Film and Portrait Analysis
Visual Research
No Longer Human 人間失格 | Illustration Book |
The visual style of this illustration book immediately caught my eye for it’s detailed watercolour work. I wanted to perhaps emulate this style in my final animation – however considerably less detailed and more simplified for the sake of time.
I also looked at some typographical art based of my chosen person’s book ‘No Longer Human’, which is an autobiographical book very relevant to Dazai Osamu’s life and was written before his suicide. The artworks shown above are varied, so I have to think about how ‘clean’ my final animation will be – or perhaps it can be a combination of wild and rushed, neat and clean.
Another piece of visual research that is crucial for this film is understanding what Dazai Osamu looks like – not just his facial features but the type of clothing he would wear, what kind of paper he would write on, and what his home looked like. I did some research into what structures would look like for a middle-upper class family in 1940’s Japan and made sure that the colours were as accurate as possible. Shown above is his actual home that has been preserved.
Storyboard
In regards to my animation, I want to explore with both traditional and digital means of animation. I plan on making the digital aspects look somewhat traditional, but using muted tones and a watercolour brush. For the traditional aspect, I want to use paper to imitate the movement of water (as the focal point of the animation is Osamu’s suicide via drowning).
Development and Illustrations
Final Films
Final Reflection
Prior to beginning my pre-production/research stage, I had to decide on who will be my ‘portrait’ for the project. After looking at a few options, I decided on Dazai Osamu, one of my favourite authors, and highlighting his iconic death, which was widespread news in Japan for its bizarre nature. I also wanted to draw inspiration from his bestselling novel, ‘No Longer Human’, which was written shortly before his death. In a nutshell – the main character in the novel attempts to drown himself in a failed suicide attempt, and Dazai himself also commits suicide in a similar way – albeit successfully. With all of this in mind, I needed to think about what research I would need to create a successful animation. When thinking of what style I wanted to go for for the animation and overall concept, I thought that a simple watercolour on paper would be the most effective. However, with the limited time we had, I did this digitally. I took inspiration from an artist on Behance (on the second slide) who painted a few illustrated pages for ‘No Longer Human’. I also wanted to include some quotes from the original Japanese text to be in the film, whilst remaining relevant. I took the quote “I made up my mind one day to give myself ten shots that night and throw myself into the river.” and applied that to the animation, with that being the key line that implicates Dazai’s future suicide. I looked at typographical Japanese art for a bit of inspiration – however, I opted for a more traditional writing style as this would have been more relevant for Dazai’s time period (19040’s). During the production stage, I used a digital ink pen so that the characters looked clear and accurate, I would have attempted Dazai’s writing style however it seems his handwriting was rather messy and difficult to pull off.
For the climax, I wanted to introduce both live-action and traditional animation to the film. Since Dazai’s death was so well-known in Japan, I wanted to animate using newspaper in order for it to look somewhat like wild waves. I noticed initially that this wasn’t working very well since the newspaper was dry and not moving the way I wanted it to, so I wet the paper enough that I could shift it enough to move more fluidly. I used a top-down tripod so that I could film the stop motion on a black background, although unfortunately the ring light didn’t work in my favour and left a harsh light post-production which was difficult to key out. Regardless the scenes whip by fairly fast, as in-between those shots is live-action footage of a calm river bankside – which is the body of water Dazai died in. I also used these clips to juxtapose with the more erratic scenes of the paper. I used Stop Motion Studio to film the newspaper, and edited the footage directly into Premiere Pro; both of which I’ve used for previous projects so the post-production element of the project definitely took a lot less time than pre-production and production.
Reflecting back on my project overall; I would say that it was fairly successful. If I had a little bit more time, I would attempt to make some animation sequences slightly more fluid. Some of the hand animations in the beginning are rather clunky (although this was mostly done on purpose as attempting a more smooth animation would be difficult using digital watercolour brushes). I also felt that the paper animation was perhaps a bit too rough and didn’t emulate the motion of water enough, nonetheless, this tells me that prior testing is crucial if I’m working outside of my comfort zone, so if I consider doing more experimental animation in the future, I need to know that my idea works before trying to execute it. Otherwise, I would say that the overall outcome of my film turned out well and it was quite fun trying experimental animation (especially since my previous elective was Living Voices)! The earlier exercises such as the ‘loop-de-loop’ animation and group activities during class really helped to understand the core sense of the project; since we observed the little things about the people around us in the latter exercise, and used various tools and materials to create an animation in the former.