Creating Animations

 

On our second working day in the museum, we were sent to create some stop motion animations by walking around the collections and seeing what caught our eyes, we were told this would give us a different perspective of the museum, and to be fair I was surprised by the different things that I noticed due to looking for different shapes to use within the animation. I decided to focus on circles, so started off with a basic ceramic pot, and managed to pretty much get around the whole of the natural history sections by following different types of circles. I will include a link below to watch the video on YouTube, as you watch you may notice that the circle starts off in the centre, and manages to move across to one side, I think just due to finding things that were not perfect circles I was not able to keep it in exactly the same place as I wanted. I thought this was quite a successful one but I know now how to improve it. I think I would like to use animation again more in my work, I never used to think about it, but now even if I am thinking of a textiles-based piece at the end, I could use animation to give it some movement and flow.

Watch the first animation here:

I then returned to the Clore Discovery centre where the drawers were full of objects that could be taken out and handled, including a variety of different animal skulls, including wolf, dog, cat, seal and horse just to name a few. I had a go at creating some stop motion animations where the skulls were just moving, turning, just seeing what I could do with them to give them a little storyline within the animations.

These can be seen below:

I then began to look at the drawing sheet, which instructed us to draw an object, the same one at the same angle, but starting off with a more fluid movement, then going more into  detailed line drawing. I did this using the dog skull as I liked the long fang at the front of it, something that could be linked throughout all of the 12 images to link them together. I then made these images into the stop motion video seen below:

Overall my first experiences into animations and filmmaking were successful and have not discouraged me from using the software again, I really liked the first circular one and was keen to find more things to photograph to add to the length of the video. When I reached the butterfly and had a go at making the circle grow and shrink I thought this was a really effective bit, and in hindsight would have included more of these, so I may do another video like this at some point to show improvement with the software.

Next I plan on carrying on with some sketches of the objects I wanted to portray, namely the skulls.

Moving the Museum

The first day was spent in the National Museum of Cardiff, a grand building that houses large collections of both art and science. This is somewhere that I spent a lot of time when I was younger, particularly the natural history sections of the ground floor. We began the day with a talk about the module, before embarking on the first of three tours that day, the first one for my group was the science tour.

The tour started as a walk around the evolution of the Earth, including many interesting pieces, such as an actual piece of moon rock which we were told was the most expensive thing in the whole of the museum, and that NASA has the only key to the glass box it is sealed in. We then started to see life forming, fossils that date back thousands of years, through to dinosaurs and through to our more current creatures. I think one of the scariest parts was how big bugs used to be on our earth, spiders the size of dogs and millipedes as big as an average human.

I particularly like the skulls throughout the ages, one display saw an evolution of how horses developed, starting out much smaller and different to the standard horse we are used to seeing now.

This is what I believe to be a primitive horse skull, although I do want to go back and check it. I particularly liked this object because of it’s interesting and old texture, age showing where the teeth have been blackened and the skull in general is more yellowed and cracked compared to newer ones being quite bright and white and much more solid looking in appearance.

Another room that stuck out to me was the crystals and precious stones room, I always loved this as a child as well and started my own collection from this particular museum and others that I visited.

I love the way some of them form into such interesting shapes, like squares growing out of what seems to be a rough textured surface. I also like this turquoise one that seems to be flowing out of itself, as if it was liquid rather than a solid object which I thought was really interesting.

I also loved the underwater collections, the coral was an interesting feature and preserves its colour well, it came in a variety of shapes and textures which I thought were a great source of inspiration for me. The shells were also inspirational, the insides had an iridescent glow to them which reminded me of jewellery and again the effect of looking liquid while actually being a solid object.

This was the last thing that I really took a liking too that day, the jars preserved a variety of sea creatures, something I also saw a lot of while visiting the Natural History Museum in London, this image actually gives me an idea to use labels like this within my work, to classify the skulls that I want to use within my work also.

I think the next steps is to start researching into skulls:

• Cultural Meanings and Symbolism
• Artists that have used skulls in their work
• Political uses of skulls
• Exploring cultures further that use or appreciate skulls