EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition, my Zine pages

My 5 pages for the zine are complete. They each loosely correspond to a section or a couple of sections from the book. Brenda is also making a 4 images, one of which is a double page spread.

YCN - Action on Hearing Loss

I submitted my YCN videos today. Overall I am pleased, although I think the concept is stronger than my outcome, and definitely could have been expanded upon. Partly this is because I had other projects on the go at the same time and didn't allow myself much time to work on it.

Ideally I would have extended the concept into a series of posters as well, as I think that the slogan 'real life doesn't have subtitles' has a lot of scope.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss from Tom Hallgarten on Vimeo.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss

The three subjects I have chosen to animate are a telephone, a train and a canon. I think they show a good range of something most people only see on television (a canon), something commonly seen (a train), and something completely mundane and everyday which you take for granted (the telephone).

The range shows how the series could be expanded upon into a longer series of videos or poster campaigns.

The videos have a bold aesthetic, using the Action On Hearing Loss brand colours.

Sisyphus completed

A Sisyphean Struggle from Tom Hallgarten on Vimeo.

My film is complete and submitted to Loop De Loop!

Sisyphus

My Sisyphus animation is done. It was by far the fiddliest animation I think I have ever made, as the character puppet was made up of 14 separate bits of paper!!

Annoyingly I forgot to put a black background down before I began animating. In the real Greek pottery the characters are either black with orange lines or orange with black lines, but they are always in contrast to the background colour. Because I forgot to put some black paper down before I animated it, Sisyphus is now the same colour as the background. I tried to rotobrush the background out in After Effects but it was too frustrating.

On Monday my friend is going to record some grunting sounds for me.

YCN - Action On Hearing Loss

My concept for the hearing loss brief is a very simple one, but it can be expanded across many iterations, and is ideal for a social media campaign.

A series of short videos show loud things happening; e.g a train or an ambulance rushing past, a rock concert, or fans at a football match. The video will be silent, and have a subtitle explaining the sound in the style of the audio description subtitles on TV, which are very direct and simple "loud train noises" or "crowd cheering". Then the tagline at the end of the video will be 'Real life doesn't have subtitles'

EXTENDED - The Atrocity Exhibition, MUSIC

I have been speaking with one of the students from LCOM about doing some music/sound design for the project. He initially seemed keen but cancelled our first meeting because of illness and hasn't been in contact since.

The logistical issues we face with getting somebody else to score the film are these;

1. We haven't even decided our animation workflow yet! We probably won't end up with a standard animatic to give him, as the film is going to be structured by 'themes' rather than scenes and won't necessarily have a traditional arc.
2. We will probably end up doing quite an intense back-and-forth workflow with the composer as we might end up animating to the sound just as much as they compose to the video....
3. We want to feel that the person doing our sound is familiar with the ideas and concepts in the book, but we obviously can't force anyone to read the original text.

If it comes down to it I am happy to make a stab at the sound myself, and Brenda is also up for doing some field recording, gathering audio-assets etc. Realistically this would solve all three major issues in one go, so apart from the fact that neither of us have very much sound experience, it does seem like the ideal solution.

Loop De Loop - Myth

February's theme for LoopDeLoop is 'Myth'

My initial thoughts jumed straight to the Greek myths that I used to read as a kid, and I thought about picking one or more of Heracles' 12 labours. The drawing style used on ancient Greek pottery is very distinctive, and actually quite cartoony, so I settled on that for a style.

As I was doodling Heracles and some of the monsters he fought I looked up and saw Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus on my bookshelf, and remembered the story of King Sisyphus who pissed off Zeus and was sent to the cruel punishment section of hell, cursed to roll a boulder up a hill forever. The story seemed a perfect fit, as just when Sisyphus gets to the top of the hill his boulder inevitably rolls down, thereby looping infinitely!

I would like to revisit using cutout animation.