Old Light New Lens BLOG 9 & 10
Project Days 9 & 10
Monday August 14th
FIRST SESSION
We shifted the plan, for a 10am start, as the V-Line trains are very ad-hoc, and Callum and Laura didn’t arrive until just after 10am (Jason collected them while Penelope started the session).
The children (tried) to teach (a not very good at learning it) Penelope their Acknowledgement of Country, Penelope ran a Sonic Choir warm up, which is designed for physical, vocal and focus. Penelope improvised sounds with physical shapes, which the children imitated in the form of a “choir”. They were asked to pay attention to dynamics (music) and to where vocal sound comes from (phonics) and the imitation of the rapidly changing, dynamic, scaled physical expressions that accompanied both.
We then played a quick game of “Why are you late?”.
The group was then divided into three: Sound (Callum), Design (Jason and Penelope) and Drama (Laura).
DESIGN
The aim was to as a group, storyboard the remainder of the story outline. It was a hot mess – but Lynne saved the day! She suggested dividing the children into smaller groups and tasked each group with a section of the story outline. Jason drew up 3 squares on A3 paper and we have each group a section to work on. It was fast and furious – but we actually have a rough to work from. Jason and Penelope will take this rough and work across next weekend to generate the final storyboard.
PERFORMANCE
Laura led the kids involved in the performance element through a workshop exploring archetypes and gesture. This session was designed to equip the performers with familiarity around how audiences will assign meaning to simple lines of dialogue and simple physical gestures and how we as a group can play into these archetypes to aid our story telling.
Each child was given given a line of dialogue and had to keep it a secret from those around them, they then created a physical whole body gesture informed by that line of dialogue. We made it 50% more dramatic, then 75% more dramatic and then 100% more dramatic, once we each had this fully realised full body gesture we looked around the room and tried to find other people whose gestures had a similar energy and might belong to the same character archetype as ours. The hero gestures found the other hero archetypes just through their physicality, the villain found the villains ect until we had four different groups: hero, villains, side kicks and the innocent. Whilst all the kids had created individual gestures there were certainly some similarities between the archetype groups. We then performed our gestures and said the lines of our characters together and the kids watching guessed which line belonged to each archetype. Laura facilitated a discussion about examples in books/ films the kids might have seen for each character archetype. We then had a discussion which centred our learning in the world of our narrative…
Kids decided the following for our narrative about the pelican and the rosella:
· Who is the hero of the story? Rosella and pelican
· Who or what is the villain? Pollution (action/ consequence of humans?)
· Who or what is the side kick? The plastic bag
· Who is the innocent? Nature (lake, birds, wildlife)
Second Session (children in one group)
We began the session by showing the children 3 different animations, and asked them to analyse them in terms of sound, story and design. Here are links to the 3, in the order in which we showed them:
Sea pollution animation: 2 D – paper/collage (for comparative purposes - no text) – Simple short, theme of sea pollution, made by children the same age. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JKu9TQCLMI
Marcel the shell with shoes on: Puppet animation – (for shots and style) text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k98Afd7Nf3Y
3. Boundin’: https://youtu.be/7WyR4AqRweY (with Text)
Sea pollution animation:
Children were asked:
· What they could hear – water/ waves, sad music.
· Shot types: started with a wide shot (establishing place),
· Archetypes: villain – human in the boat, innocent – nature/ environment, side kick – the rubbish, hero – humans changing behaviour, (the creators have asked the audience to: Stop. Sea. Pollution)
Marcel the shell with shoes on animation:
Children were asked, what do you observe about the style of this animation that we will not be doing? They reported/noted that is 3D animation and 3D backgrounds, we’re not having any speaking or words, we’re using less frames per second
Boundin’
The children analysed the Characters in relation to the archetypes explored earlier with Laura:
· Hero – Jackalope
· Villain – people that come and sheer the sheep
· Side kick – the animals in the environment
· Innocent - Sheep
They noted the following:
· All the dialogue rhymed, and there was a rhythm to the whole thing, the sound of a drum throughout – rhythm was interrupted when he was shorn became sad and went silent it effected the mood
· The weather was helping to tell the story, the audio and visuals were both connected, symbolic weather
· Animation style: computer animation
When questioned: “What do you think the point of the story is”, these were some responses. The story tells us:
· To always be happy with what you’ve got (sheep was super proud of his wool and then when he lost that he thought he’d lost everything,
· It took the hero redirecting his focus pick yourself back up again) pride/ ego/ his shame from the friends got in the way of his ability to enjoy his life.
The afternoon sessions included:
· Theatre - Devising
· Sound – Working from the existing storyboard
· Puppet design - Build
Followed by Reflection.
Sound Group Work across the two days
We:
Curated a selection of stock images (ideally atmospherically dense) to show the students.
Campsite
Busy city at night
Alien spaceship
Had the students analyse the images and create a sound bank of textures for the image.
Generating soundscapes from still images
Discussed foreground/background sounds, as well as sound length.
What sounds would play throughout the whole scene?
What are some sounds that may only occur sparingly/once?
We took skills from exercises above and generated sound banks for storyboard images created by the storyboard team. We examined what sounds appear across multiple scenes, discussed the use of atmos vs SFX
Created a soundscape for Performance Storyboard Video
Identified sounds that match visuals
Discussed how to best time sounds to match action in images
Introduced concept of sound mixing (what sounds are louder, what sounds are softer, where do you want the sound to exist in the space)
Meeting with Creative Vic
Barking Spider Creative artists and Lynne Richardson from St Mary’s met with Kathleen from Creative Vic to discuss the project progress – and it seems we are tracking well! Kathleen noted that we are all still recovering from the lockdowns, and that it’s not just business as usual. To help ease the pressure, Kathleen said that this blog needn’t be so detailed. So!
Over and out with details. From now on, photos and reflections!
REFLECTIONS
Penelope
Kathleen’s reflections on the state of play post COVID, and that things are not “business as usual”, was extremely helpful. While we have been tracking well, it has been a really pressured process so far, with so many kids at different levels, and keeping everyone on-board and focused. The teachers (as we learned) are under huge amounts of pressure to get all the kids back on track academically and it’s really stressful at this time. Kathleen gave us license to ease back on the intensity. So, I have proposed to the artists, in order to simplify both the animation and the performance, we use transitions between scenes in each, that utilise written text in the case of the animation, and live narration, for the performance. This means we need to generate less visual and sonic material in both cases and make the material we do create, richer.
This is a huge relief, and I suddenly feel that the project has some space in it for play – where up until now, for me leading it creatively, it’s been very full on as I have felt pulled in many directions all at once, and not capable of being fully available to any of the artists or to the kids because I’ve been so stretched. I’m looking forward to diving in more deeply and slowly to the creative process from here on in.
Laura
The pieces are coming together, the narrative is clear, and the storytelling elements are very nearly ready to put into practice. Day 9+10 of this project have been enormous, however I’m coming away feeling really positive about our ability as artists to help shape this thing now we have a really clear framework.
The performance element of this project is mostly a visual one. Penelope and I have worked together to clarify our four types of live storytelling (narration, overhead projection, physical movement in silhouette and shadow puppetry) and then create a visual plan of which part of the story will be told in which medium. This visual storyboard is our map, our framework of creation, and now we have this from the kids’ story, we’re ready to start the rehearsal phase of the project. I’m immensely relieved to have this done, and very excited for what’s to come next.
This week I’ve been reflecting on just how far the cohort has come in terms of their connection to each other, capacity for creative collaboration and their willingness to express themselves both verbally and physically. There were a couple moments this week where I really saw just how far they’ve come since the start of the project and the kids really surprised me with how much they had retained or were willing to engage full heartedly. Firstly, in the physical theatre and storytelling workshop I ran every child was able to create their own full-bodied gesture for their character archetypes and could engage in discussion about how the audience assigns meaning from one simple line of dialogue or physical gesture. There is no way that in the first week we were here the kids would have been comfortable to create and share their gestures with such commitment. Secondly, when they put that learning into practice and identified the archetypes within their story and then again within the other animations we were watching. This understanding of storytelling elements is really exciting for me to witness, and I know will now provide us with a shared language as we move into the creation and rehearsal of our live performance. Overall, really encouraging!
Callum
This week we focussed more on our individual groups. I’d spent some time last week trying to work out how to make this part of the sound design process the most engaging (as the sound team weren’t having as much fun and losing interest). I knew the kids loved the creating side, and they’d seemed to like when we worked with visual elements, so I tried to keep the process as visual and creatively generative as possible. This required me to spend the morning of the second day recording a bunch of sounds myself at Lake Colac (which I love doing, sound hunts are the best), and cleaning up the samples so that when the sound team came in, we could just start creating. The performance group had a two-minute performance storyboard video, so I got the sound team to watch the video and work together to build the sound for it (treating it like an animation). We got about 42 seconds of the animation done, but it was so great to see the kids already have a fairly strong sense for sound design. They spent time creating a transformation sound for the fish to plastic bags, that included three different sounds coming together (bones cracking, crumpling plastic, and a pop), as well different transition sounds depending on whether the camera was diving underwater or coming back out. I’m extremely excited to continue building this work, and I think I have a better understanding of how to engage with the students!
Jason
Day 9: After an ill-fated attempt at getting the children engaged in developing a storyboard for the stop motion animation, we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon without the children so that we could focus on developing the story and therefore the puppets and set pieces required for both the stop motion animation and the performance piece.
Day 10: I had the morning sessions free to make more puppets for the animation and to do the filming around Colac Lake that we anticipate will constitute the backgrounds for the stop motion animation. I had hoped to Return from the filming and engage the children in the process of stop motion animation but found after setting up the worktable for that process that the puppets would not be suitable for the animation and I would have to change some of the jointing. This meant running around trying to find suitable materials such as wire to do wire joints and to pull apart and reshape the puppets I had already made.
After lunch I was able to engage the children in the process of making their puppets and some of the children were able to complete the process. Just before I finished up for the day, I was able to do a four second animation that we will use in a test animation over the weekend. The Puppet making process was quite chaotic with children being at all levels, some even doing it for the first time. I calculated we need about 12,000 still images to create an animation at 10 frames a second that goes for two minutes. Over the weekend I will complete the other puppets required and so we can begin the animation process on Monday.
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