Monomyth - Experimental Animation

Watch in HD ;)

Monomyth is an animation project developed during the first semester of my Medialogy study at AAU Copenhagen, by me and my group mates. It was made for a 5-day "Traditional Animation" workshop and competition. My role in the group was as lead animator, photographer and have also contributed to the story. I also want to give credits to the other people who had equally important roles throughout the process: Horatiu Roman (animations, story and composed the music), Mihai Anton (animations and story) and Shuaib Hirsi (group processes and story).

Techniques Used: The animation was made using multiple techniques based on stop-motion. We decided to try a more experimental approach for our animation and therefore we came up with the idea of creating our characters using light-shapes. These light-shapes were made by taking long-exposure photos of one of the group members moving a flashlight (or bicycle light), forming different shapes which would later become the characters in our animation.

Just to give you an example of what I mean, in the picture bellow you can see me fooling around with a bicycle light and achieving this pretty neat effect. It's not at all related to the project though.

As I mentioned before, we used lights to create most of our characters. All of our light models were made using the technique described above. In the following picture, some of the light models used for this animation can be seen.

 

 The only character which is animated in a completely different way is the main character. Our drive to experiment led us to the decision of creating the main character out of seeds. In the picture bellow, you can see how the character was build (left) and edited in Photoshop (right).

For each frame of the animation we slightly moved the seeds and then took a photo. An example of a "decomposing" animation can be seen bellow (you can scroll up and down fast and imagine the motion better :) )

 

I won't go more into detail but this was our main workflow for "Monomyth". Hope you found it interesting!