Chalk Board and Collage Animation Workshop

Today we used chalk on black paper to create a stop motion animation about global warming, deforestation, industrialisation or a subject similar to those described. My group and I chose to make an animation about deforestation as we felt that we could do more on that.

For our animation, we drew a tree growing in stages, using chalks as the tree grew, taking pictures at each stage. We then went through two seasons with the tree before ripping the page up in strips, signifying that the tree was getting cut down. After putting another piece of black paper under the first, we then transferred the stump of the tree to that paper before starting to cover it with small pictures of buildings, leaving a small patch of the trunk visible before finally covering that with a picture of the tree when the buildings had been ‘built’ up. The tree signified that, people will chop down trees and build upon their grounds for their own means, but then want that greenery back so they construct parks, or greenery, despite having it, and taking it away.

Taking pictures at every change in the page, out final animation is quite bitty, but works as it shows the tree’s growth and fall, with the buildings taking over. Due to the unreliability of height of the camera and lighting, everything seems a little disjointed, however it still works. We used 12 frames per second for our animation, so it was a little slower than average, but the slower pace worked in explaining the story better as you had more time to process what was going on.

The chalk itself was a hard medium to work with, although the faded effect we could get from it worked in our favour in making the tree’s and background more present, in contrast to the building, which was quite strong and bold, with crisp and dark lines. For the chalk, we used ‘Autumn story chalkboard’ on YouTube for our inspiration as the chalk’s hazy outlook followed it across the use of multiple chalkboards, much like the haze followed our tree.

Our animation was very different to the other groups, as our focused on deforestation whilst there’s focused on pollution, using props with theirs as ours only used chalks and a collage effect. Each worked in different ways, however ours had text too to explain what was happening at the end, whilst there only showed what was happening. Each differed greatly in that respect, as each showed a journey, whereas ours was the timeline of a plant as it grew and died, and there’s was following a car on a physical journey while polluting the area as it went.

To make our animation better, we could have made things neater, and took into consideration the ghost like effect the chalk left to use it to our advantage. However for a quick first attempt, ours worked quite well.

Conclusively, the animation worked well, and our choice of frames per second really hit home the impact of the tree getting cut down as everything was slightly slower than average, bringing attention to the actions. The animation itself was simple, but effective, in showing the takeover that buildings have on nature due to deforestation.