We have been exploring the subject movement on shadow puppets. Shadow puppets are flat articulated cut – out paper silhouettes that were used in play performances to show on screen in the background.
Looking at artists work for inspiration, we were given a task to complete our shadow puppet animation. Artists work include
Kara Walker
Miwa Matreyek
William Kentridge
We then collaborated into groups of six. Had to design and build a shadow puppet character and then present it telling a story about a character coming to new land.
The things we had to think carefully about were ways in which the character would be feeling in a new place, the poses the character would be performing in the scene and the style of the movement.
In our group we decided to build a silhouette character based on a flower plant. Using black paper material, we then started to cutout our figure and constructed the shape of the head and body parts with the arms and legs. We had also cut out some triangular shapes pieces, which would represent sharp edge like pillars coming around the background. Using the pins, we then attached the arms and legs onto our figure and also added the skewers below to make it balance its movements.
Once our figure was completed, we made use of the balcony. We then started setting up the camera to video record our short animated film. We used a piece of tracing paper, to stack on the background of the window.
Started to plan out the narrative for our scene thinking about ways on what feelings and emotions the character is experiencing. We were required to use a video camera for this exercise to record our puppet performance, thus we were also making sounds to represent a disturbance reaction to the character. Firstly at the very start of the narrative it depicts happiness as the flower warps through its flowerpot until eventually towards the middle plot when bad things start to happen in the scene when it depicts disturbing patterns of fearsome hands, falling sharp pillars.