Ellie Chaney, Flipbook Animation

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