User:Loes van Dorp/WhatHoWhy

´Theekeningen´ / ´wehavemetthedaylightbefore´.

This is a music video of the band `Space siren´ with the song `wehavemetthedaylightbefore´. In this video I used the structure of the music as base for the Story.

The title ´Theekeningen´ reveals already the process you will see in this video. In Dutch thee means tea, tekeningen means drawings. Combining these two you have ´theekeningen´ aka ´tea drawings´, drawings made from tea stains. You see the process of the tea-drawing from stain till puppet animation.

• The making of the stain with a tea-bag (Photo animation of real action)
• The stain evolving into a drawing of two creatures(time lapse animation)
• The creatures coming to live on paper and try to escape from it.(Drawn animation)
• Dripping into a 3D space where they reform themselves into 3D puppets.(Stop-Motion puppet animation)

A girl is involved in this story from the beginning. She made the stains and held the piece of paper were the creatures escaped from. Both the girl as the creatures are first scared of each other but overcome their fear and become friends. While walking away they turn around to stimulate other tea-drawings to escape from their paper and join them.

The idea to make this animation started with the invitation of the director of the scaled museum hall ‘ruim1op10’ (scaled 1:10) in Gouda. He asked me to make something for his miniature museum. My love for miniature worlds woke up in me again and I started to search for a way to use this space properly. For a long time I had played with the idea of making big, life-size sculptures out of my could experiment with this without having to make the big sized sculptures. This was also my change to try out puppet animation, drawn animation and how to use different techniques to make one fluid story. To make the scale more clear, I planned to let them interact with scaled pictures of me. That is where the end of the story was written. I only had to think of a beginning. Where did these creatures come from, how were they born? By showing the real story of the birth of these creatures I let people be part of the imagination process when making the tea drawings.

Observation animation

Over the years I have been writing out my thoughts and observations while traveling by train. In this animation project you hear a voiceover telling the observations while the charcoal drawings support the story. Most of the time you see exact what the voice tells you, but some moments it is not supporting the story. For example, when the voice tells you about a group of cyclist passing by, you see them passing by in the animation. But when you hear the voice over tells you there is a girl who bought a electric toothbrush, you do not see a girl with an electric toothbrush, but you see a big mouth with an electric toothbrush brushing the teeth. The told observations are about small things in the train; the shoes off a girl, drinking out of bottle, a small girl eating a banana. Combined with observation out of the window and the thought of the observator ‘It is hot’. The transitions of the subjects/scenes are either a hard cut but more often by transformations of the one object into the other. A sheep turns into a bottle, a swan into a streetlight. This is a technique which animation is known for: tranformations. The charcoal drawings are evolving/methamorphoses in the other subjects. The voice you hear is is very soft, almost whispering which gives it a very intimate atmosphere. The vulnerability of the medium charcoal adds to this.

I started the travel diary 8 years ago, when I was traveling everyday to school. During these trips I noticed that the travelling by train gave me a good opportunity to observe the fellow travelers. During traveling people are very on their own and not really noticing the world around them. As if they do not want to be there, they all escape to someplace else; In their heads, in books, or fall asleep. Maybe because it is not a place they want to be, but have to be to get to the place where they want to be. They are in between destinations, which makes them passive. I used this diary for experimenting with animation and spoken text, because this would force me to work with more realistic images and play with how the animation can enrich the spoken words and vice versa. The reason I choose for drawings is that I wanted to challenge myself by getting really involved into my core interest; drawing. The vulnerable medium charcoal fits the concept of thoughts and observations. It is very easy to whip out and reshape and together which is very useful in animation.

I set up the lights, the camera and the piece of paper in my studio and taped it all down. The paper I used was 50x70 cm. The paper gets worn out after a while because of the erasing and redrawing and erasing. In total I used circa 10 sheets of paper. To make my drawings more convincing I shot some moving images to use as references for my drawings. It took me two weeks of 6 till 8 hours a day to finish the drawing part. I went into a professional sound studio to record my own voice for the voice-over. In Final Cut pro I putted the whole together.

Portrait of an empty house

This is a stop-motion animation which takes place in an old almost empty house. To give the space an extra layer it uses a Plexiglas screen/frame (140x200 cm) to put a drawn animation on.

At first you see a garden in black and white. You see the leafs of the trees move, but in a very choppy way. Using the stop-motion technique gives this effect because there is time in between on picture and the other. A girl pushes a wooden framework with Plexiglas into the screen. The title of the work appears on the frame while the frame moves; the text stays in the same place. It is a drawing on the screen. The scenery changes to the living room of an old house. The girl pushes the frame in front of big old brown closet. On the Plexiglas objects are drawn who appear to be standing in the closet. When the frame moves towards the sofa, you see a drawing of a women sitting on the sofa on the Plexiglas. She is doing something with her hands, but stops to bend over and take a cup and drinks out of it and puts it back. The frame is pushed toward a big brown chair. A male figure is sitting on it and walks away the moment he noticed he is on the frame. There is a cut to a new scene. You see a very old kitchen from the 70 ‘s. When the frame comes in, you see someone opening the kitchen cabinet and taking something out of it. The frame moves towards the sink, where you see a women in a dress on her back. She passes a bowl to a smaller girl who is next to her. While the girl eats out of the bowl, the frame is moving more in the girls direction. The frame is than pushed out of the kitchen. That is where the animation ends. The girl pushing the frame is only actively involved with the drawing in the beginning. In the rest of it she is just passively pushing the frame around. It is a 40 second stop-motion animation without sound.

The house of my grandfather was for sale and being empty for a while and I was in search for a space to use for an animation. I wanted to do something with my memories. I first went to the empty house of my grandfather to get inspired, where I collected my own memory and that of my aunt about that house. I made a storyboard out of these memories. The Plexiglas frame was put together and used to experiment with drawing on it with different materials to find the best material ; oilpaint. Using the software of Dragon stop-motion, made it possible for me to have live view of the camera. This way I could see on a screen what the camera saw and make the drawing on the Plexiglas in the right position for the camera's point of view. I also could use the onion-skinning tool, which means that I could use the picture of the first frame as reference of the second one. During the project I had a hard time sticking to the storyboard, because the technique was very time-consuming. By performing this project on my own, made me responsible for all the different aspects of the project, which made it hard for me to focus on the whole story. After shooting the scenes I edited the first part to find out that the animation on the screen was so fast that it was inimitable. This made me remake some frames in between. With the help of the software I was able to find the right spot for the camera and the frame.

I wanted to play with different times and show different worlds in one image. I wanted to make the process of thoughts while being in a space visible.