A project about “You are Here”, Introduction to Animation, BA(Hons)
Animation Year 1, LCC, UAL
The Assignment
You are to create a twelve ‘page’ book that is a portrait of you, as a creative, as an
individual. It is a book about you and your identity. You will capture your book (photograph, animate or film) as a final presentation, which could be from a rostrum perspective (camera pointing down to a flat horizontal surface) to make a short moving image piece (no longer than 30 seconds) with original soundtrack.
The Idea
At the very beginning of Year 1 I had the interesting task to choose six objects related to me. By the way I didn’t really see a connection between the homework given to us every week and the current assignment. But now I realize how much they, especially the one mentioned in the first sentence, have helped me to shape the idea for the book and to discover new “layers” about me.
Layers? Sound familiar? Probably not if you haven’t read my very first blog. One of the objects I said that are like a symbol of me is the object representing another well-known person, or rather a creature – Shrek.
And so this is how the idea for my book was born. A book of “layers” but not just of an onion, layers of the world. Because, as I said in another homework (the 15-second one about “Here”), I don’t want to be only one place or only one culture, I want to be a whole world, a whole universe.
So this book is an encyclopedia (a kind of gift that I wanted for every Christmas when I was a child) about a universe, my universe. I needed to map the whole space between the earth and the sky. And maybe even further. Because inside of me fires and lights are raging with desire to live, sea waves try to push every stone, to destroy even the strongest rocks until they reach their goal, the earth is trying to draw me to its stable surface, to the reality, but the air, the wind spreads my wings, demonic or angelic, who knows, and lets me fly to the dream sky.
Pages
Page one: The Prologue
Tell me who you are in 3 words. Does this sentence sound familiar to you? They ask us this in every interview, when we need to introduce ourselves, it’s everywhere, asked by everyone to everyone and for me it looks like the most difficult task. Why? Aren’t there more important questions like what is the point of living, what’s going to happen 100 years from now, how everything began etc. Yes, these are certainly important questions, because their answers will help us to understand the universe. But to accomplish the task above is at least if not harder, because the answer will help us understand another universe – the one inside of us. Because each one of us is its own universe. Or so I believe we are.
Page two: The Metro
So to accomplish the task I needed to explore my universe, to walk through it. But what does my universe look like? Is it quiet like how it is in my small hometown. No. It should not be. Because once I watched the big metropolitan city from above I saw a creature, a living creature, with veins – the busy roads full of cars and busses and trams and their lights and the million glowing windows interflowed and made the blood. I heard the creature’s voice – the people in the nearest market, the traffic jams, the protests. I felt the life inside the creature while traveling in the metro, watching the busy people, hurrying for work, looking at their watches, and I realize the time was ticking here in the big city, not like in my town. Here you cannot stay in one place, you need to move, you need to hurry, you need to live and I wanted to live. So I know I cannot be a small and quiet town, no, I am a metropolitan city.
Note: This page was strongly inspired by my trip to Istanbul and my life here, in London.
Page three and four: The sea
But I am not only a “garden of concrete”. I am the nature, I am a sea, I am the water. I have a purpose, I have ambitions and just like the water finds the secret paths no one else has thought about – the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box, I will find my own way through every problem and I will reach my goals.
Note: This page symbolizes my ambitions, because one of the first things people say about me when they meet me is that I am an ambitious person.
Page five: The flying balloon
I am the air, I am not afraid of aiming high, I am not afraid of flying with my balloon desiring to reach the clouds. I am not afraid of my choices nor am I afraid to follow my dreams despite people not liking them.
Note: Here I present my stubbornness. I said on my second homework that Hiro Mashima (the creator of my favorite manga “Fairy Tail”) was and still is like a role model to me as an artist and he made me see animations not only as a part of my life, but as my life. But people around me didn’t like this kind of life for me.
Page six: The space
But let’s see all these places from afar. Galaxies full of burning suns of anger and passion, born and dying everyday swallowing the small planets who try to suppress the fire because they are persistent, stubborn, with their cores of strength. And the black holes – dark and mysterious, sometimes scary, sometimes curious. And let’s not forget the nebulas who give their light for the creation of new suns, to protect the galaxies from the darkness, because…because of love but at the end the galaxy’s black hole will steal all of the light for itself because of selfishness. Galaxies, black holes, nebulas – we are all that. A universe.
Note: On this page I wanted you to realize that the human being is everything and everything can be a part of the human being. We are not just good or bad, we are not just beautiful or ugly. We have so many layers and so many components. We are the ones between angels and demons. We are angels AND demons. We are humans.
Page seven: The writer
This anger, violence, fear, naivety, cruelty, selfishness are the core of my poems, which aim to reveal the demons hiding in our souls.
Page eight: The artist
But something else is hiding there too – passion, persistency, stubbornness, strength, curiosity, freedom, empathy, love, an angel. Yes, we are angels too and they inspire me to draw, to draw the beauty of the humans.
Page ninth and ten: The puzzle
Where am I, who am I? Am I a city, a sea, a sky, a universe, a demon or an angel? Or maybe a ticket, a snorkel, a boat, a rope, a spacesuit, scissors, a feather, a tear or an arrow? Or am I just all of them? Separately they are useless objects, places, stories, pain and happiness, but together they are a personality. A personality of a writer, of an artist, of a human. And here I am now, standing in front of you, showing you who I am in three words, but I am here not because of you, but because of someone else, and my last words are about him…
Page eleven and twelve: The epilogue
To the author of this book
I am writing to you, my friend. To explore the world, I will never be done You will ask, who am I? A person who doesn’t stop dreaming, I am a one. I have and will always bother you. How my principles and stubbornness didn’t give you a heart attack! But no matter what don’t stop going forward. Walk slowly, but never walk back. Don’t dream about the sky. For when you fall it will hurt. But I never listen to myself. Fall, but always rise up from the dirt. The old wounds still hurt sometimes, but move on, forgive, although the past’s lessons never forget, continue with them to live. I am writing to myself, to you, my past, present, future, my whole. I am writing for myself, for you, for the life from mine to your soul. It belongs partly to an angel, but a demon is your other half. You are who you are, never forget yourself to respect and love. Now I just need to thank the person whose happiness and pain, as my biggest inspiration, I took. Thank you myself, thanks to the author of this book.
Techniques
In this project I had the opportunity to work with variety of techniques. Obviously this is a pop-up book so I used different folds to achieve the desirable 3D look. Another technique was sewing – by hand in page five for the valleys and with a machine in page seven (the embroidered flowers that attached the zip to the paper). I soaked a cardboard in water and I model the moon surface for page six, which is the last technique that I am presenting to you.
Sound
At the beginning I planned to put only natural sounds connected to the theme of the pages but to my surprise I found a person who is studying song writing so he helped me to compose a melody for the soundtrack.
Link for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie2py4uahI0&feature=youtu.be
To the previous Topic: