My MA Proposal

For my MA animation I want to make a homage to the colour blue. Blue is the strangest, most magical and changeable of colours.

Megaman was made blue because it was the colour with the most shades on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In the book ‘River Boy’ a painting of a river, all in blue, hides a secret second image.  Yves Klein painted over 200 blue paintings. He felt blue represented the immaterial, space, and the infinite, and I can see why.

In my own work I’ve found blue is the only colour other than grey that looks like a natural bridge between black and white. In fact, in painting in grey I’ve found something interesting. Most of the time grey looks like either brown or blue; and brown isn’t even on the colour wheel. It’s a very strange colour.

For my Masters, I would like to make a film that shows the malleability and strangeness of blue paint. Specifically watercolour. How it varies, strays and changes as you paint with it, and I want to make an animation out of it. Ever since I became interested in being an animator I’ve wanted to make a painted animation; like those of Petrov, Norstien, Leaf, and Orlova. To work in the realest and most beautiful form of animation I feel there is.

I would use this year to make my first real animation. Something that could be shown in festivals and art shows. Something to show my love for slow, intricate animations where colours are allowed to change, flicker and wave and speak. And to show just how much blue can do it. How mystical it feels. And how illuminating it is. Even at its darkest.

The film would be three minutes long. Showing forms of different shades of blue slowly moving and changing. I hope it will be deliberate and entrancing. That a viewer could get caught up in individual little movements. Like seeing different pieces fit together in a game of tetris. As the film comes to an end the shades of blue come together to make a peaceful visual silence.

I hope to use music in this piece. Something to give it a feeling of transcendence and to make it easier for people to get into. I want a classical piece. All piano. Relaxing and gentle.  But also mystical and inviting, and maybe a little scary. But all subdued Something between Patrick Hawes and Tangerine Dream. I would like the piece to be composed for animation. Timed to the piece if possible, so it all feels like one.

I feel the advent of digital animation has made us lose something. I wish we could have had an extra hundred or two-hundred years with the camera but without the computer. But it is what it is it is and I’m not going to become an artistic shut in pining for the past. I do want to show that the limits of what analogue art and animation can do haven’t been fully tapped yet. Especially in asphetitics and precision. If I am tasked to write an essay for this, I would make it about all the strange experiments animation did before digital homogenised everything and how there is still more that could be done.

I don’t want to fall into bitterness. Trying to pull history back. That would be fruitless. History never goes back. But This is path that excites me, and I want to see where it goes.