WoE!? - Duck's Dream

From quite early on in this project I was aware that there was going to be a fairly hefty chunk of animation that I’d have to tackle at some point. It came in the form of a dream, Duck’s Dream, set to the Beatles’ track ‘Because’, and I struggled with it a bit, as usual. Here it is in it’s final form, before I go on to moan about it…

I say final form, but there is a key element to the whole thing missing at the moment, as with all the other animations for this project that I’ve talked about here so far - the dancer(s)! This piece, more so than the others, doesn’t really work or make much sense without the performances of Joan Clevillé or Solène Weinachter (each playing Duck in the two casts of WoE!?) making the link between themselves and the animation. In the final performance Duck anticipates the pylon rushing towards him, looks down with a big grin on his face when he first takes off, and is heartbreakingly sad at the end as he realises he’s stuck in the dirty, oily water as all his mates fly away above him.

Joan performed it in front of the projection for me the other night in the studio, and he, Solène and Sally have adapted the choreography from the initial version I was working with to make it work beautifully with the animation - I can’t wait to see the final thing in the Rep!

My initial idea for the look of Duck’s Dream was a bit more experimental than it ended up being, and I spent quite a bit of time (possibly too much) trying to make it work. I really wanted to try and push it to make it look a bit different, so I eventually came up with this projection mapping idea, with 200-odd little trees for Mr Duck to fly over…

It took me two or three days to get from the sketch above to the image below, but it didn’t really work as I’d hoped. The idea was to treat the trees as a 3D background that I could animate with the projector to create the illusion that the ground was passing below, in combination with some hand held camera movements between the trees and the vertical projection screen behind them, and some After Effects compositing. There were a few problems that cropped up though…

You can’t really see it in any of the images I took, but the tripod holding the projector up just took up too much space in my already cramped living room/studio, so I couldn’t really get the best camera angles or movements without getting in the way of the projection. The nature of the triangle set up meant if I wanted it to look like the trees were scrolling from top to bottom (which I did), the movement had to be very stop/start, unless they were moving every one or two frames which would’ve been too fast for the nature of the piece. This staccato movement also doesn’t combine very well with the smooth movements inherent in any computer based compositing or animation, as you can see in the horrible looking tests below.

Of course, there are work arounds to these problems, but it was getting to the point where I had to make a decision as to whether to carry on with this and try to make it work (and possibly waste more time), or just cut my losses and go with a more traditional / conventional approach.

I decided on the latter, obviously, and looking back I think I made the right decision for the piece - the slow, controlled movements and compositions that you’re able to produce in After Effects are a much better fit with the music and choreography than the projection idea or the rougher style I’ve been adopting for other parts of the project would’ve been.

I’ll maybe go into more detail about the final version of the dream at some point.