Working with you

One day left before the final show!

So how did we get here?

We started the work almost one month ago thinking about the most basic principles of animation and film. 

Mmh... what is special about animation? Why animation?

I use animation in my work because it is a bit like magic...

Making animation is, in a way, the inverse process of making a movie, when you have an actual movement in 'the real world' and the camera records it as a series of still images. When doing animation, you record these still images one by one and then put them together. When you play them back, they're both the same: 24 images per second, one after the other, playing so fast that our brain creates the illusion of them being one continuous image in movement. Now, this is magic!

So, in our introduction to animation (and to my work), we had to talk about Méliès, a French stage magician, friend with the Lumière Brothers (inventors of the cinematograph), who saw the immense potential of their recently invented 'motion picture projector' to implement his shows. And so he started cutting and pasting film (literally, with scissors and tape), 'montaging' and hand colouring picture by picture to create the most impressive magic tricks ever seen. 

And, talking about beginnings, we also talked about the Lumières. Or, more precisely, about the audience of their first screenings (the first ever cinema screenings), when people ran away from the screen where a train was arriving to the station and gentlemen lift their hats to salute the projected images of ladies walking on the street. Now, how amazing it would be if we could recreate that powerful physical response in an audience these days, when we're all so used to screens and we know no train could ever escape from one of them... (or could it?).

In a bit of a time jump we went to talk about Jean Luc Goddard's films, about what the audience expects from a film, what a film expects from us and about how to play with these cinematic conventions.

Because we had to make our animations for a live performance context, to be played on a stage, we also looked at the use of projections in performance by Forkbeard Fantasy.

So, after this introduction came a lot of hard work from all the students. First challenge, I think, was the team organization, more than the film making itself... Sharing tasks, organizing roles and communicating with each other is not always an easy job, but necessary for film making and I think the achievement of these abilities has been the biggest success of the project. And I hope you find this as useful (or more) than all those technical skills you've learnt with amazing facility and the exceptional creativity and artistic talent proved by you all. 

Guys, well done! Amazingly done!

I can't wait till tomorrow!