To accompany our process of developing our animation we had a couple workshops that focused on key elements that make up the development and construction of a monition video. This included storyboarding and flipbook drawing and an audio workshop. The storyboarding and flipbook workshop was taken by Alice and was useful to learn the core principles of storyboarding and how crucial it is as one of the first major steps in the production process of an animation. The flipbook element was also useful and showed how animation works frame by frame, which was important for our group moving forward as we constructed a lot of our motion video using frame animation and stills.

The audio workshop was also very useful and proved to provide our group and myself with the audio files we wanted to create our eerie background sound that I put together for our animation.

Alongside the culmination of our idea, we also set up a pin board on Pinterest that we used collectively as a group to bring together imagery that we wanted our style and visuals to look be inspired from, some of these can be seen in the mood board here.

With Dan and Eve being confident drawers and having access to procreate we quickly decided that we’d allow them to draw stills and frame by frame animations, as they felt they could nail the style that we had all collectively set our sights on. With myself and Harry then tasked with the more digital side, which was to consist of putting stills and frame animations together and developing audio to go alongside.

Once we had established our focus for our narrative inspiration being ‘The Mommet’, we then looked to develop a conceptual and creative story that our animation could follow. The Mommet focuses on a wax doll being formed over a fire, and we felt that this could allow us to create some strong visuals. We looked to use this as a launch for our idea generation. Along with the wax doll a red ribbon was also mentioned within the poem, and we developed how we could use the ribbon as a tool for the story telling across the Wessex Landscapes within our motion video, as this linked to our themes.

Click Here to see my initial sketch’s from when we first started exploring our concept, along with our first story board that I drew on procreate. The first story board was our initial one that we presented to Mark and Alice and the second and final one was our more refined version that linked to our animatic that we showed in our crit presentation. That can be seen just here on the right, with a very eerie and dark feel. As a group we felt this was suitable for the themes we were exploring and represented what a supernatural setting would have been depicted like back in Thomas Hardy's era.

So here we have our animatic that we presented in the crit with Mark, Alice and our clients from Wessex Museums. This was to indicate what our animation style would look like and how the sequence would flow, accompanied with test audio as well. We received very high praise for the story and style we had chosen and the idea of the Ribbon being a device was also liked.

We took onboard all their feedback as well, with Harriet, a member of Wessex Museums and the exhibition curator, giving us more information about 'The Mommet' and how it ends with a drowning of the person who the wax doll was made to represent, and how this could link to our wax doll and the ribbon could be used to fly over Wessex and land by a pond.

After receiving feedback from our critique, we looked to progress with our animation. We did this be continuing our development as we looked to extend our animation to fully express our vision for the project liked the storyboards showed. So, for this I worked on more animations that I oversaw, making sure they all flowed how we wanted. You can see those here, with focus again on the house intro but also now the exit and how the narrative then continues through the quiet night and across the Wessex landscape. As well as working on the animation and what we physically see I also continued to play around with the audio and looked to improve that within these clips.

Click Here to see more of my development and process.

One of the key elements for our motion sequence that I took on was our use of audio. We made the most of our audio workshop by using little microphone devices to record little snippets of sounds that we felt had potential. I then downloaded all these sounds, as seen in the image below on the right and I named them all, so it was easier for myself when mixing, overlapping and merging.

The screenshots on the left and below show my audio layers in green being synced up with clips of our motion. The process of overlapping and mixing sound files to create new sounds was a lengthy one, which I spent a lot of time on as I made the audio for the entire motion sequence. Syncing this with our animation was also a fun game that took a lot of time and patience to be done right.

Click Here for more about my Audio development.

As well as the developing all the audio for our motion video and syncing it up I also chose to create some hand drawn typography that could be used within our video as well. We decided after a tutorial with Alice that we wanted some of the lines from our poem to appear on screen as well as being an audio feature. We all had a go at coming up with styles, trying to achieve a scratchy, eerie typography style that would work with the sense and visual appearance of our motion sequence.

Here are my final type styles that I drew by hand and scanned in, which were the ones that we chose to go forward with for the animation. We collectively as a group agreed this captured the right aesthetic we were after all whilst keeping the text clear and easy to read.

Click here to see more of my previous attempts with
hand drawn styles.

At the top of this page sits the final animation. This is the complete motion sequence that we worked to from the beginning of this project, and this is what all our collective development was towards.

Overall were happy with the motion sequence and on top of this Wessex Museums have chosen our video, ‘Amen Ever’ to feature within their exhibition which is a very rewarding feeling and something we can all be proud of as a group.