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

When I was traveling everyday to school, I started a travel diary. 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 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 this animation project to experiment with animation and spoken text. Using this diary forced me to work with more realistic images and allowed me to play with how the animation can enrich the spoken words and vice versa.

The observations I used for this project are about small things in the train; the shoes off a girl, drinking out of a bottle, a small girl eating a banana. Combined with observation out of the window and the thoughts of the observer (‘It is hot’).

A voiceover is telling the observations while the charcoal drawings support the story. The transitions of the subjects/scenes are either a hard cut or more often by transforming the one object into the other. A sheep turns into a bottle, a swan into a streetlight. The charcoal drawings are evolving/metamorphosing into other subjects. The voice you hear is very gentle, almost whispering which gives it a very intimate atmosphere. The vulnerability of the medium charcoal adds to this.

The reason I choose for drawings is that I wanted to challenge myself by getting really involved into drawing. The vulnerable medium charcoal fits the concept of thoughts and observations.

Portrait of an empty house

This is a stop-motion animation which takes place in an old almost empty house. The space is given an extra layer by using a Plexiglas screen (+/- 140x200 cm) to put a drawn animation upon using oil paint. It is a 40 second stop-motion animation without sound. You see a girl pushing the Plexiglas screen around in the space, while memories appear on the screen. She is only actively involved with the drawing in the beginning. In the rest of the story she is passively pushing the frame around.

In search for a space to use to experiment with animation, I realized that the house of my grandfather was not in use anymore and was for sale. I went there to get inspired, and collected my own memory and that of my aunt about that house. I made a storyboard out of these memories.

The software of Dragon stop-motion made it possible for me to have live view of the camera. This way I saw the camera's image on a computer screen and was therefore able to draw on the Plexiglas in the right position for the camera's point of view. I also used the onion-skinning tool, which allowed me to use the picture of the first frame as reference of the second one.

In this project I experimented with showing different times and different worlds in one image. I wanted to show how memories can change a space.

Due to the fact that I was the director, animator, protagonist, camera man at the same time in this project, it was hard for me to stick to the story board. It was very difficult for me to focus on the whole story.