We were given the Thomas Hardy novel- Far from the Madding Crowd to create our animation in response to. We started off the project by doing some research into the story, we read up on multiple websites explaining what happens in each chapter. We also watched the 2015 film of Far from the Madding Crowd to help us understand the story better and to get an idea of the scenes. This also helped us to think of ideas to form our concept for the animation. We found the visuals really inspiring. You can see a mood-board of screenshots from the film to the right.

We then did some style research. We looked into existing animation styles to get an idea of what we wanted ours to look like. We came across some really cool stop motion examples and we knew straight away that this was what we would be interested in doing for our animation. We created some mood-boards of examples that particularly inspired us, which you can see below. I thought that a collage style using scraps of paper could work particularly well. I made another mood-board of different collage examples, which give off an almost Victorian style, matching the era that the novel was set in.

Click here to see some of our further research on Thomas Hardy and Far from the Madding Crowd.

I created a mind-map (to the right) based on the Valentines scene in the novel and how it could be turned into an animation. In Bathsheba’s Valentine’s card, she writes a short poem;

“Roses are red, Violets are Blue, Carnation’s Sweet, And so are you.”

We thought we could go for a conceptual approach by basing the animation on this poem and extending it to symbolise Bathsheba even further. I really liked the idea of producing the animation in a collage style effect using small scraps of paper moving across the screen (similar to our style inspiration mood-board), making it look homemade just like the Valentine’s card was. Although we wanted to go for a conceptual approach, we wanted the animation to have clear links to the novel itself.

One of the themes of the novel was 'social tensions'. Another reason we decided to go with the Valentine's concept was because the feminine approach heavily links to social tensions in the Victorian era. The card Bathsheba sends is sealed with a wax seal that says 'Marry Me'. During this era (and still today), men would typically ask for a woman's hand in marriage but Bathsheba goes against this expectation by proposing herself. Bathsheba felt that she could send the card because she has a lot of power.

After we had decided on our overall concept, it was time to start developing storyboards of our ideas to help visualise the theme and bring it all together. I took the task of storyboarding on myself and I produced the storyboard below which shows the card being written and then sent and then being opened by Mr Boldwood. I drew flowers in every frame to represent our feminist theme and to symbolise Bathsheba’s power in the novel. I was happy with the outcome of this initial storyboard, I felt that the colours I chose really helped to represent our theme and style we were going for and clearly showed what was happening from start to finish.

The second storyboard below was also drawn by me. I drew this in a style that represents the collage/scrapbook idea that we intended to go for, showing how small pieces of paper will come towards each other to represent the Valentine’s card. We had the intention that the whole animation would be produced by hand with paper cuttings to give it that traditional, handmade feel. Then we intended to make minor edits digitally afterwards.

During the project we had an audio workshop where we got to play around with recording our own sound effects. This inspired our original idea with having scrunched up paper and writing sound effects. However, after the crit we thought that we should make the audio less friendly and happy and more twisted. Harriet from Wessex Museums suggested that we could use a song that featured in the 2015 film of Far from the Madding Crowd- Hollow in the Ferns (Craig Armstrong) in the background. Molly W edited the audio for the animation by heavily reverbing and editing the song to make it almost seem creepier and not as happy.

We also came to the conclusion that seeing as our animation was going to be quite abstract and conceptual, that with just the music it wouldn’t make much sense and viewers wouldn’t necessarily understand the link to the novel so we decided that we were also going to use a voice over. The Valentine poem from the novel wouldn’t have been quite long enough to fill a one-minute animation so we thought it could be a good idea to extend the poem but still have the original verse at the beginning and the end of the animation. We managed to get in contact with a student from Creative Writing who extended the poem for us but still keeping it inspired by the novel. This is what we worked with as the basis of our idea. We asked a friend of ours (Rachel Hawkins) to read the poem for our voice over.

After we had decided that going with the cyanotypes was definitely the way forward, we drew out a few more storyboards so we knew what we had to do when filming the animation. We broke down the poem into four separate sections and thought about how we could portray each section separately.

To the right is a storyboard that I drew out which shows how we would have different cyanotype prints of flowers on the screen and then they would move around and reveal the envelope with the Valentine letter coming out and text appearing. I showed this to my team, and we thought this would work really well for the final animation, so we decided to follow the concept when filming. Jemima also had the idea of having a white silhouette of a woman appear in the animation to symbolise Bathsheba, so she took on the role of creating that part. We combined this with what I had drawn out in my storyboard.

Overall, we were really happy with the outcome of the cyanotypes we had made completely from scratch. We found the whole process took a lot of trial and error, but we got there in the end. Some prints were a darker blue than others depending on how long we left them to develop but we thought this looked quite effective when all put next to each other in the final animation.

Instead of using the drawings, we decided to just have some fake cyanotypes popping up near the beginning of the animation. I edited the images of roses, violets and carnations and then I sent them to Molly P and she put them together, making them pop up one by one on the screen. We decided that this worked much more effectively than the drawings as these matched up with our cyanotype style a lot more.

Below, you can see the photos of the individual flowers that I edited and sent to Molly P to edit into the final animation.