You
may remember we had a great morning at Full Of Noises in Barrow,
recording a traditional Afghan dance for an animation. Ellie Chaney
has been working on this, and we have compiled her drawings as part
of our Reverb Sampler project video. The end product will be a
Flipbook. The dancers were the nicest bunch of lads you could hope to
meet, so thank you to Sartoor Shaman Said (photographer)
Hamidullah
Mangal,Abdul Razaq Sagan,Rahim Ullah Jabarkhail, andNoorsalam
Arabzai. Hopefully we'll see you in Barrow for the Seahouse show.
Thanks
to Linda, Pat and Pete from Furness Refgee Support for the
introduction, and Amy at Full Of Noises for the introduction.
Here
is a special post from Ellie, describing her methods...the results
are beautiful, what you see here is just a taste. And if you want to
see more of Ellie's wide ranging practice...here she
is...https://www.eleanorchaney.com/
“While
I've made lots of animations before, they have always been
stop-motion using puppets and I had very little experience making a
flipbook or a frame-by-frame cell animation.
Looking
at the video John recorded with the dancers, it became clear the
first step was to extract the still frames for the 80 pages of the
flipbook. After a bit of research it seemed like the best way to do
this was to use FFmpeg, which is able to take a small edit of the
footage I gave it, and export the frames at even intervals.
The
next step was working out what the drawings should actually look
like. This part was definitely more difficult.
I
initially tried drawing the dancers in a few different ways on
Procreate using my iPad - using loose sketchy lines, using ink tools
to look like images created with a dip pen and using charcoal tools
to try making tonal drawings...but nothing really worked.
Feeling
a bit stuck, I researched animation techniques to find a more
effective approach. I knew I really wanted to capture the sense of
movement in the dance, and I could image something that was less
linear and more tonal would create an feeling of atmosphere and
energy.
This
led me to looking at two animators - Caroline Leaf and William
Kentridge.
Caroline
Leaf is widely recognised for her innovative approaches to animation.
In
'the Owl Who Married A Goose' from 1974, Leaf used sand on using sand
on glass creating lightboxes that formed organic, tonal images full
of movement and
fluidity. https://youtu.be/FbFD-3GCnVI?si=zjADfD2TSBIqGj6Y
Whereas
in 'On The Street' from 1976 she used paint on the glass, adding
glycerine to watercolour to keep it from drying out so she could move
the paint around. https://youtu.be/Xsb29V2ecj4?si=HoF4KAC93XPeaOTx
William
Kentridge is also an award winning artist who is well-known for his
labour intensive technique of drawing onto large sheets of paper with
charcoal, then creating animations by smudging and erasing his work
before drawing the next frame on top of this. This creates animations
where images emerge from one another with visible marks of the
process. https://youtu.be/Xsb29V2ecj4?si=HoF4KAC93XPeaOTx
My
main goal with this work was to create a flipbook though, and this
project didn't have the time or budget to create something so
demanding. However looking at both artists helped me to develop a
technique I could use on the iPad to find that sense of movement I
was looking for.
The
method had to be something I could do in under 30 minutes for each
frame (because I needed to make 80!), and it also needed to be
accurate so the flipbook and animation would be true to the
choreography of the dance, and work at the end when all sense
together.
So
I ended up creating each image in four stages using Procreate on my
iPad.
Step
1 was to import the image on to a black canvas the dimensions of the
flipbook.The dancers moved across the page so I also needed to make
sure they would fit from start to finish, starting at the far edge of
the paper.”
Thanks Ellie