Me and my friend Zai Tang just started a new project yesterday which we will be working on this summer.
The basic idea was that erm... well, "we'll make something togheter".
We know eachother quite well as we lived togheter at University and we
respect eachothers work so we thought we'd put our heads togheter and
do some experiments to see where they take us.
The plan was to start off doing some visuals and then let that lead us
in to new ideas. This will hopefully form a storyline as we go along.
In the later stages we will start the music for the video and then
piece the two togheter.
So, yesterday I took my camera and headed up to Zai's house in Stoke
Newington. We set up the tripod and camera with a black sheet as a
neutral background. Then we shot about 140 photos which resulted in a
little stop frame animation which you can see below.
We used Zai's old toy figurines for props which we thought worked quite
well. I think the fact that they are figurines doesn't really matter. I
think the interesting thing here is the colours and the shapes &
patterns from the stop frame animation. The sequence was actually not
more than about 10 seconds, but we took the footage in to Final Cut Pro
and messed about with it there to see where it could take us. What we
quickly discovered was that single trails of animation (like the toy
cars moving in a line) make a nice point for gesture. The other nice
feature is that when you have quite a lot going on, you can make
interesting patterns by multi-layering the animations across the
screen.
Stay tuned for further developments (all on this blog) in the coming weeks!