Making the Sting From Start to Finish
These were my initial storyboards. The very first ones I did. Looking back at this, its apparent that I was planning on making a full blown animation in 15 seconds. Which is pretty ridiculous considering I had no idea how to do this at that point. The more we talked about it and researched, I started to understand the concept of a moving image rather than an animation, but more on that later. I wanted to make a sting on either a small passage I really loved from the book, ‘The hearing trumpet’, or focusing on the hybrid themes that Carrington often uses in her novels and her work. Looking back now, these were far too complex for my current skill set, and for the duration in which it had to be.
Moving on from the initial storyboards, I started to think about the moving image rather than the animation. I kept the hybrid theme at this point, and tried to think of certain elements that could move without too much difficulty. For some reason, I thought I could do this in a portrait format, but when I came to putting it in after effects, I realised that the format for the sting was landscape. In the future, this isn’t a mistake I will make again.
Because my drawing was portrait, I had to change the whole aesthetic of the sting, because as you can see here, it didn't’t look quite right. There was too much empty space. At this point, it wasn’t too much of a problem because it was just a mock up, and I knew I had plenty of time to change it. I wasn’t happy with the colours or any of the movements, so I knew I had quite a bit of work to do in order to make it work.
I changed the composition almost completely, subtracting the female wolf and adding other characters. I spent hours and hours on this, trying to separate the layers and work out what would move and how. I n the end, the layers got the better of me, and so I decided to take a break from the sting, and focus my attention on my prints, and hoped that something would spark from that.
Luckily it did. I knew that the sting had to resemble my prints in some way, so once id finished my screen prints I decided to take a character from one of them and animate it. This way, it would work as a collection much better, and by this time I understood what was manageable and what definitely was not.
For added reassurance that this could work, I made a mock-‐up using split pins. It also helped me to understand which parts to draw separately.
I made two versions of the final sting, the later being the new and improved version of this one. I struggled with the movements looking fluid in this one, and the arms came completely away from the body at certain points, and I didn't know how to avoid this. In the end I re did the whole thing, just to make it all look a bit smoother. To better the problem with the arms, I ended up making the character a filled shape on Photoshop rather than having him transparent. To improve the fluidity of the letters coming into shot, I worked backwards with all of the position key frames turned on at the same time, so that I knew where each would come in and at what time they would all end up aligned.
After a rough start with my sting, I eventually produced something I'm really happy with. It works perfectly along side my screen prints, which was my main intent, and its also as strange as I had hoped. In the future I will learn not to over complicate everything I do, as sometimes the simplest of ideas works the best. I would like to continue to research the surrealism themes in the future, as I have thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.