For this project, we had the task of creating our own conceptual and creative response to ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ by Thomas Hardy which was to be expressed through motion. We had to work in small teams to do this and the aim of the animation was to draw the viewer into our interpretation of Hardy’s world and ethos.

We undertook some extensive research before diving into the project including watching the films based on the story and as a team, we decided that we wanted to take a feminine approach with our animation by basing it on the lead character in the novel; Bathsheba. One extract of the story that stood out to us was the scene where Bathsheba sends a Valentines card to Mr Boldwood. We thought this was a very powerful part and had a lot of potential to work with so we drew out various different storyboards and made an animatic based on this idea and thought of different ways we could portray our ideas. We also decided that we wanted to go with a collage style using cuttings of paper and stop motion to produce our animation following by editing it on After Effects to finalise it.

We initially thought that we could have a heavily feminine colour palette with pinks and reds to symbolise the female power in the novel but then after the first interim crit with our tutors, it was suggested that our test animations looked too “sweet” and “lovey-dovey” which we also agreed with. Although this raised us with a challenge of what to do next. We decided to stick with our original idea but put a twist on it. We went back to our research and came up with the idea of producing our own cyanotypes. Seeing as cyanotypes use negative images, we thought this could reflect a not so sweet and happy love story but by using real flowers to make them, it would still have a slight feminine appearance. After a lot of discussion as a team and with our tutors, we realised that it was going to be quite a lengthy process to produce loads of cyanotypes and then film our animation and we were already quite tight for time.

But we thought the idea was particularly strong, so we chose to go forwards with it which I am very glad we did. We had to put a lot of time and effort into it, but we all worked very well as a team to do so and we even had to face the challenge of Molly and I catching Covid during the editing stage but we managed to work around it and everyone in the team worked equally as hard to get the work done.

When producing the cyanotypes, we faced a few difficulties with lack of sunlight to produce the prints, so I made some ‘fake’ ones on Photoshop which I designed to look real. Luckily, we ended up not needing these as we had enough of the real ones which went successfully. However, looking back, I think we could have saved ourselves quite a bit of time by making more of the fake ones and then just making copies of those rather than spending full days waiting for the images to develop. Although we were very proud that we had managed to produce a variety of prints from scratch.

If we had more time, I would have liked to develop my After Effects skills a little more, so this is something I would like to come back to when I get a chance. I also think we could have incorporated the silhouette of Bathsheba a little more throughout the animation, I think we could have used her more throughout to add more variety to the animation.

Overall, I am really happy with the outcome of our animation. I like how we went for a creative and conceptual response, meeting the objectives of the brief. I am proud of how well we all collaborated to produce it, especially under some difficult circumstances at times. I have learnt a lot during this project from using stop motion and producing cyanotype prints from scratch to animating on After Effects and it has also sparked my new interest in motion graphics.