I've been busy growing up

It's been a while since my last update. That doesn't mean I haven't been reading stuff though. Or working on things. Other things. I have nailed down what my animation is about. I'm doing a short animation about Orson Welles and his relationship with his daughter, Christopher (yes he named his daughter Christopher, yes she's sane, yes she's married with kids, and yes she writes "BrainQuest", a series of educational games for........children). It's partly based on the autobiography Christopher Welles Feder wrote about her relationship with her infamous father (In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles ). I say partly because it was impossible to find that book in Lebanon; I'm still trying to laugh that off. What does that have to do with fakery? Well, Orson Welles was an actor/director/magician, all of which are related to faking stuff. Not convincing? Christopher's relationship with her father was a shell of what it was supposed to be, it was...fake. Still not convincing? A movie by itself is fake, because it shows actors faking emotion, on fake sets, with fake props.

In other more visual news, here's what we (Paola, Mirella, Dany and I) came up with for the rotoscoping project we've been working on. Yes it's a fight scene. Yes that's me in red latex. Yes it's awesome.

Codex Seraphinianus

A friend of mine introduced me to the Codex Seraphinianus just for the epic-ness of it and I thought that it completely embodied the whole fakery theme.
The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. It is some sort of encyclopedia for an extraterrestrial planet that he created. It features different kinds of creatures, plants and objects, all illustrated and explained in that world's own language which to this day remains indecipherable.
If creating an whole encyclopedia for a made-up planet in an indecipherable language doesn't scream fakery, I don't know what does.

rawr!

So, by now I've come to realize the huge amount of research I'm supposed to be doing. Yeah, instead of doing that today, I made this. Then again, it is a fake Godzilla attacking Old Beirut. *adds it to sketch folder*.

Chicken Hypnosis

You could easily hypnotize a chicken by holding its head to the ground and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at its beak and extending straight outward in front of it. That's what I learned today from research.

In fakery-related research, here are the major themes I could be working with:

-Anthropomorphism: when human characteristics are given to animals and/or non-human objects
-Acting, stage, set, make-up, theater, movies, and all that universe
-Magic
-Myths
-Science-fiction
-Faking death
-Dreams and hallucinations

That's what I narrowed things down to for now.

I Heart Stefan Nadelman

Ramona Falls "I Say Fever" from Barsuk Records on Vimeo.

Amazing music video for the single I Say Fever by Ramona Falls. Similar to Metropia, it makes heavy use of photo-manipulation as an animation technique. Great Stuff. Directed and Animated by Stefan Nadelman.

Verdict

Fakery.

After researching the 3 remaining briefs (post elimination of the first 2), I decided to work on Fakery, mostly because it is very broad, allowing room for experimentation and any kind of end-product.

Fakery: canard, cover-up, deceit, deception, dishonesty, dissimulation, distortion, equivocation, erroneousness, error, fable, fabrication, fallaciousness, fallacy, falseness, falsity, feigning, fib, fibbery, fiction, figment, fraud, half truth, hogwash, line, mendacity, misstatement, perjury, pretense, prevarication, sham, story, tale, untruism, untruth, untruthfulness, whopper, yarn, charade, disguise, fairy tale, fantasy, imagination, pageant, playacting, make-believe, mask, gag, guise, shtick, burlesque, phoniness, pseudo, spoof.

Metropia

Poster of the movie Metropia

Still from the movie Metropia

Still from the movie Metropia

Still from the movie Metropia

Metropia Trailer from Atmo on Vimeo.

I watched, a while a go, the amazing movie that is Metropia by Egyptian-Swedish director Tarik Saleh. It's an animation movie based on tweaking and altering actual photographs to create the movement. Something really fascinating. I think I am going to be heavily influenced by it when it comes to the end product of the ISTD brief.