https://vimeo.com/41071991 Oscar Saunders: http://justanotherdoodle.tumblr.com/ Will Richardson: http://callmeprez.blogspot.co.

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IN

Admonition

RODUCTIO T
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Stop-Motion By Oscar Saunders & William Richardson

Admonition is a ninety second stop motion piece which is based around the orginal poem penned by Sylvia Plath in 1953. It is based on the style of Rachel Whiteread, a current English artist. Both these two women make a very interesting combination, which we hope we have portrayed effectively in the piece. You will see Plaths use of dark and sometimes morbid imagery, mixed with Whitereads simple style, specifically her use of eradication fluid. The poem starts with just a few drops of ink, which go on to evolve into the elaborate narrative that Plath wrote over fifty years ago. The animation does not just play out the poem literally, but displays subtle messages of our reading into the poems meaning as well. It is a project which took us nearly 100 hours of animating, in which we took well over 2000 images. This documentation will show you some methods we used, some preliminary sketchbook work, and even the materials used.

ORIGINAL POEM BY SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath

(October 27, 1932 February 11, 1963)

Sylvia Plath was an an America poet, novelist and also a short story writer. She was born in Massachusetts, USA but later went on to live in London, England. She was a gifted, troubled poet, known for her confessional style of writing. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950, she eventually went on to work as an editor for Mademoiselle magazine. After her husband Ted Hughes cheated on her, she fell into a very deep depression, which unforunately controlled her life from then on. Before committing suicide at the age of 30, Plath had written hundreds of poems and a novel about her mental

breakdown. The depression had become far too much for plath who wrote outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. Much to the dismay of some admierers of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes became her literary executor after her death. He did edit what is considered by many to be her greatest work. Ariel featured several well known poems including Daddy.

(20 April 1963 - Present)

Rachel Whiteread

Born in 1963, she is an English artist, well known for her sculptures, which most commonly take the form of casts. She was the first person to win the Turner Prize in 1993. One of her most famous pieces is Ghost, which is a massive plaster cast of a room in a Victorian house. She also contributed to the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. She was Born in London, and living most of her life there. Her mother, also an artist died in 2003 at the age of 72. Her death had a great impact on Whitereads work. Her father, a teacher, died in 1989. She also studied in a series of well renowned

art schools. She began exhibiting in 1987, and her first solo show was in 1988. She now lives and works in an old synogogue, in East London with her long term partner and fellow sculptor Marcus Taylor. They have two sons. Some of Whitereads key works: Ghost, House, Untitled (one hundred spaces), Water Tower, Nameless Library (Holocaust Memorial), Untitled Monument and Angel of the South. Whiteread is a very private person, avoiding the alaborate lifestyle that some of her fellow artists chose to lead.

Admonition
By Sylvia Plath

If you dissect a bird To diagram the tongue Youll cut the chord Articulating song. If you flay a beast To marvel at the mane Youll wreck the rest From which the fur began. If you pluck out the heart To find what makes it move, Youll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

We both discussed and planned visually in our sketchbooks what the poem sounded like to us. We annotated the poem, and drew out a rough storyboard each of what we felt we were trying to put accross. Wanting to challenge ourselves, we chose a tough visual style to pull off, stopmotion animation using eradication fluid

and black marker pen. At first 25fps was the target, so we could have a smooth animation, but due to the length of time we had, and amount of images we needed, it had to be shortened to slightly less.
(right: Oscars preliminary sketchbook pages) (above: some early visual tests of the first scene)

Wills Storyboards

We used Fruit-Loops for the soundtrack, which would compliment our animation. Starting off by writing down the key times in the video, and when key moments happened. We then went about making/using samples and synths as appropriate sounds for different elements of the video. Going for a very atmpospheric tone, without beat, but eventually finding it hard to produce a track without one. For our sound that we chose, typewriter was our choice to fit in over the pattern laying down in the intro. As the soundtrack progressed, it began to fit less so he ended up chopping it apart and using it as percussion. This being perhaps a more cheeky way of using a compulsory element to our animation. We used iStopmotion to run through all the images at 20 fps, and were able to go through all the single frames that had mistakes in. Then proceeding to run it through iMovie to run a stablization on the track. Finally we put it through After Effects to add the title. The animation needed very little editing, as with most stop motions, a lot of the work had already been done, before edit.

Oscars Storyboards

Stills from the animation mixed with pictures of our various setups.

With so many hours of animating under our belts, we managed to get through a lot of tippex and black marker. This was about half of the amount we actually used, which meant quite a few trips down to Staples!

75+ hours of timelapse

30+ pens
3 Locations

10+ pots of tippex