What On Earth!?

For the past few months I’ve been working with the Scottish Dance Theatre on some animated projections for their upcoming show for kids, What On Earth!?. The project is still in production, but the lovely people at SDT have been kind enough to allow me to blog about my involvement as we continue to work away on it.

‘What on Earth is a curious nocturnal journey full of surprise encounters with strange flora and fauna - dreaming of planet Earth. This dynamic, physically adventurous, by turns spooky, funny and thought provoking roller coaster is for children from 6 - 11 but fun for all the family’

I was really excited when Janet Smith and Sally Owen (who are collaborating on the choreography for the piece) first got in touch with me about the possibility of my getting involved with the project. The prospect of having my animations projected as part of such a well respected and talented dance company was, needless to say, irresistible :)

I’ve never done anything like this before, certainly nothing on this scale, so I’ve been feeling my way along to a certain extent, and I thought the best thing to do initially would be to get invloved as early as possible in the choreography process. Sally and Janet were keen to get me into the first few rehearsal sessions, so I basically just sat and observed them to try and get a feel for what they were developing. It was really interesting to see them at work, and their process struck me as being a bit like animation, only in extreme fast forward - both practices are concerned with movement, or more specifically the control of movement, and the dancers would be constantly performing their own individual movements, refining them, subtly changing and perfecting them in front of the mirror and with each other - something I found myself strangely identifying with, despite being a clumsy, uncoordinated lump of a man. I remain very jealous of their ability to make such swift changes to their animations. It’s not fair :(

Quench

Over the next couple of weeks or so the choreography began to take shape, and the first section that seemed to emerge was based around a duck character that Sally had been developing (the piece would later be christened ‘Quench’). It was to be set in a swamp, a bottle of water would be on centre stage and the Duck would try to figure out how to pick it up. Once he did so, the swamp would drain and dry up and some strange, thirsty, wiggly creatures would slither on to harass the Duck and eventually help re-hydrate the swamp scene.

This was one of the first images I came up with.

Not really a swamp is it? But I liked the idea of the reflected flower in the water, and for some reason I was keen to use sand in some way (that’s what the textured background is). This idea developed a bit more, and I came up with the version of the swamp that you can see in the video below, which also includes a very rough outline/animatic of the whole section.

In hindsight, I think I jumped the gun slightly with this. I was a bit too eager to bring something to the table, and as a result ended up bringing something a bit bland and in the wrong aspect ratio. As with most of these things though, at least it was a starting point, and I hadn’t spent too much time on it.

I think I find it hard sometimes, when I’m actually being paid to do my own style of work, to let go of that horrible instinct to sanitise and clean up all the rough edges that you tend to have to do with normal commercial work sometimes. Sally and Janet reminded me that they were hiring me for my rough edges (which was really nice to hear actually :) so it was time to get the OHP and marker pens out!

This is a quick mock up image I did in about half an hour just to loosen up a bit. I was far more happy with this style. If it was to be animated, the different layers would all be moved quite roughly by hand under the camera and then composited in after effects, a technique I wanted to develop and refine for the new version of Quench and probably other sections of the show as well.

Once we had decided upon the aspect ratio (a decision that is perhaps more complicated and tricky than it sounds - because the show is to be toured at various venues throught the UK and Europe, the stage size will range from the fairly big to the relatively small, so we were cautious, maybe slightly overly so, about deciding on the final size and ratio of the screen. Better to be safe than sorry though) I was able to go ahead and produce Quench version 2.

So in keeping with the OHP style, I came up with this mock up and asked Sally and Janet to approve it before I went ahead with any animation.

An initial version of this background loop included some slightly over the top movement of the foreground reeds/straws, where I was blowing them in an attempt to simulate a light breeze. It didn’t work, so I just gave them some much more subtle swaying movement in after effects. The rest of the movement is all done with acetates, manipulated and filmed on an overhead projector. I’ve put together a quick shot breakdown of some of the elements which you can see below.

The transition to the dried up swamp at the end works better with the little bit of crunchy sound design I’ve done for it, which I’ll hopefully get uploaded once the rest of the section (where the ground re-hydrates) is properly finished. The music for the piece actually pauses at this point too, as we felt that the animation would need a brief bit of space for the consequences of the Duck’s actions to properly hit home :D

The timing seemed to work pretty well when Quench was performed alongside the animation at the Rep in November as part of Backstage Pass (an event that the SDT have put on the last couple of years where you get a glimpse behind the scenes at the Rep and are treated to excerpts from various shows and works in progress). It was great to see it in something approaching it’s final context, and I was pretty happy with it, apart from the slightly rushed bits at the end. I’ll post more about that once its done.