Wub Wub
This was done for my junior project studying animation at RISD. It is one of many animations that take an interest in sound, a theme that persists in my work to this day.
The project began with inspiration from three somewhat embarrassing interests: Dubstep, animating fantastic deformations of bodies, and modern hip-hop based dance styles. I watched countless Youtube videos of people popping, tutting, strutting, sliding and gliding all over the place, and became enchanted with the concepts being employed. It was immediately apparent to me that these dancers were deliberately manipulating their bodies in accordance with certain principles of animation that allowed them to pull off such "illusions" as walking in place, sliding and floating on solid ground, and even being "animated" at a low, choppy frame rate. Further research confirmed my suspicions, as certain dance moves were espoused to be modeled after the movements of classic Ray Harryhausen stop-motion puppets. With my undertaking, animation and dance had come full circle.
I set out to create a visualization to a soundtrack, so for the ease of workflow, I decided to animate directly in Flash. The visuals were largely unscripted, being animated straight through. The structure that emerged was one that I felt followed the soundtrack, of a slow escalation to the climax with a final return to the start to seal the deal.
I still derive an embarrassing amount of gratification for coming up with the perspective shifts and deformations at 1:01.
This was done for my junior project studying animation at RISD. It is one of many animations that take an interest in sound, a theme that persists in my work to this day.
The project began with inspiration from three somewhat embarrassing interests: Dubstep, animating fantastic deformations of bodies, and modern hip-hop based dance styles. I watched countless Youtube videos of people popping, tutting, strutting, sliding and gliding all over the place, and became enchanted with the concepts being employed. It was immediately apparent to me that these dancers were deliberately manipulating their bodies in accordance with certain principles of animation that allowed them to pull off such "illusions" as walking in place, sliding and floating on solid ground, and even being "animated" at a low, choppy frame rate. Further research confirmed my suspicions, as certain dance moves were espoused to be modeled after the movements of classic Ray Harryhausen stop-motion puppets. With my undertaking, animation and dance had come full circle.
I set out to create a visualization to a soundtrack, so for the ease of workflow, I decided to animate directly in Flash. The visuals were largely unscripted, being animated straight through. The structure that emerged was one that I felt followed the soundtrack, of a slow escalation to the climax with a final return to the start to seal the deal.
I still derive an embarrassing amount of gratification for coming up with the perspective shifts and deformations at 1:01.
