After being briefed on an experimental project with the subject of 'The Self-Portrait of Your Life', I was daily stuck for a good week or two trying to churn out ideas. Most of which I struggled with wrapping my brain around having my 'face' appear throughout the entire 60-90 seconds worth of animation. Then it hit me that I could eventually create something abstract and not have my face feature in it.

Originally, I wanted to create the entire sequence of shadow puppets, mixed with 2D elements. However, that didn't turn out well as the set-up for shadow puppetry proved to be a challenge especially when students were constantly crowding about trying to get a stop-motion space to work on their respective experimental project and I didn't want to risk my set-up being moved about.

I was inspired by Tame Impala's music video 'Feels Like We Only Go Backwards' and discovered that the artists behind this amazing music video did it in a  style called plasticine collage. It sounded so interesting and it also looked really, really, really fascinating.

It looks something like this:

Before I go any further into talking about how I implement this method into my experimental project, here's how my final outcome looked like.


Here goes:



Well, to be fair, this isn't what plasticine collage should be like. I tried out the real plasticine collage on a size of A5 paper, just like how it's shown in the example that I've added at the top. I had 2 problems,
1) I didn't have enough plasticine (buying a few of it were already causing a hole in my pocket)
2) It took way more time than expected

How I overcame it was that I sort-of gave up on 'plasticine collage' and went with more of a plasticine stop-motion style with some hand drawn bits and also a mix of 2D bits and bops.

Behind the scenes:




Having the very psychedelic-style of tune at the background, it takes away the seriousness of the message of my self-portrait (of which I've disclosed in my production report).

If I had more plasticine and a little more time, perhaps plasticine collage would have been the way to go. Unfortunately, plasticine itself doesn't come cheap, and my time management at that moment wasn't as great. As an overall outcome, I'm honestly happy with how it came out even though I had some momentary struggles/hiccups in the beginning with trying to find a technique and also what I wanted to convey.

Have a nice day!