Sonic Visions

The Final Film – THE HAND FISH

I made this first audio with absolutely no intention of using it. It is truly awful, but I enjoyed making it because there was no pressure to make it good – I just wanted to see how Adobe Audition worked.

This is the audio that I ended up creating to give to another person.

EVALUATION OF MY NOISES

For the storyline I decided to use the prompt ‘In The Beginning’ to illustrate the first time that aliens found Earth. Hence, the first act is tense! It is a buildup of layered sounds with shooting effects and space atmosphere and whirring of engines, hopefully to create anticipation of what will happen. Then, an explosion! I wanted to have silence for a bit after this to create more contrast so that the explosion had more of an impact. To make it sound more realistic I put some explosion fx on the sound in Audition. This gave it a certain speaker-destroying quality, which I quite liked. The last section is the aliens screaming and having a brief dance party (because they have to get back to work) because the moon has just been destroyed.

I think the missile part translates well but i am very intruiged to see who gets my audio and what they are going to do with it. Mistakes I made along the way were making all the clips too loud (because I was working with my headphones turned down) and I think if i had more time, i would have recorded more sounds myself, and layered them in a more subtle way with more fades because in some sections it sounds a little choppy. But i really enjoyed making it and im excited to see the result.

^^^^ THIS IS THE AUDIO I WAS GIVEN

Initial thoughts on the sound

• I was happy with the sound that I was given, although it didn’t have many sound effects to use I thought that the atmosphere that it created was very floaty and dreamlike.
• Instead of using sound effects to create an animation to, I can choreograph the movement of a character or shapes to the flow of the music and the notes of the music that stand out to me.
• While listening to the audio, I began thinking of a white expanse and endless light. The presence of the monologue emphasised this. This is because I viewed the voice as an omnipotent presence and I was excited to think about who this could be.

THE HAND FISH

• The Hand Fish has always existed.
• Everybody has met the Hand Fish.
• The Handfish gives eye astigmatism to newborn children.
• He Holds the world in his Hands.
• The Handfish has a big nose, almost the size of his body. He uses his big nose to sniff out maternity wards.
• The Hand Fish has a severe overbite. This does not let him stop him from saying his truths. He speaks out of his nostrils.
• The Hand Fish has infinite hands that emerge from his gills.
• The Hand Fish has astigmatism. Just like me.
• The Hand Fish fell down the stairs when he was young.

• Creating an animatic as a response to the audio that I was given randomly. I collected images on a moodboard in Pinterest as I listened to the audio
• I was happy with this outcome, i think that i curated more of a feeling than a narrative, which works well with my audio.

However, despite this, I was able to do some experimental compositing in After Effects. I used the Keylight feature to create a mask of the object, removing the green screen. I also counteracted the green reflection of light with both physical and digital processes.

1. Lighting the figure with a warm light
2. Removing remaining green light from the figure with the spill suppressor and digital warm lighting in After Effects.

EXPERIMENTATION

I created this test shot of a plasticine hand moving to experiment with the use of green screen. This lead me to create a series of test shots of this ‘hand forest’. I thought it fit the strangeness of the audio, and the floatiness of it. The part of this that I found the most fun was using After Effect’s 2.5D multiplane. I was actually inspired by the Gorillaz music video Tomorrow Comes Today, because it moves PNG characters in a way that looks three dimensional.

Beginnings of making a stop motion puppet – I knew that I would be editing a lot of the video to suit the sound, so I wanted to have a character that i could record a lot of stop motion with so that I had an abundance of footage to use. I felt like using a 2d drawn character in this method would be too time-consuming. I had made a stop-motion character before on Foundation, but it was a lot smaller, less mobile and was felted. I wanted to try and make a larger, lankier model with different materials.

Process of making a stop-motion puppet

• Sculpted the head out of plasticine for a size reference
• Double-twisted three strands of armature (aluminium) wire
• Attached separate strands to create the base of the skeleton

• Skeleton hands (wire) – I made three fingers on purpose, I thought it would make him look uncanny and I didn’t want to animate more!
• Covered skeleton in plasticine
• Bucket prop: cardboard, tape, hot glue. It was covered in tape and PVA and then painted with acrylic, layered with gouache, and scratched off to create a weathered effect.

• Skeleton – milliput to create ‘bones’ – allowed for moveable joints, although hands and head are fragile.
• Was suggested to create silicone mould next time, or use liquid latex. I didn’t do this because it was expensive.
• Milliput dried in thin bones – however later on one of the hip joints broke because I was playing with it. Repaired this with milliput and double-up wire on knee joints because I thought they were too weak.

A BIG PROBLEM

I didn’t know how I would be able to make feet for the model, as I wanted them to be in shot in some scenes. So I made massive horrible feet out of plasticine, which was a bad choice. Not only were they horrible, but they were also heavy, inflexible, and unstable.

I consulted Chris about the tie-downs and he said the best possible thing to do would be to sculpt the feet out of milliput and set screw tie-downs into them. So this is what I did.

the making of mr shah

I had a lot of fun making the puppet – this was one of my favourite things to do as part of this process. I didn’t have a plan for him at all, usually when i make things i will create a plan or a character sheet, but mr, shah evolved naturally. i think this worked well for my project because the audio i was working with was very dreamlike. i didn’t want him to make much sense, which i think i succeeded in. even his name mr. shah doesn’t make sense.

He is made out of plasticine, milliput, UHU glue, tin foil (to build up body shape and make the joints sturdy) and his jorts are made out of my old socks.

Reflections

• ankles made too thick, made legs look misshapen
• needed to use drill to twist wire, did this by hand but this made the wire less secure and his back and knees ended up breaking.
• Plasticine and wire fingers ended up being problematic as his hands melted. they looked good for most shots but started decaying after a whle, which was not ideal. i would like to experiment with silicone molds for this process next time, which I am excited to try next year.

“There is something seriously wrong with this creature.”

“He makes me uncomfortable.”

“The more time I spend with him, the more he grows on me.”

“We love Mr. Shah.”

“Mr. Shah I want you.”

Why did I do this?

This is a question that i ask myself a lot, and this time i did not know the answer. Mr Shah took over my thoughts, clouding my judgement. I completely forgot about the brief at this point. What was my audio? I listened to so much Gorillaz in the the stop motion studio that i felt like i had gone insane. Prehaps this was Mr. Shah’s doing. The puppet had become the puppet master.

However i really enjoyed this process, making the puppet and the actual stop motion was probably my favourite part of this project. I loved the tactility of the stop motion, and layering this in After Effects created something unique and unsettling – I liked how the layers looked like a Punch and Judy show.

_______ EVALUATION – SONIC VISIONS _______________________________________

In the research stage, I compiled a lot of images from artists while listening to the audio that I was given. What initially worried me about the
audio that I was given was the lack of any sound effects, but I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the music because it felt floaty and dreamy. I drew a lot
of inspiration from the film Yellow Submarine, as I liked the absurd imagery and the lack of sense, especially as the visuals were created to fit the tone of the Beatles songs. I therefore decided to create a film that was less tied to the link between sound effect and visual, and more towards capturing the dreamlike tone of the audio. Compiling my artist research while listening to the audio was a good decision and meant that I could create an animated moodboard that wasn’t focused on a narrative. It started to develop into a narrative as I progressed, as I knew from the start that I wanted to make my first solo stop motion film in this project, and this led to me creating the character of the Hand Fish from my moodboard images that I had collected. My concept was the character of Mr. Shah (my stop motion puppet) fishing up a Magical bucket that, when placed on his head, caused him to see hallucinations of the strange and terrible Hand Fish. This idea developed because while I was listening to the audio, I pictured the ethereal voice to be an all-seeing deity. This is the Hand Fish speaking her truths. One concept that I was disappointed that I didn’t use was animating the movement of the fish on the multiplane, as I think that the texture could have looked interesting if I created the character as a lino print and cut out each section as a puppet. This is an idea that I would like to use in the future, but my favourite part of this process by far was making the stop motion puppet Mr. Shah. I made the armature by hand which was a learning experience, as I realised how fragile wire armatures are and I ended up having to repair his joints a lot. However, after seeking the advice of my tutors I managed to use screw tie-downs to secure the feet which was much more practical than the plasticine feet I had built before. I worked with limited storyboards, as I wanted the strange and unnerving feeling to be more important than the narrative. I think that this succeeded to an extent. Tactility in this film was very important to me, which is why I decided to use stop motion and then comp in After Effects. Learning 2.5D in Ae was very enjoyable for me, I think that the strange way in which things move (such as the segment of the film with The Hand Forest) matched my audio well, and worked with my goal of making the film feel eerie. I thoroughly enjoyed creating different textures through sewing the clothing of my character, and hand-painting the textures and lighting on top of the fabric. I was inspired by the works of Tim Burton and the film The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (1920) for this technique. I think that the stop-motion itself could have been more polished, and in the future I will draw arcs and timing charts for the movements. However, I thought that the way I let this project evolve naturally worked well, as I wanted to create a nonsensical dreamscape that didn’t have many rules. Limiting my planning and spending my time on making definitely worked well for me in this aspect. I would have liked to get into production earlier in the process, but overall I very much enjoyed the project and I am most excited to continue working in stop motion next year. Working on a film based on a feeling/aesthetic rather than narrative is definitely a concept that I will carry forward into future projects, along with the characters that I have created.