Project 4 - Scratch Animation

Scratch Animation - CLICK HERE

With the departure of Tony from our lectures, came Rozzi to broaden our horizon, with a brand new set of challenges for us to conquer. The third project was to create a line animation drawn straight onto film. Unfortunately the Tuesday on which the class began to look at this kind of technique, and set the project, I was away in Cardiff accepting the Best CAD/CAM work award for my A Level D&T work, from a Carwyn Jones, who's the prime minister of wales or something...I'm not a man for politics. Due to this I came in the next week not knowing about the project and having to create and draw on a piece of film with another student who'd been absent.

To improve our historical understanding of this technique, we learned about Len Lye, who created the first direct film shown to a general audience, aswell as his second. We also observed Norman McLaren's work, who created Hen Hop and Blinkity Blank. By today, this technique is rarely seen in, but still around, for example Steven Woloshen still uses this technique.

We listened to Rozzi's advice on what we should draw onto the film, and we agreed to make lines and shapes in various colours, as well as making them change size and shape. We didn't really think of a plot, just to draw lines, sguiggles , marks and shapes to flash on the screen in bright, contrasting colours to draw the viewers away to it. I also drew some more complicated images onto the film, such as a dragons head for example, unfortunately I did not stretch the image out, and so the design was only on 2 frames, and were only on screen for a less than half of a second, and easy to miss. Which is unfortunate, but from this I learned what I'd need to do in order to make more complicated images.

Once we had finished the film, we connected our individual film reels together to form one 2 minute long line animation, which we showed on an old film projector the film school had. Initially the projector slightly scared all of us (Since it looked like an antique and about to break at any moment). But Rozzi demonstrated how to load the film reel in, and how to operate it. It was an interesting and curious process to use, which I'm happy we did.

But I do not believe this particular project had any great benefit to 'honing' in on my favorite animating technique, but it was an excellent opportunity too see what it was like to work on an animation back in the 20th century, and gave us all a feeling of going back in time, especially when the projector was turned on, and you heard the flickering of the film reel and the gears within grinding.