Final Piece

Below is the link which will take you to my final animation on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/417594072

Summary, Reflection and Evaluation

Summary

My animation was based upon the poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath. The poem explores numerous topics including history, suicide, resurrection and revenge. Personally what i found intriguing about the poem was the links to WW2 and the Holocaust. I was tentative to choose this poem because of this strong historical context which portrayed incorrectly would be hugely inappropriate. However i continued to research and found that an allegorical approach could be very fitting. Within the poem Plath refers to a cat and a phoenix (in the way she describes the resurrection) this reminded me of how the Nazi’s would describe themselves as a cat in a game of cat and mouse with the Jews. I thought this imagery was very fitting but decided to swap the mouse with a bird which could then be resurrected into a phoenix. This was now the foundation of the plot the animation would take. When it came to the actual creation and planning of the animation i had the idea to add subtle hints throughout the animation referring to the Nazis. For example the opening shows a flock of birds flying in formation, what you may not notice is how the birds start in the form of a swastika. Additionally the colour scheme reflects the colours used in propaganda posters, deep reds, black and white with occasionally a beige background.

Reflection

Research was a very important part of this project as it enabled me to have more understanding and respect for not only the people i was portraying but also the author, Sylvia Plath. Plath actually committed suicide so the poem was just as much about her mental wellbeing than it was about ww2. In fact it was the convergence of the two that makes the poem so interesting as she relays her suffering to that of those from the holocaust and claims in this that history is not for anyone to own. I wanted to respect her and her poem so research was integral to portraying my own interpretation.

In terms of storyboarding I would just note down all my ideas as i was having them and as a result would have several storyboards all slightly different but telling the same portion of the story. Through this i was able to try and come up with the best version of my animation that i could. The sequence of events was quite simple to follow as it followed the poem.

Numerous artists from a wide variety of backgrounds and styles helped in my research to find an aesthetic that would be suitable. This included the artists such as Hans Schweitzer who created Nazi propaganda to Olivia Lomenech Gill who illustrates fantasy creatures.  I felt it was important to delve in to a variety of styles from different periods of history to hopefully create the best version of the animation that i could. 

I found the sound really difficult too choose, I really wanted it to reflect how ‘Peter and the Wolf’ has certain instruments to reflect each character. As a result I wanted it to be classical and a true parallel of the characters. The final sound i chose is very simple with plucking strings. The aspect of the strings almost represents the innocence of the bird whilst the repetitiveness  and its eerie nature symbolises the birds destruction as a result of the cat. I chose to use a cacophony of drums for the Phoenix emerging as it represents a change in the birds character from small and delicate to strong and vengeful. This was also a result of my research in the foley and how not every sound needs to be an exact recording of real life. I did choose however to have a recording i took of birds chirping running beneath the sounds throughout the animation as i felt it would provide a nice natural balance to the intense music.

A part of the process i did struggle with was the choice of background. I had so many different ideas which i liked all of. However i felt that because i had delved quite far away from the story as a poem itself it might be nice to put textured paper as the background. In this way the poem then remained written on paper just through animation and not words.

Evaluation

Unfortunately i was limited in terms of what techniques and process i could use to create the animation due to the outbreak of Covid-19 however i was quite lucky to have access to procreate so  i was able to draw out and create the animation. Given the opportunity i might have explore more tactile processes such as etching. I also think i could have furthered my animation by giving my characters more personality, this could have been done by animating my cat much more villainously in the way it walked and prowled around the bird. The bird could definitely have done with more personality, however it does also suit a blank exterior and then becoming bright and vibrant in its Phoenix form. Additionally i would have liked to create my own music for the animation but due to time constraints ultimately did not have the time to create something that i felt would do the animation justice.

https://vimeo.com/417594072

iMovie

I’m editing my video using iMovie 

Below are two screenshots showcasing the layers of sound I have applied to my animation 

My final music choice

This was my final music choice.i chose it because the plucking of the strings is quite nice in the sense that it’s quite calm but there is also a sense of foreboding in the background as well which I really like.

FMA

I really wanted some kind of music that could underline the animation and disguise the breaks in my foley sounds. I used FMA which was suggested to me by a fellow peer. I wanted it to be classical because I wanted to reflect the same story telling through sound that Peter and the wolf utilises. Below are some screenshots to evidence my research and some of the music I thought might be appropriate.

Lady Lazarus read by Sylvia Plath

I also considered having lady Lazarus read over the animation by Sylvia Plath but I feel that because I have taken the animation on more of an allegorical route I don’t think it would suit the scenes anymore. If I had tried to follow the poem more then I would have had her reading as I could have followed the narrative with the images. However I chose to follow the imagery of the cat and Phoenix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq2LOhaf97o

Foley research

I also researched how Disney create their foley which isn’t always meant to be realistic such as symbols indicating a punch rather than some one actually making a punching sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXzXw3envgk

Foley research

I researched foley and how I can create my own artificial sounds to fit my animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO3N_PRIgX0

Foley

On my one outing of the day I realised it would be the perfect opportunity to record some foley for my animation. I recorded a general background sound which included the sounds of birds chirping and trees rustling in the wind. I then recorded my dog running through the grass and over these wooden crunchy things which I could use for the cat moving/running. Unfortunately I could upload the actual videos but here are some screenshots from the footage. I ended up videoing because I didn’t have a sound recorder and then when I upload them to my animation i will separate the audio from the footage.

Colouring in the cat and adding the Phoenix

I actually really like the white that flashes around the fire even though it was an accident so might keep it although I still want to have the shadow involved so will haft to add that in again.

When I applied the background It highlighted that the cat isn’t actually white whereas when it was on a white background it was. As a result I considered changing the background but I actually really like it so as a result I am going through all my animated slides colouring in the vat white and blending the white with the grey.

Background experiments

This is my favourite background but I feel like it’s too dark at the moment at it looks a bit to much like parhcment

Below is the same background but now at a colour level I prefer

Below is an idea that I like with a burn piece of paper. I like it because it reflects maybe a burning Phoenix aesthetic but I don’t think it would suit being the background across the whole animation

Paper background inspiration

I’ve decided that because I’ve taken the poem so far from the original concept by deciding to explore the allegory in the poem that I would bring the poem back round to its source by having a paper background. As if this is the poem being written but visually instead of through literature.

Peter and the wolf

Peter and the Wolf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfM7Y9Pcdzw

I have been researching how I can integrate sound into my animation. One of my first thoughts was of peter and the wolf where each character is represented by an instrument which perfectly Summarises each character and their motives in the story. The bird is delicate and fluttering creature and is one of the protagonists of the story and is resultantly represented by the flute. On the other hand the antagonist which is the wolf is portrayed by three french horns which creates an intimidating and almost aggressive character. These oppositions create distinctive character traits and resultantly is is easy to differentiate the hero’s from the villains and all the characters in between.

‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath: a close reading 

• Article written by: Mark Ford
• Themes: Exploring identity, Gender and sexuality, Literature 1950–2000
• Published: 25 May 2016 

Mark Ford explores the themes and allusions in Sylvia Plath’s 'Lady Lazarus'. 

‘Lady Lazarus’ is one of a group of poems that Sylvia Plath composed in an astonishing burst of creativity in the autumn of 1962. That summer she and her husband Ted Hughes had separated after seven years of marriage. Plath found herself alone with two very young children in Court Green, the old thatched house in the village of North Tawton, Devon, which she and Hughes had purchased in August of 1961. Hughes was mainly in London, where he had embarked on an affair with Assia Wevill. Many of the most famous poems eventually published in Ariel (1965) were written in Court Green in the wake of these disastrous events, although the only time Plath could find to write was between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. each morning, before her children awoke. During the extraordinarily productive last week of October (in which she turned 30) she composed 11 poems, including the first drafts of ‘Lady Lazarus’. These poems, like her letters from this period, record how her moods swung from elation to despair, from extreme rage to excited belief in her ability to ‘make a new life’, as she put it in a moment of optimism when writing to her mother on 16 October: ‘I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.’[1]

Manuscript fair copy of Sylvia Plath's 'Ariel', dedicated to Al Alvarez

Plath’s fair copy of ‘Ariel’, written in October 1962.

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Usage terms © Estate of Sylvia Plath. No copying, republication or modification is allowed for material © The Plath Estate. For further use of this material please seek formal permission from the copyright holder.

The art of dying

The title ‘Lady Lazarus’ refers to the New Testament account of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Plath’s inspiration for this may have been the lines in T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in which the dithering hero imagines himself as ‘Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all’. Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ also, however, explicitly refers to her own biographical history. In the summer of 1953 she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and hidden in the crawl space beneath the downstairs bedroom in her family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she was eventually discovered by her brother Warren and her mother Aurelia. It is to this suicide attempt, as well as to a swimming accident that nearly cut short her life when she was ten, that she refers midway through the poem:

The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

The poem anticipates yet another dicing with death, ‘Number Three’, from which, she predicts, she will again emerge like the phoenix from the ashes, though this time as a vampiric, female avenger: 

                                                      This imagery of the Phoenix is what I essentially                                                             focussed                                    Focussed on in my interpretation

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

In fact her next suicide attempt, in the early hours of 11 February 1963, would succeed.

There is a charge

In her late work Plath often appropriates imagery from a startling and, at times, troubling range of sources in order to heighten the emotional intensity and expressionist violence of her poetry. She implicitly justified the various references that these poems make to the Holocaust in a letter of 21 October, again to her mother: ‘What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like’.[2] When, in the second and third stanzas of ‘Lady Lazarus’, she claims her skin is ‘Bright as a Nazi lampshade’, that her face is a ‘fine / Jew linen’, she is provocatively asserting her right to compare her ‘psychological’ Belsen with the experiences of those condemned to real Nazi concentration camps. This has outraged some critics, while others, such as George Steiner, have commended her development of a poetic idiom capable of responding to the horrors of 20th-century history. What makes her references to such atrocities so disturbing is their incorporation into a poetic performance that also deploys the language of advertising, mass spectacle and pornographic self-display – the ‘big strip tease’ that the ‘peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see’. The poem figures the crowd’s fascinated eyeing of her body parts and fingering of her blood as part of a debased, commercialised martyrdom. The reader, in a further irony, becomes uncomfortably aware that she or he is also one of the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ lured into marvelling at the terrible wounds and scars that the poem tauntingly chooses to parade; and that while the narrator apparently derides and parodies the ‘theatrical’ exploitation of suffering, ‘Lady Lazarus’ makes use of the very techniques that it mocks and elicits precisely the curiosity that it condemns, in order to deliver its ‘charged’ narrative of victimisation and revenge.

A huge focus of my interpretation is the Nazis and presenting my own version of these events through allegory and symbolism, as respectfully as I can. Therefore I have combined the two themes of the resurrection and historical context together. The historical context is represented through the cat and bird, who represent how the Nazi’s who described themselves as a cat hunting the mouse (Jews). I swapped the mouse however to a bird in order to combine the resurrection of a bird into a Phoenix as I felt this was poignant to the poem.

'Herr Enemy'

Plath wrote before radical feminism had begun to challenge the patriarchal assumptions that governed many aspects of Western society in the post-war era. A number of her late poems, however, mount a vitriolic – though at times conflicted – attack on the myths underpinning the conventions of male dominance. It is striking that in the drafts of ‘Lady Lazarus’ in the Plath Collection at Smith College, the male antagonist is initially presented not only as ‘Herr Enemy’, ‘Herr Lucifer’ and ‘Herr Doktor’ (that is, an evil doctor in a Nazi concentration camp), but as ‘My Great Love’.[3] Plath revised such ambivalences out of successive drafts, and chose to develop Lady Lazarus into a ruthless heroine rather than a wronged and grieving wife. Yet it is clear from the introduction that she made to a recording of the poem for the BBC in December of 1962 that Plath conceived of her speaker as performing her anger in a deliberate, self-conscious way, indeed as a stage in a regeneration myth: 

The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.[4]

Despite her incandescent rage, Lady Lazarus never manages to imagine herself escaping entirely from a relationship with ‘Herr Enemy’: he is needed as both witness to her appalling immolation (‘Ash, ash – / You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there –’) and as one of the future victims of her reincarnated vampiric self: ‘Beware / Beware’ she threatens him, assuming the role of the transgressive visionary seer of the end of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (‘And all should cry Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair’). This allusion helps to give the incantatory rhymes of Plath’s closing lines (‘Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware / red hair / like air’) a dangerous uncanny power, as of a spell or a curse.

Integrating camera movement and transitioning one scene to another

I thought that the easiest way to imagine the angles moving was to begin by circling the heads and animating the circles to move around in the way I wanted the animals to move. I also increased or decreased the size depending on which animal was going to get larger and which was going to get smaller. This helped me see what it was going to look like and wether I needed to make any changes earlier on.

I then began illustrating the actual animals in roughly so I could get the gist of the outcome. I then added detail and grass around each of the animals.

This is the final outcome which will blend into the end scene. I am contemplating rewinding It as well and having the sequence the opposite way around. I will experiment with this in the editing process.

New animated scene

This was a scene I previously storyboarded but was unsure of how to actually animate it. However I decided to stick with one of my earlier initial ideas and have the cat bearing down on the bird in the grass. The outline is quite basic and although I decided that I would not give the cat a face I decided it was necessary for this scene. This is because it’s quite a simple outline and it’s hard to read the cats intentions with its face buried in the grass.

Currently I’m struggling to figure out how to have the Phoenix emerge but this is my progress so far

Animation progress

So far I’ve improved on my past progress by adding in the cat to be caught by the Phoenix and changing the design of the Phoenix to make its feathers more fluid and natural. Currently the speed is an issue, however when I take the animation out of premier pro and in to an editing software I can experiment with speeds. I also think I need to work more on the ending with the bird flying out of frame as it’s not quite as fluid as the beginning.