After researching about William Kentridge and watching a few videos of his interviews, I was very drawn into how he goes about combining drawing and film/animation. The signature charcoal animations are, in a way, a very organic and raw process. With the medium of charcoal, lines can be easily blurred out, erased, moved… and in the process, give it a sense of movement that no other medium could do better. I wanted to do some quick experimentations as well, since I’ve always been interested by animations/ have a love for stop motion films (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Kubo and the Two Strings, Paranorman, Frankenweenie, Coraline, etc… would love to dive into older stop motions too)
I’m not familiar with editing video at all apart from the basic cutting up clips and putting them together kind of thing, but I do know how to make gifs. It is a hobby, something I do in my spare time. I make gifs for a particular fandom on tumblr, for a music group I really love. Before learning how to make gifs, I was always intimidated by Photoshop. How extremely complicated it looks. But thanks to my passion for this group, I learnt basic skills of Photoshop. I started with making a gif of one horrific moment from The Company of Wolves - the part where the man sticks out his long tongue. I then tried to trace each frame onto paper but I realized after a few frames that this wasn’t going to work due to my lack of skill in drawing in perspective/accuracy. There’s also no real point in tracing… I’d much rather draw from imagination. So that’s what I did next.
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| gif I made of that horrific moment from the Company of Wolves |
I didn’t really think about it, but I guess one particular lyric of a song I’ve been non-stop listening to - Lucid Dream by Owl City (everything he writes is poetry, I will always admire him as one of the best song-writers/artists/singers out there) was floating around in my head - “BLACK RABBIT OF DEATH / WAKES UP IN A BREATH” I don’t know why I resonated with that lyric, perhaps because of the strong imagery it creates, and also the fact that rabbits are very important animals to me in my art practice. Anyway, that’s what I started to draw with charcoal. I had a rough idea of wanting its jaw to grow wide, but I had no real control of how it grew after that, it was liberating, so free, to have a drawing grow before your eyes. And with such movement! the lack of color emphasizes on the shapes and lines and blurriness of the edges. I feel that this gif / animation experiment was successful in its own way. I didn’t have a camera set up permanently in once place, or have the paper be in the same place as I drew on it so, I of course didn’t have the same stability Kentridge has in his animations. But alas, I experienced first hand how fun that was, although difficult since I couldn’t really control what was going on.
I also did another one straight after that, in color this time. I initially was just going to sketch a photo from a trip to milan with my friends (thinking about the concept of ambivalent friendships again), and yes, I did find it very difficult to sketch in accuracy, especially in perspective, even after roughly looking at the picture through the ‘grid’ technique. I just sort of let go of any sort of structure after that. I felt limited. Initially, I planned on having the girl’s hair and dress grow longer in the wind and become a sort of fire against the cool blue buildings behind her but - before I know it - the red that swept towards the right became an animal, a fox, perhaps, its always a wolf-fox creature that creeps into my works unannounced, not that I am upset by it, I was just intrigued by how much that sketch changed from a drawing I was struggling with to something that looks quite childlike but raw, something that was true to my ‘style’. As I followed the drawing through each frame, taking a picture every time (I drew directly this time without taking the paper down from the wall) I was thinking about what this drawing meant. I realize that I was thinking about desire, how the fruit on the top left grew and evaporated, how the fox-wolf’s tears and want dripped down relentlessly, its eyes clouded…
Even though these little experimentations were nothing like Kentridge’s controlled, planned ones I still liked how fast and rough these feel. Yes, you could see different angles/cropping/shadows that shouldn’t be there but, in a 0.1 second frame? it made a subtle difference, and whether that difference is a good or bad thing can be debated. After those two experimentations I decided I liked the idea of a drawing having a life of its own. And that the end product will only be the process of that drawing, and the last frame. It says something about growth, time, and control. I will definitely revisit this idea/process again.
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(at the same time I wrote a little poem thing on ideas of Monsters from the previous day, scratching it into the childlike oil pastel. I was thinking of the tone used in children’s literature again, and encouraging the reader to befriend their demons.)
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