever end) with just the moving images we see. There are untold stories of the creative processes behind the scenes that are linked to the moving images, which are equally interesting and intriguing.
There are countless approaches to creating animation, depending on the nature of the creator and the result they envisioned, from simple techniques requiring the labor of only one person, to collaborative work by a large number of people.
In general, creating an animated work requires elements not unlike regular communication: sender, message, receiver.
Yet one distinct trait of animation is that the creative process requires a multidisciplinary approach: painting, sculpture, architecture, music composing etc. These elements can combine to make animation a tool that can be applied to various modes of communication, and therefore nearly impossible to be categorized in a single discipline within the creative industries.
Now we will get to learn about the neverending story of the creative movements and the making of animation.
Animation as a Medium for Music Video
Alice Saey is an artist with a background in graphic design before switching to animation. She discovered that the integration of her drawings and existing music – through the music’s rhythm, space and time – has helped immensely with the creative process and storytelling.
Part 4 - Making of Happy, Alice Saey_1 (2022-08-24) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
Happy (2017) by French-Scottish artist Alice Saey with music by Mark Lotterman
Animation created through an interpretation of the song “Happy” and through the artist’s self-exploration during the time she moved to Rotterdam, Netherlands
Seeing Egyptian swans roaming about, she found a connection between the inconspicuous yet jarring presence of the swans and her feeling of self with regards to the city.
That inspiration led to the creation of the work that had undergone experimentations with images and sounds, dilation and contraction of time through transforming images, to reflect the emotions of the artist.
Storyboard and work progress by Alice during the creative process.
The Role of Sound Track in Experimental Graphic Cinema
is one of the studies about sound in cinema that Alice has learned, which influenced the unique relationship between image and sound of the work.
Part 4 - Making of Carne, Camila Kater_1 (2022-08-25) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
Animation as a Medium for Personal Storytelling
Personal experiences and family stories about ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a woman of the artist Camila Kater have driven her to tell the story through “Carne (Flesh)” (2019), a documentary animation inspired and based on true stories of 5 women.
“Speaking of weight and being complimented for losing weight is a dialogue that has been around the house since I was a kid. When I was six, my bodily concerns started, and because of that concern, I went to meet with a nutritionist when I was eleven.” - Camila Kater
The book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, written by Carol J. Adams plays a part in the development of this project in the analogy between women, flesh, and social perception.
“... meat is disconnected from the dead animal and simply becomes food, and the woman is mischaracterized from a human being and becomes a body.”
Carne is a collaborative piece by 5 artists, where in each chapter one artist expresses her feelings of being the object of gaze by society, with an analogy comparing levels of doneness to life stages of a woman.
What’s more interesting is that this piece uses 5 different animation techniques chosen by each artist to reflect the concepts that emphasizes the perception between female bodies and flesh as commodities.
In addition, the piece also reflects the ideas of sex object and patriarchy, a universal theme for the audience to ponder on and question about.
Rare: Oil on plate animation depicting the story of a child who was bullied for being fat by PE teacher and classmates, and at the same time dealing with the pressure from the mother, who is a nutritionist.
Medium Rare: Watercolor animation telling the story about a girl’s first period and her puberty.
Medium: Computer-generated 2D animation reflecting the status of sexual object of colored people, and the violence faced as a transgender.
Medium Well-Done: Claymation about physical changes as the body goes through menopause.
Well-Done: Animation on 35mm film telling the life story of the actress Helena Ignez and the experience of living with her body for 79 years which reflect her freedom and her relationship with filmmaking.
Animation from Charcoal Strain
As we have mentioned, the unique trait of charcoal animation is the traces left behind on the drawing surface. The artist usually sets up a camera and records the process of creation and change of the picture on canvas/paper from start to finish,
giving particular importance to the traces recorded in time, be it charcoal traces, material surfaces, lights, and even the creases on the surface, where each frame does not have to be completely new or cut off completely from the previous one.
Sight (2013) by Keawalee Warutkomain gives a good example of using the in-between in a charcoal animation to explore the status between identities, between house and community, and between one thing and another
Part 4 - Sight, Keawalee Warutkomain_1 (2022-08-24) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
The space between the internal and external,
the ‘me’ and the ‘others’, the Thai and the Chinese identities of the artist are being explored through photographs and drawings of the house and its surroundings, the city, the abandoned, and things in the state where time and space is incongruent.
Two space-times between the skytrain and the bus are used to explore the transition of the relationship, where the artist has tried to bridge the two, in order to explore the state between herself and the surroundings.
Continuous residual transformations and traces of objects are also reflected in this charcoal animation.
Colored pencils on paper thus clearly show the traces in the in-between.
The strengths of storytelling in animation is not only limited to fascinating creative processes and behind the scenes, but also a myriad of techniques that can be used by the artist to best convey their ideas and identities.
Part 5 Journey to the Next Possibilities (2022-08-25) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
From the approaches, techniques, aesthetics, and the ideas behind a variety of animation works from both foreign and local artists, it is clear that animation is a creative medium that enables multidisciplinary collaboration.
For these reasons, beside seeing animation works as a medium for storytelling, there are currently experimental animated works with various objectives, all of which would allow creators and audiences to explore and push the boundaries of animation tools that can be freely applied to other disciplines.
Animation and Shadow Puppet
NUNUI (2013) by Janya Hetayotin, explores traditional shadow puppets as folk art in the context of modern innovations.
From lights, puppets, and shadows on a screen, to digital cut-out animation where the artist blends the folk characteristics of traditional shadow puppets with animation, altering some original elements to find new possibilities.
Part 5 - Nunui, Chanya Hetayothin_1 (2022-08-25) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
In this work, the shadow puppet’s mechanism and storytelling are being challenged by the old traditions, mixed with cinematic elements.
Familiar characters like Nunui and Teng retain their appearances, but their relationship has been reinterpreted as strangers.
The two puppets are digitized – scanned and designed to fit movement in computer simulations rather than imitating traditional puppet movements.
Digital sound effects have also replaced dialogues and narrator voices to put more emphasis in postures and movement.
Animation in Public Space
Dreamscape Project (2015) by Eyedropper Fill in collaboration with Epson. Projection of Bangkok building facades.
Sometimes, to perceive whether a dream is real, seeing the dream move may just be the proof that the dream is real.
They started from the question “What does your dream look like?”, then drew the dreams on paper, and made them a reality by projecting the images at nighttime.
The idea of the piece lies in the interaction between people and moving images in public spaces, highlighting the ephemera of projected light and people at one moment in time, like a shared dreamscape – taken shape at night, gone by the morning.
Animation and Art Therapy
Scratch Your Anger and Flip It (2021), by Graphy Animation in collaboration with Studio Persona.
Moving images work with art therapy by first expressing emotions with scribble art, exploring the relationship between scribbler and scribbles.
Then learn to control the scribbles by creating and controlling moving images in a flip-book, where the scribbles are controlled, adjusted and changed with each flip of the page.
Emotions are being recorded second by second on the pages like a personal emotion diary, where only the owner can access.
Collective Animation
a collaboration by 3 artists who were complete strangers to one another: David Habchy from Lebanon, Renato Duque from Brazil and Thanut Rujitanont from Thailand.
All three use animation as a tool to explore the definition of ‘home’ and design a house that would best accommodate them living together.
The animation’s creative process became a medium with which the three used to get to know each other, by talking and sharing memories of their own ‘home’, and drawing elements of those memories on transparency sheets.
Using pencil, paper, color, sound, time, fragments of recollected memories old and new, they began to overlap on the sheets.
Interacting through animation while drawing simultaneously allowed the artists to quickly perceive each other’s emotions, thoughts and characters, very much like moving in and adapting to living in a shared space.
Although living together is a matter of 3 different people, each person’s attachment to their own friends and family cannot be severed.
“Visiting Day” is the name of one process where the artists allow their friends and acquaintances to participate in designing their collective home.
Part 5 - The Third Man and I, Tinrey Wang (2022-08-25) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
Animation and Virtual Reality
The Third Person and I, a VR-assisted animation where important events at every life stage of the artist are simulated and made accessible with a virtual reality headset. Delve in and help make key decisions in his memory.
“Looking back on my memories, my perspective became that of a third person who saw myself in the memory. I am no longer the first person” - Tinrey Wang
Part 5 - Animation as an art (2022-08-26) by TCDCThailand Creative & Design Center
Stories told using animation techniques by home and foreign artists should give you a brief insight into the storytelling process that can be both diverse and spanning multiple disciplines involved with animation.
Animation is a time-based artistic medium that has attracted more and more interest for development, particularly regarding current technology in computers and imaging pushing the envelope on a daily basis.
On the other hand, perception of animation as art and a part of the creative industries has been around for a mere 100 years compared to other art forms.
As such, animation is like a toddler with endless potential to explore and untap. Yet the growth of the animation industry, as well as animators and artists, require support from creative workers in both national and international levels, so that they can improve their skills and expand their knowledge to open up even more future possibilities.
Because animation is a space where everyone can experiment, engage and explore their ideas and approaches, and find your own definition of animation.
What about you? How do you view animation? And what stories have you got to tell?
Graphy Animation and Thailand Creative & Design Center under the Creative Economy Agency (Public Organization) appreciate and thank the artists and the organization who contributed to this exhibition.
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