Experimenting With Backgrounds

After the group had completed the treatment, the pitch and a few other important pre-production work pieces,we found that we were coming to a dead end with how we wanted our animation to look. We felt that to be able to construct a proper storyboard and synopsis, we would have to decide on the image of our animation and the detail of our backgrounds.


We had already spoken about how we want our animation to be based on a scrapbook, and how we want the animation to travel across different pages, with background expanding beyond a single page, making the work space more, and something that the camera can follow. From deciding that we wanted paper background to reflect the mood and location of the different scenes, we were unsure whether or not we would like a lot of detail, what materials would work best and whether or not it would be abstract and surreal or easier on the eye.


From having a group meeting, we quickly came to the realisation that our animation style would work best with it being abstract and minimalistic, with building up different colour paints to create the atmosphere and emotion in some scenes, and simple shapes in others. We also liked the idea of having a minimal amount of objects and drawings on the pages, keeping it simple and focused a lot on the characters. This meant that anything we would like to animate would be done on card, and anything that was in the background we did not wish to animate would be painted roughly onto the backgrounds. Again, this would keep the focus on the characters and make it easier on the eye.


Once we all had the image in our heads of how we wanted the animation to look, we felt it would be best to experiment with some ways in which the backgrounds could look, and what ones would work best for what scenes. We all grabbed some paint and started painting. I chose to do the baby in the womb, where as other members of the group chose to do the emotic backgrounds, using colours for the emotions. There were some we liked, and some that didn't look the way we had wanted, but this is something we were glad about, as it felt like we were getting somewhere with the image and look of our final piece. Annotations of my backgrounds can be seen in our group folder.
 One problem we did face was that when building lots of layers with acrylic paint, it shines when dry. This we thought would be a problem when coming to shoot the animation, as the lighting would reflect off the paint. Something that we think will over come this problem is by using the paint thinly with lots of water. Again, annotations of this can be seen in our group folder.