A Summary/Evaluation of 'A Splash of Colour'

Due to a number of personal, and technical, difficulties over the course of this project, much of my work remains incomplete, and a large volume of my research has not received proper written justification. As such, I felt it necessary to compose a piece detailing what I intended to do, and also what I did do, but not to a complete, or presentable standard.

The first task revolved around researching the history of animation, and learning the history of our craft, in order to give us a greater depth of appreciation for how it came to be, and how far we have developed over time. This is where I first started to fall behind, as I found myself effectively doing too much research. Rather than just giving a vague outline of a few historic animation techniques, and crediting the people that invented them, I started looking into things in too much depth, and learning about the personal lives of some of the key figures.

The second part of this task required us to talk about our favourite 2D animations, which again set me off searching through my childhood, and all of the 2D animations that I have watched through out my life, weighing up the merits of each one individually, so as to find a selection that I could truly call favourites. In the end, I suppose I ended up just resorting to my default, and answering 'favourite film' questions based on nostalgia, and the films I had the most affinity with as a child (I still maintain to this day, that my favourite films include The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Emperor's New Groove, and Monster's Inc.)

The third research based task revolved around Foley sound, and again, I got so caught up in exploring the world of sound design within film, that I neglected to do much actual summarising of my research. Whilst it is true that most sound is non-diegetic, and added in post-production, no matter what film you watch - some of the best films to analyse in terms of sound design, are of the Sci-Fi genre. Pixar's Wall-E is often cited as one of the best films of all time for sound, and there are a ton of videos online, discussing the sound within this film. Here, Ben Burtt talks about the sound design in Wall-E, and here are a selection of videos demonstrating how he actually produced these sounds.

In addition to this research, I curated a playlist of YouTube videos from creators that inspire me, that fit in with our theme of 'A Splash of Colour.' Throughout (and possibly partially as a result of) this project, I have been feeling extremely inspired, and have been consuming a lot of content, and devising a vast number of ideas as to how I could improve, and develop my own style (as advised in this video). As such, I also curated a second, more personal playlist, featuring videos that inspired me, or spoke to me on a more emotional level.

Other ideas I had for this project included creating my own optical toys (for example a Thaumatrope), and creating a video about it; compiling a video diary of the creative process; and editing a selection of photos that delineated a visual representation of the theme. 


I do, however, have a few hundred photos that I've taken throughout the brief (all of which are unedited), and here are a selection of the best ones.