How To Make Your Animations Weird.
Uuuuhhh… my head… I knew I shouldn’t have drunk all that chocolate milk….
Wait….
Where am I? This isn’t my blog…
What’s with this colour scheme? Throw a splash of red and pink in here and you’re on the set of The Grand Budapest Hotel…
Wait, I remember now. Reece wanted to do a blog swap. I was meant to come up with something wasn’t I? Oh dear… Alright Red’s get it together; you can come up with something I’m sure.
Hi everyone! As I’m sure you’re aware, I’m not Reece Morgado; my hair isn’t long enough. My name is Redmond Beer and I’m a CG animator who is currently studying with Reece at university. Much of my work is CG character lip sync, but today I won’t be talking about that. Instead, I want to talk about experimental animation and how you can go about making your animations weirder!
As a preface, Reece and I were on the same module called ‘Experimental Animation’ and both put a lot of effort into it in our second year. But what does ‘experimental animation’ actually mean? It is a form of animation that usually has little to no structure, character, or narrative. This doesn’t leave you with a lot, but it allows you to explore the abstract and surreal side of animation.
How do you start creating an experimental animation then? Well usually I like working from a brief. This brief can be anything from basing your animation around a theme or word, to working with a specific material.
For example, one of my experimental animation involved working from the theme of using illicit substances and working with ink on paper. You can see the results here:
It is important to listen to your brief, however, remember that the idea is that you want to make the animation weird. Therefore, I took the brief ‘ink on paper’ and thought about ways of making that weird. You know what does have ink on paper? Books.
Reece is also very good at using his materials to the fullest extent. When given the task of working with literal film reel, Reece took that as an opportunity to create a music video… and I have to say that it is a bop:
https://todola.media/animation/2020/workermusicvideo
When you’re working with the abstract, you can really use it as an opportunity to express yourself as well. Don’t be afraid to include yourself in the animation in some way or another. I find this form of art can be a cathartic way of expressing something that cannot be said in words. When I worked with manipulating images, I used myself in the actual images, which did get me some strange looks when I filmed it in a public park…
I hope you’ve found this useful and perhaps inspired you to create some experimental animations of your own. Remember that you can’t know if you’ll enjoy it until you try it!
The Biweekly Recommendation
As Reece usually ends his blogs with a recommendation of an animated short, and I will follow suit! One of my favourite animations of all time is an animated music video called Moses. It follows an adorable tap dancing ghost who is happy to have feet again! I highly recommend you check it out.
義足のMoses by ががめ
A big thanks to Reece for letting me post a blog on his website and if you want to read Reece’s blog on my website you can view it here: redmondbeeranimation.com/post/learning-graphic-design
If you want to keep up with my work, you can follow me on twitter: @Redmond_Beer