Animation Statement of intent

For my animation project I have decided to make a short music video, for the song "Imaginary" by band Evanescence.

Evanescence is one of my favorite bands and the reason why I chose this song of their's is because its one of my favorites. I also relate to this song in a personal way, as sometimes I feel like I want to sometimes get out of the real world sometimes just close my eyes and shut myself out from reality to daydream Imagine, Draw create, surround myself in my own imagination. Im sure many people can relate to this as the real world can sometime be a very horrible place.

While planning for the Animation I wanted to keep that Evanescence gothic style as well as making it dreamlike, hazey and kind of surreal. As dreams dont always make sense.

In the lyrics Amy sings "paper flowers" frequently for example in the intro she sings "awww... paper flowers" and in the chrous "In my field of paper flowers" I wanted this to be the theme running throughout my animation so I decided to create the whole thing from paper using the stop motion Animation technique.

The paper also helps with represnting the fragility of imagination and dreams. How easily dreams and imagination can be destroyed and crumpled just like paper can. The two are very delicate.

During the production process I played around with the lighting to create shadows and sillouettes, using the gels to create different colours and hues in the bacgrounds, to create the atmosphere and mood. I also played around with the focus on the camera to blur certain parts of the animation, I found this technique very effective as it added to the dreamlike quaility of the animation. I also played around with the zoom which created interesting effects.

As this is the first time of creating animation using paper cuts it was an interesting learning process through experimentation, it was quite challenging and out of my comfort zone as I am very used to creating narrative hand drawn animation, that is very figurative. This was a whole new challenge for me especially in the pre-production phase were I had to work out how to animate this. In order to animate certain scenes, such as the flower grow snd monster scene I had to create the animation frames of the sequence on animating paper then transfer onto thicker paper to cutout using a scalpel, this was a very long process and very hard on the hands. To create the 3D set I had to get two pieces of wood and create slots into them to slots the thick paper into.

Making the flowers was also a challenge I have never made flowers from paper before with layers of petals that have to open in a way that I can animate. At first I looked at Origami flowers and made a few. But the problem I had was trying to animate them. Then I came across artist Jen stark who creates beautiful paper flowers using multicoloured paper and lots of layers for the petals. I tryed to make many simpler versions which were not good at first but then I found a technique and adopted it. the flowers I made were very easy to animate as they closed and opened very easily.

Artists Yulia Brodskaya and Oded Ezer Inspired the text used in my animation. I used the paper curling technique to create the letters in the words "Paper flowers" This was very time consuming, but again another technique was learned. To create the words "Evanescence, Imaginary" near the beginning of may animation was a little simpler, I drew the letters in the Evanscence logo font in pencil then cut out only some parts of the letters, lifted up the corners of the letters the create a relief effect, rubbed out the pencil the shone the light from behind.

The Post production phaze was very time consuming and stressful at times, as I have used alot of effects such as transitions and filters it takes quite a while to render. I have tryed to layer differnt clips on one another in some parts of the animation to create interesting effects.

Creating this whole animation was a whole new learning curve and experience for me and although at times it was stressful painful and very time consuming It was worth it.

I feel my animation will target audiences of any age as I feel it reates to everyone in some way. and I do hope its done Evanescence and their song justice, just as much as I hope that the fans dont hate it.