The idea for this representation documentary actually came from an idea I had for my experimental animation. I was looking at swimming pools and saunas and I wanted to see if I could animate live action footage of people in the sauna melting like cheese. I took some reference footage of cheese melting and I also experimented during 10x10 with making one of the statues from ECA melt.
Another 10x10 project:
I experimented during 10x10 with the animation technique I was thinking of using in my documentary. I'd done several tests with mike, trying to make things melt in real time and such. So I got the idea to try to make someone grow older as they were speaking to you. As this was a 10x 10 project I had to make this in a few hours but I quite liked the results and decided to pursue this idea.
The projection Idea:
To make this a documentary I needed to include people's opinions on the representation of older women. I have also been interested in the relationship between animation and performance. I wanted the interviewees to be recorded live as they speak, so that their response is more genuine and doesn't look overly edited. As an experiment I tried projecting the animation of Gisela's face growing older onto her own face as she is being asked questions.
After animating onto Gisela's face I realised that the person it was projected onto wasn't necessary for the "performance". I could project onto still objects which would animate the object bringing it to life, and experiencing the object as a performance. the Idea was to interview people about what they thought of older women’s representation and what they would do in their old age and project these faces onto run down objects, to give the conversation a double meaning.
However I don’t have a projector or the skills to projection map so this idea fell through when social distancing and lockdown happened. Instead I decided to take some of the experimental footage of projection of faces and interview footage and play around with after effects to improve my skills.
The experimental footage of projecting Gisela’s face onto her own face had a strange 3D video game effect to it, which I decided to develop further. I thought going ’Into the screen’ and illustrating Gisela's view of herself in the future as this digital futuristic version of herself. But I also thought this way of illustrating her was interesting because the representation of older women 'in the television' is more surreal and fake compared to the women in the real world. So visually, it would be interesting and in technique it would improve my after effects skills which are poor.
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