WoE!? - Signing Birds

This is a short piece of animation used as surtitles for the sign language section of What On Earth!?

It was a tricky one, this, and I’m still not entirely sure it’s going to work in combination with the dancers. I went with the OHP style as it felt like a good fit, and a good way to keep the images simple and direct and fluid. But it’s possible that it still might draw too much attention away from the signing dancers. We might get around this by playing with the positioning of the projection - perhaps if it’s filling the screen behind the dancers, almost silhouetting them maybe, you’ll be able to take in both elements at the same time. We’ll be looking into this soon when we get in to rehearse at the Rep.

I still love doing this style of animation though - the best way to do it, I’ve discovered, is to basically make it look rubbish while you’re drawing the acetates, film all the basic movements on the OHP, and then try and salvage it in After Effects, adding elements to try and improve the shoddy work you did earlier. You’ll never get it to look good, but it looks deliberately bad, at least :)