Category: Poetry Brief | Sons and Mother

Below is a link to the final poetry animation. I am quite happy with how it has turned out but there are some more scenes that could have been fleshed out, but they required a longer duration and I was restricted to the 90-second mark. Regardless, It has been a worthy challenge to try something different ( a different storytelling process) and animate in a certain way that has been out of my comfort zone. All in all, it did teach me new techniques and I will surely apply those in my future works.

Now that my timeline is all set, I started refining the scenes; added textures, lights, and shadows to make them stand out more. I also added additional scenes to make the whole animation coherent.

For example, I added a light flicker before the tap scene and bubbles in the sink to give the scenes more character.

Furthermore, for the hand-in milk scene, I created a milk dripping transition and added a bit of a glow in it as well so that it gives a gloomy dream sequence vibe.

I also added a camera shake in the penultimate scene along with a teardrop.

I also added an in-between the scene above and the last scene i.e., the image of him and his mother (when he was an infant) to symbolize lost times.

The animation is coming along quite nicely and now it is just a matter of finishing it by adding some minor touches like lights and shadows and credits.

After presenting the final timeline cut to my teachers, they felt the pacing was off in some places and the holes in orange socks was too abrupt and in the face. Since the overall message I want to give throughout the animation is that; how our mothers pamper us as a child but when were grow up and apart we do not give ourselves that same level of care and are snobbish.

In terms of visuals, I was lacking a long shot as a deal breaker to help the poem settle down a bit for the viewer. So, I created a panorama shot of the room to show how much of a mess the person really is.

After adding the smoke trail and tracking camera movement this is the final result. I believe this was a much smarter move, as this gave more depth to the animation and gravitas to the whole poem as well. Establishing shots are necessary when dealing with such medium.

After a weeks of continuous back and fort, I have completed my final timeline in after effects. All that is left to composite some scenes. lighting in some areas, add motion blur and camera shake in some places. Before I can proceed further, I showed this to my tutor. Although she lauded how much it has become but she felt that there are still certain scenes that need to changed and some further polished. Since I have only one week left of this brief I have to go ahead and finish it off myself.

In today’s session with the poetry society, I had an interesting discussion about certain lines of the poem that were too symbolic for one to understand and I took their perspective of it. One of the most common feedback was; the parts that were too literal were too distracting and at points I used metaphors that seemed engaging. They further suggested I take a more personal approach with this one and try to live out the scenarios.

In a tutorial after the class, Alex and I dissected the poem and he suggested me a book called “Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud” to further understand the link between words and images.

The constant feedback that I had been getting is to allow to the words to do most of the work and let the images be independent and to just amplify the words. So I dialed back things a bit. For example the bit about;

Sons are the skin hanging off sun-soaked lips. They need to be snipped with teeth-

Intially I made the following;

The closeup shot of lips biting off skins was very duo-specific (where words and imagery are conveying the same message). There is no refuting that the imagery is uneasy to watch and a bit grotesque. The imagery also felt unnecessary as the words were enough and a bit symbolic approach would work out better. So, in the process of finding what could complement the poetry line, I research dried leaves and petals because I think those are the closest thing to having sun-soaked lips. And when we talk about the need to be snipped with teeth it could be represented by petals/leaves falling.

Hence my take was to show a glowing rose, with its petals drying up and falling off. Below is the result. I added a subtle fire glow in the background for continuity purpose.

Hence, I am quite satisfied with how it shaped up to be and I think this method is the right approach.

All the puzzle pieces seem to be coming in to place. The pacing now looks much better and the overall film tonally feels coherent. I have decided to go ahead with the some scenes and finish them off. For now I will be colouring them, but after approval I will add lighting and shadows and render the frames.

Since the poetry also felt that, at certain points where I have added extra establishing shots those amplify the poem and setting. It also foreshadows what it about to come.

For the handwashing scene, I added dirty clothes in sink and to connect it to the previous scene I animated a leaking tap.

The most tricky part was figuring out the metaphor of bathing hand in white, I went for a literal representation but I will with it a way that seems symbolic. For example, add a bit of glow in the particular scene to give a dream sequence feel.

The most tedious task was to design the opening sequence, where the smoke trail transforms into the animated title sequence. I tried experimenting with a couple of smoke brushes in Photoshop but failed miserably. After spending time online researching, I found out I can create my own brush in Adobe Illustrator.

Since I wanted the poetry animation to be culturally authentic, I chose the hindi word for sons and mother “Ama ra Chora”.

After much ideation, I moved on further to actually animating it using this brush. But before this I had to block out the scene.

It is oddly satisfying to see, the smoke trail come-together. If I add a bit of box blur to this then it will help sell the effect even more.

References

http://www.youtube.com. (n.d.). How to Make an Illustrator Smoke Brush. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDbsV6OwBpU&t=381s [Accessed 23 Apr. 2023].

‌

Taking into account the feedback of the initial animatic, I revised some scenes and added a bit of depth to some. Halfway through, I realized that animating a smoke trail throughout the video would be a challenge, and need to devise a different approach.

I started animating rough scenes where the words did most of the work and the images were allowed to roam freely.

The above is a sample animation for the part;

Sleeping on my mother’s bed, at my age, doesn’t feel so strange. It is warm.

The above is a sample animation for the part;

Sons are the fingerprints of hands hidden in pockets. They need the need to be kept a secret-

The animation was a bit jerky and so I added a couple of in-betweens and further extended it to amplify the words. I added some fingerprint details and half-way through I started adding base colouring to find the look and feel of the scene.

When I presented the animatic in todays lecture, I got a mixed response. For some the animation had a very linear story but gets confusing after a certain point, a bit incoherent. For some the closeup shots gave it a suffocating feel and should had some long shots to break this suffocation. One of my teachers felt that the story lacks the essence of the mother, so I need to register her through various means.

After the feedback I also realised the story was half baked and I need to add some more scenes and revise the story a bit to make it more coherent and linear. Since the poem does not tell, if the mother is alive or not, I have to bring her empathy into the story and make it a bit more relatable and dramatic.