Studio Brief 3 - Moving Pictures

I struggled a bit with this brief in comparison to the other two, I think because I didn’t manage my time between the printed pictures brief and this one, and also because I was a bit overly ambitious with what I wanted to achieve.

My initial idea as seen in the project proposal was to animate my chess board lino print from the first brief. I wanted to animate all the pieces on the chess board moving about and knocking each other off with farmyard animal sounds in the background, and then have the text “George Orwell, Animal Farm” appear at the end. However, when I attempted this in aftereffects I found it really difficult to make the motions seem lifelike, and I think there were just too many elements to incorporate.

After reconsideration, I decided to base the sting off a double page spread in my zine from study task 1. I chose the “two legs good, four legs bad” etc. pages because I think this more or less sums up a lot of the themes and elements of the book, such as the misinformation that the pigs spread, the gradual change of the farm from a communist community to a more dictatorship style one.

 

I wanted the sting to have quite a DIY, tactile feel so I keep the moving elements quite simple. Most of the animation is just things appearing or fading out, and the sheep’s mouths just move as the text appears. I think this simplicity has kept the message of the sting quite clear. The only sound effects I added were sheep noises as the text appears, and the typewriter sounds at the end when the title and author appear.

I think I’ve managed to make the sting work cohesively with the other briefs which I’m pleased with, but I think this is the weakest of the three briefs for me. I think I probably should have managed my time a bit better and spent a little less time on my publication and a little more on the animation. I think I also made the same mistake as I did in the previous brief, and forgot to work with two colours in the storyboarding stage so I ended up adding the second colour towards the end of the development process. Still, I enjoyed this brief and learning how to use aftereffects.