PL&TN: day 10

So, I've actually shot some animation today that will be part of the final film, it's some background material - grey windy skies, and it's taken almost 2 days to make about 15 seconds of it, although that includes repainting the skies 3 times before they looked good enough (by which I mean spontaneous enough) on long pieces of wallpaper, photographing it, and printing it out frame by frame on a bad printer, photocopying the sequence (which took 2 hours in the library as only one machine worked and I had to keep stopping to let other people use it who didn't have 300 print-outs of cloud paintings to enlarge) and then photographing it again as a final sequence.  This process is partly to do with trying to make the surface of the paper (and also therefore the screen and the layers that make up the film) feel apparent in the film; the photocopier leaves artefacts on each piece of paper that will stay in roughly one place when you film it, and it hopefully gives the illusion that the images are passing across it, or under it. 

Here are the long sky paintings - grey sky undercoat drying on our stairs:

and then clouds drawn on in chalk:

I also spent about 5 hours yesterday making a rain sequence but it wasn't good enough, so I'm going to try that again this evening while I carry on listening to Kyle read 50 Shades of Gray.

It's good to learn that by mostly following your instincts for what might work in animation a big part of the process is doing it wrong - the first clouds looked too fussy, and the rain storm didn't have enough consistency across the mark-making yet, but sometimes you can't see this until you have drawn it all and filmed it to play back.  Then the mistakes are obvious . . . 

Filming the clouds:

Is this weird? - yesterday after the rain animation failed to work very well I thought I'd go to the cinema instead and see Killer Joe.  It was the afternoon show, and when I got in there was just one other man in the whole cinema / screen, and he was singing along to a song in the advert, really confidently, and didn't stop when I came in.  Then he started to make a kind of spitting noise, like when you pull off the paper sleeve from a straw and get a bit stuck on your lip, and I thought, oh he has a bit of paper from the sleeve of his straw stuck on his lip.  But then he just kept making the same noise all through the next advert, over and over, and it was just the two of us still, and I started to prickle all over, and thought, I might be in for some trouble, and I moved along to the end of my row, not too obviously, but just enough so I could try and keep him in my peripheral vision if I sat slightly crooked, but I couldn't without turning more to look at him, and I just didn't want to make eye contact or make any movement that might make me stand out.  Then he started talking to himself, and I started to think, ugh, who talks to themselves and makes spitty noises and is able to come to see a weekday afternoon film, especially one about a trailer park murderer, and I started to just get more prickly and weird feeling as I then thought I saw him move seats too, and I just had to leave.  So I didn't see it.