Live Project Portfolio [TheSmilingBoy - LoopdeLoop] WIP

    As I am interested in visual music animation, this pitched brief by LoopdeLoop will be significantly beneficial to my practice. For this LoopdeLoop brief, we are to create an animated loop for a piece of music produced by Neil, Sean Haely and Farhad Bendash to bring attention to the refugee protest in Australia. 

    Farhad Bendash is a Kurdish asylum seeker who resides in Australia since 2013. Asylum seekers are people whom have fled their home country due to war or other harming factors that may directly affect them or their family. Thereby applying for 'asylum', which is international protection provided by the country they currently reside in. His inspiration originates from a photograph of Kurdish people waiting in line to be buried alive in northern Iraq as Saddam Hussein, the fifth President of Iraq, attempted to wipe out their population in the late eighties. 

    The song entails human resilience in the face of hardships, a personal statement for Farhad, Kurdish people and all the asylum seekers that are locked away in various locations on and offshore by the Australia government. 

    After understanding the brief and the purpose of this project, I looked into the specifications of this brief.


Deadline: 11:30pm November 15th [https://www.loopdeloop.org/theme/]

There were four options given to help guide the direction of the animated loop. Self interoperation, rotoscoping the chorus depicting Farhad singing via given resources, protester loop to illustrate mass protest, and Smiling Boy scene which will be a series of atmospheric shots capturing the scene of the photo of The Smiling Boy.

In the end, I decided to choose self interpretation as my option...
Self Interpretation: Create a looping animation which responds to the theme [human resilience, brink of hope in the face of suffering etc.] Listen to the song and work through research materials provided by Farhad.

After reviewing materials provided by Farhad, the general sense of the theme that I interpreted were abstract depictions of hopelessness, death, sorrow and the eerie sense of unknown. 

I then proceeded to listen to the song produced to get a sense of the tone and mood. With it's progressive sequence of storytelling, from a sorrow and lost sense in the instrumental from the Intro, to a progressive unison of resilience and strength from the Chorus, I can depict either the sorrow aspect in the beginning or the gathered unison which progresses over the song. 

With the sources provided and have listened to the song, I decided to work on the introduction of the song which marks from 0:00 to 0:40. [At least 12-20 seconds]

Creating the Mood-board

 

Listening to the introduction a few times, I created this mood board which visually depicts what I what to portray in the animated loop. Along with Farhad's art works in the provided documents, I used that as an inspiration and guidance. 

Ideas [Man features: Crow, Boy, Cage, Desolate Land. Smoke, Chains. Wings]

- Sync the animation beginning [start with whistling] but the difficult aspect is how I am going to loop that scene back

- Abstract loop depicting a sequence of 1) Boy whistling, 2) Eye of crow, 3) Crow flies away, 4) Crow drops seed in desolate land, 5) Seed grows into a dead tree forming a cage, 6) Cage sprouts a boy, 7) Zoom into boy whistling

Wanting to include the imagery of a smiling boy to capture the main theme of this competition, I changed the second idea sequence to a more simpler one. 1) Boy Whistling, 2) Crow calls, 3) Cage, 4) Boy Smiling, 5) Boy Whistling. 

Trying out an abstract approach, I did a head-on technique and I drew the frames as I continued. 

After I finished the line work, I was thinking about colour and I decided to do a light finish on colour on each frame.

TheSmilingBoy LoopdeLoop Final

Proof of Submission via Email