A brief was given at the beginning of the semester. Choose a creation myth, choose a point where WATER is mentioned, and depict that part.
It all started in class numero uno. In the beginning, we all made succulent gardens and took a tram ride down to Melbourne’s majestic Botanical Gardens, where we sat down near the Cactus Garden to stitch up barley bags together in a circle. It was a fun introduction, a great way to get the creative juices going.
What a fun approach to introducing animation students to the Illusion of Life course! We all got to make a little succulent garden as a way of representing us creating a world! Next stop was a trip to The Botanical Gardens!
We then proceeded to The Botanical Gardens, sat down on the grass, we had to cut out and stitch up some barley filled bags for the beginnings of a character!
I recall being asked what I wanted to do, and the first thing that came to mind was a project I’ve barely started! It incorporated robot little monkeys in a concrete jungle- not a lot to do with a creation myth, I know. It was more a music film clip idea for an original song that hasn’t been shared with anyone just yet. This is a drawing of the image I’ve had in mind for it, in case you are curious…
After that class, I was of course inspired by the foliage around me. I thought i’d spend a while capturing shapes and textures and colour for inspiration…..
A few days later, I decided to buy some twine, sit down, turn on some Native American inspired meditation music and tried modelling a creature out of my barley bag. It was at this stage I was scouring the internet for Creation myths. I grew up with the Biblical story of Genesis from the Old Testament, so I wanted to explore a story I wasn’t familiar with. I thought maybe I’d want to explore the Mayan story or why not one of the Native American myths? I wasn’t sure. I was admittedly drowning in stories and bamboozled. All I could do is sit there and make a monkey!
I came across the Babylonian myth, eventually. A tale between many gods. It starts with Tiamat, the god of sea water and Apsu, the god of fresh water. The gods of the sun and moon, the lightening and clouds (Ea, Anshur and Kishar) all cause a havoc inside of Tiamat before things got serious and there was some major destruction and fighting between the deities (a link to the story is included in a link of my final little project). It was the commotion inside Tiamat that I eventually decided to focus on after some sketching and learning how to create stop motion with Dragonframe in class! After this, I decided I wanted to try out watercolour pencils for a rough and rustic sort of feel. To gain a level of confidence and perspective, I decided to Google tutorials on using watercolour pencils and documentaries on Ancient Babylonian history during a period of a few days when I was quite unwell at home. I drew up a very rough storyboard and finally drew a draft template of Tiamat and Apsu. I wanted Tiamat’s pregnant belly to be the focal point of the piece. The womb was to be where all the chaos between the “baby” gods occurred. This chaos I depicted was to come in the form of natural catastrophe that occurs within the waters of Tiamat’s womb which eventually turns into planet Earth. Wow, that was a mouth full.
The next step was to visit the arts and crafts store. I bought a memory board, a knife, water colour pencils and some watercolour paper. I sketched and coloured and used water (as one does with watercolour pencils)…and replicated the template I drew earlier in free-hand onto the water colour paper. I cut out Tiamat’s belly….
Next, I had to trace out the belly shape onto more paper, and added the visual motion of water, trying hard to create a somewhat realistic tidal wave of sorts.
I then added half day and night, I wanted the sun and moon to get bigger and bigger and I wanted there to be lightening strikes. As it turns out I struggled to recreate the look of lightening strikes, I’m sure if I’d had used a bit less water it would have looked more effective.
After many hours of layering watercolour shades and adding “frames”, it was time to head down to the computer labs at RMIT to try stop motion animation for the first time in Dragonframe. It was here I had to strategically place the template and each “frame” created onto a light stage or projector. I worked out that if I added a mask with a 6.0 ratio after adjusting the camera lens to my humble drawing I could block out any bits of sticky tape holding everything down around the sides! Considering I forgot the notes I took in class, I was chuffed about this little discovery.It’s the little things, eh? The result was a short but somewhat sweet clip.
After saving the file as an Mpeg 4, I went home and hopped back onto my computer and looked up a You Tube clip I found earlier of a 3000 year old Ancient Babylonian song and decided to record a riff inspired by the tune and added the sound of rain and thunder storms to further enhance the idea of nature’s chaos of deities within Tiamat. I used the tune as an ode to Babylonian times. In order to add music and some credits, I decided to simply use iMovie and put the stop motion animation on loop a few times.
This is the end result (click link below):
The Babylonian Creation – Apsu & Tiamat: The Wrath of Ea, Anshar & Kisha
Where to from here?
I would love to try a slightly longer clip next time with another visual concept to see what else I can achieve in stop motion. All in all, I am pleased with my first official attempt. I realise it is not quite an “epic picture” of sorts but for what I set out to achieve, I have done just fine. The only way is up from here!
The Cheshire Cat's Quill 