Studio Brief 2: Moving Pictures

I had several ideas for ways to make my work move. We were introduced to the animation brief at a time in my project when I was fairly lost so my initial ideas were very different. As my work for the prints developed into the collages it became clear to me that they would lend themselves to a very simple animation. A downside of the simplicity is that I don't feel like I've challenged myself with after effects as much as I could have.

I wanted the sound to relate to the scenes in Orwell’s books at the atmospheres I imagined when reading his books (industrial, war zones, groups of people gathering and talking) . I thought it would be very easy to find a soundtrack I liked but after finding it hard to get exactly what I wanted online I realised it would be easier to make my own. However, I don't think the soundtrack is perfect and it misses lots of things I wanted. I don’t think the animation and the sound mix together as well as they could; when I added the sound to the animation I realised that I should have maybe created the sound before the animation. 

In the end, I made two different stings, one much slower using zooms and moving around the prints and one that is much faster paced that uses flashing images with mostly cuts rather than transitions. The flashing one (which became my final) works much better; especially synchronises with the soundtrack much better.

continuing the fairly abstract approach of the screen prints. I wanted to continue to combine the completely abstract, obscured elements of the prints with the parts relating to the author. However, in the interests of making clear that the sting is about George Orwell and communicating I planned to focus on the more relevant elements of the screen prints (such as the lino parts) in the sting; however, I'm not sure how much this happened, instead it seems that by cropping into areas of the prints it just abstracts them even further and takes it even further away from George Orwell. I found the sting much harder to make than I expected. It felt as if I made a very simple idea very complicated. 

Generally, considering sound more would have been good. That said, I think the soundtrack works with the images and is effective. I focused much more on the prints than the sting, partly as I thought it would be easy to make what I wanted on after effects.

George Orwell Sting from Oliver Wingard on Vimeo.