TATE PROJECT
: "To Touch"

1st Pitching: 25 Oct 2017

This short animation project has been inspired by the quote of Barbara Hepworth which is
" It's lovely to pick up a stone and it's lovely to live with a sculpture because it changes in every possible light, all through the day, in moonlight, artificial light, any light...it's always changing. Everything I made is to touch and people usually do which pleases me. And it's very important with sculpture not just to go sort of plonk, up and look because it changes all the time, so the real thing for people is to move with their bodies. If I can make them do that then I am very happy.

The first process is exactly doing some researches of her and her works which were inspired by the place and her experiences of nature. For example, this sculpture called Pelagos,1946 which was inspired by a view of the bay where 2 arms of the land surround the sea and her key materials are stone, wood, and bronze.

Hepworth, B. (1946) Pelagos[Sculpture],

Tate Britain, London

So there were 3 reasons why I chose her to be an inspiration for this project. The first one is I really like the way she combines the nature with the man-made thing which is a sculpture. Another reason is I love the way she uses the very strong and solid materials to create something very friendly making people having interaction with it. The last thing is I like her thought that she very pleased with people touching her work because she thinks it's the first sense of human while other artist don't.

Moving on to the beginning of my process, before any ideas poping up in my head I always sketches some pictures that I’ve been thinking. Here’s some sketches I’ve trying to visualize something that related with each other as the way that Barbara wants people to engage with her work. And trying to use some objective thing like spheres creating subjective meanings as if the sculpture and the viewers engage with each other.

WHAT

Animatic

WHEN

October 2017

DURATION

1 min

27 sec

TECHNIQUES

Stop-motion and

2D-drawn animation techniques

The plot is kind of abstract as well concerning to the engagement between the sculpture and the audiences. And this animation is the hybrid of 2D-drawn animation and stop-motion animation because stop-motion technique is about making an object and 2D-drawn animation can support that objective scenes to be more subjective which is similar to she uses her material or object to create the subjective meanings.

And for the mood and theme that I used are adopted from her style of work as she is an avant-garde artist, so it will be kind of abstract form and as I’ve mentioned before that her work was inspired by nature so I used the tone of it.

Here's the first animatic for pitching which I've changed a little bit from the original storyboard.

These are some mock scenes of using the stop-motion in some reality scenes.

And here’s the last storyboard which I had planed all the thing that I had to do before making it such as what props and setting did I have to prepare?, how long in each scene? and how’s the transition between the scenes? Which is very helpful for me to organize the schedule and make me understand myself better in details and made me think more about Are these scenes answer my idea, or not? For example, the 8th scene which is when the smaller sphere pop out from the bigger, first I thought I would use the static camera from frame30 to 39 like a long take but I shifted my position because when I saw the whole scene on the same paper I think this had not answer the engagement enough, then I added the scene 8.2 which has the zoom-in camera movement to the hole of the bigger sphere like the audiences move their bodies through the sculpture.