For Unit X I decided to create an animation inspired by the poem ‘Haunted Houses’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I chose to do this after reflecting on what I had enjoyed doing in past work. I knew that I wanted to work with animation again, after I enjoyed making my animation ‘Growing Old’ for the BBC Sounds summer project. Choosing to continue with animation was combined with my interest in Gothic literature that I explored in my CP3 essay, ‘Exploring Symbolism in Gothic Literature’. This combination of interests is what led me to the poem as a starting point for my work for Unit X.
Working on this project gave me the opportunity to create work with an audience similar to myself in mind. This being an audience of adults , who have an interest in poetry and literature and want to further explore older works they may not have heard of. Doing a project where I would consider myself part of my target audience has been really great as I have created something that I am passionate about both as a viewer and as a creator. This has also helped me expand my thoughts on audiences that I can do work for in my practise in the future, it is always interesting to explore audiences that are not as obvious in the illustration industry as things, such as packaging design or children’s books.
Doing research for this project was really interesting. The whole project started from a place of research by looking through old poems before finding ‘Haunted Houses’, which then led to more research about the author. I researched this project slightly differently than I have researched previous projects, by looking at larger areas such as, Dark Romanticism or Victorian Spirit Photography, as well as focusing on individual artists. I feel like this gave my research a much broader basis, helping to create a larger foundation of visual references for me to build my work on . I also feel that in this project ,because I used past work to influence my decisions ,I was able to focus my research on things I am very interested in, so I tailored this project to develop areas I already had interest in and some knowledge of. I also made an effort to seek out artists that have a similar ‘feel’ to their work that I hope I will be able to achieve in my own practise. Researching these artists, such as Rovina Cai and Jana Heidersdorf, has helped to improve my knowledge around the areas of the creative industry I am interested in and given me new goals to aim for within my own practice. Researching artists that I aspire to be like, helps to inform me on the areas that I am interested in trying to develop my own practise into.
The practical development of this project has also had a positive effect on my practice. This project focused entirely on developing my skills with animation. This is a really exiting area of work for me. It is something that I had absolutely no experience with before starting my degree and throughout this course have found a love for. Just throughout the animations that I have done over the last few years I can see my own development, although I still have much more that I can improve upon. I feel that with this project, and ‘Growing Old’ before it, I am finding my own style within animation. In this project I am happy with how I was able to translate my work from sketch to moving image without feeling like it became ‘stiff’. However, I still have plenty of areas for development within animation.
For this project I used Procreate to draw my animations and Adobe Premier Pro to put them together. These are methods that I would like to expand upon in my practise in the future by moving my animations into other programmes such as Adobe After Effects or TV Paint. This project will be really helpful for the development of my portfolio as I want a larger part of it to be moving image based, and I am happy I was able to do this with Unit X as I was not able to work with moving image in Authorship due to breaking my wrist.
My wrist is a lingering injury that I am still recovering from, and in this project I am really proud of the quality of work that I was able to achieve in spite of having a weaker wrist and the discomfort that it caused me when I was completing my work.
Moving forward in my practise and career I would like to work on developing my portfolio to reflect the type of work that I would like to do. To do this I will be continuing to develop animations, but I would also like to incorporate still image work that I enjoy such as printmaking.
This project has also incentivised me to work on the online presence of my practise more. I would like to develop this by working on my portfolio site, that I began to put together for this project, and working on developing my social media pages to become a professional reflection of my practise.
In conclusion, I am proud of the project that I have developed for Unit X this year. I feel that I was able to create work about a subject that I am very excited about for an audience that I am interested in. I was able to develop my practical abilities in animation, and become more knowledgable about areas that I need to develop further. This project has also improved my personal practise, helping to show me the direction that I want to take my work in the future, and the areas in which I need to develop as a practitioner to achieve these goals.
