Assignment 3

Assignment Three: Movement

Your assignment task is to undertake a more sustained and focused project that goes through various iterations and processes of making, addressing the theme of ‘movement’ in either the production of the work or in its content. This idea of ‘movement’ could produce an artwork that moves quickly or slowly, or moves from being large to small, or from colour to black and white, for example, or indeed any combination of all those qualities. The important thing is that you are documenting a process of making and change.

Animation is an excellent artistic representation of movement and is a skill I have only briefly tried out before, so I chose to make a very short animated clip. The subject is a continuation of Exercise 2: Slow. I like the sequence on the second page and its combination of types of movement. Depicting both the transformation in the background and the character in the foreground would be a challenge, but the shortness of the video and the fact that the character only walks in a straight line would help mitigate the level of difficulty. I really am only a beginner in animation.

How to animate a walk

Given my beginner level, I had to scour the internet for videos and online tutorials on how to animate, and how to animate in Photoshop specifically since that is the program I have on hand. I unfortunately went through a long stage where I thought I would be able to animate the drawing in a style similar to animated graphic novels, where one works with the original images and creates movement by cutting and moving around the elements on the page. This turned out to be both far too time consuming and horrendous to look at, so I eventually admitted defeat and started to redraw the whole thing the normal way.

Animating in Photoshop

I started out with the base layer I already had from the previous animation attempt, the comic panels in sequence.

The first step I took was animating a skeleton for the character walk. I didn’t bother with the details at first, the motion was more important. For all that drawing a walk is simple there are certain details like the up and down movement of the torso with the bending of the legs and the alternating of said legs. I did not have to draw the arms because the character is holding his parcel.

Next, I animated the growth of the tree. The tree is necessary in order to reinforce the fact that the character is moving far slower in comparison with the background. It helps to have an obvious reference point, otherwise one just assumes the character is traveling along a great distance and that the cities in the background are from different places instead of being the same city. The growth of the tree is another important element for showing the passage of time. I also added a fallen branch for the section where the city burns, I didn’t think to when I was drawing the comic panels somehow. The fallen branch helps with clarity a little.

Next, I drew in the hills and the path which are the only things that don’t change in the animation. The background details like clouds or the position of the sun do change, and are supposed to help with the sense that many days pass as the character moves from one side of the panel to the other.

I was a little stuck when animating the city. It didn’t look like it was growing naturally at all, so I became a bit frustrated with the animation overall. It’s very busy as it is, so the lack of clarity city’s evolution over time was a big problem in the storytelling of the little animation. I eventually added more panels with fewer buildings in order to help sell the in between parts of the city’s growth, but I’m still not sure it helped very much.

The thing that probably helps sell the passage of time the best is the changing color. Initially, I wanted to use the same colors from the comic panels, but they ended up not working well. The overall gradient is meant to represent moving from the warm summer court to the winter court rather than the passage of time, but both can be relevant at the same time. Interestingly, the color instantly helped sell the movement. I had not expected that at all, though I probably should have. The flashiness of the changing color helps the brain read the image much better than black and white lines. Coloring the hills and path in the background also gave the image so much more depth and clarity. I would have done it sooner if I had known the colors would help so much because I had been very frustrated with the jumbled mess of lines.

The same can be said for coloring the other elements such as the city and the character. Everything is so much more clear. There are certain problems I still don’t know how to fix, though. Like the glitches. At first, I thought the glitches on the character were because of layers that didn’t align well, but they still persist, even after rearranging everything and making sure the corresponding frames appear on the same beat. Though I will admit that there are probably more precise methods of work that I used.

The part that did not read at all in the sketches was the burning of the initial buildings. I’m very happy that the coloring helps with that. For the last version, I did my best to clean it up a little, but kept the illustrative style I started out with in the comic panels. I’m glad I went with something a little soft and watercolor-like, because my beginner animation would have probably looked even worse if I had used a cleaner approach, like cell animation or just thinner line art. The pencil-like lines are a bit more forgiving.

Reflection

Trying out so many radically different approaches to art was both challenging and rewarding. All the methods of making in this section had their own difficulties. When the materials were large I found difficult to work on something I could not fully see without standing up and moving around. When the theme was about depicting movement/slowness, I had to think outside the box and find a way to show relative speed in a static, two-dimensional medium. When the medium was photography or animation, I had to learn new skills in order to have the best result I could with my limited experience. Being able to work large, small, fast and slow is vitally important as an artist. Though at the moment it is a little more important that I learn to work fast and small rather than slow and large. That is the nature of a more illustrative focus. While working small is not really a problem, working fast has been an issue once again. There are still a lot of kinks to work out in my process and time management style. The planning of the next project will have this point at the forefront. As an illustrator I cannot really afford to have such a big deadline allergy.

While I will benefit from all the new skills I learned in this chapter, the sequential storytelling and movement related ones will be most useful for the next section. The photo booth exercise could also be useful if I ever need references and I can’t find satisfactory ones on the internet. The fast sketching from the first exercise will also be a big help, especially if I need to work from life at one point or another.

Among the artists I researched, I found Adam Dant’s work to be my favorite. The aesthetic of his style appeals to me a lot but even more than that, I like his approach of working in a historically informed way to depict modern day problems/scenarios. Combining history with the present is something I think about a lot. My preference for more old-fashioned styles can be seen clearly in my work, but I can’t say that I really take the contextual approach as well. That is something to think about for the future.

My current focus is on becoming better at the comic-book style and improving on clarity when it comes to depicting movement. I still find that my images do not communicate very well and that my intentions are not always made clear. Hopefully practicing with comic styles will help me sharpen the clarity of design and movement in my images. These skills will be very useful whether I will decide to focus on drawing comics in to future or not. I plan to create a short comic book in part four. The skills I started learning here will greatly inform my process going forward, and I hope they will help me arrive to a great result.