hannahfaulder

[hannahfaulder]

FINAL EVALUATION

Throughout this project, I was motivated by a want to celebrate, rejoice and engage in work that I feel is important: if not important to other people, then work that I feel is important for me to make, for myself. The past few years have been hard and transformative for everyone - I know that I’ve certainly struggled, but I have also changed a great deal, and hopefully this for the best. JOY! was unique because it was a project I first conceived in December 2021, as I was conducing research for my thesis paper. I was so engrossed and impassioned by the topics I was writing about, but I could not fit all of my thoughts into one essay, and furthermore, some of my ideas would not be suited to that format. At it’s core, I wanted to explore the idea of Queer Joy simply because I wanted to be joyful, and embody this spirit in my design methodology. I wanted to make something with warmth and character, that connected with the theme of human experaince which permeates all of my projects, and which allowed me to navigate my own identity as a queer person, and it’s relationship with my design work.

Despite my Major Project being conceived in the mists of queer theory texts as thick as my arm, and a slew of academic jargon, JOY! was something I approached with little consideration for the research side of the process: perhaps because I’d already spend months in the trenches, thinking about the abstract, and other pretentious things. Although I cared for the research greatly, and I was shocked to find such little writing about the topic of Queer Joy, this was not the reasoning for creating JOY! I missed my community, I missed the euphoria of experiencing Queer Joy, of not being able to access my most whole, most alive version of myself. During the process of my project, I was not yet out as gender non-conforming/non-binary in university, and I had only told my closest love ones about my pronoun change. This project was my outlet of joy, love, community, confusion, self-doubt and self-acceptance. My only disappointment with this project was that I could not finish it in the original time frame, as I fell sick over Easter Brake, and then contracted Covid upon my return to Bournemouth - compounding the sense of burnout and my struggles with mental health, which I have been experiencing over the course of this past year. I should not feel guilty for this; but I do still acknowledge that I struggled with motivation and time management throughout project, and ultimately received help through being granted mitigation.

Overall, I think that I have a very long way to go in my design practice, but I am incredibly proud of myself. JOY! is a project that I will cherish forever, and which I think turned out far better than I expected of myself. I certainly put myself outside what I am comfortable with, as I decided to take-on a new skill set in a medium I am already incredibly intimidated by: animation. With this said, however, I can quite confidently say that I have new-found love and respect for stop motion. Despspite all of my personal issues holding me back in this project, I did work very independently, and at the end of it I have created a tender, personal animation which answers the question I first formed at the start of this project: Queer Joy is freedom.

[hannahfaulder]

FINAL ANIMATION / JOY!

[hannahfaulder]

More process: matching audio to animation, making sure everything flows nicely and syncs together. Made final cuts and edits to the audio, too. I also added in royalty free music (Gaze of The Void by Lema, sourced through Epidemic Sound). For the background music I wanted it to almost sound like white noise or vinyl static. Something that added to the soundscape but did not pull away from the voices.

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Animation with new slides - the transitions are smoother, and there is more time filled-out. This also helped with editing the audio.

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A look at the animation process - added a white background, started playing with pacing and doubling up on some of my slides to lengthen sections. At this point I had added the extra stills needed to fully round-out this animation, and all together it rounded out the time nicely to 1 minute.

[hannahfaulder]

Second animation run - slowed down to 8 frames per second, which creates a nice pace. At this point however, I realised I needed to create a few more frames to really solidify the transitions.

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The very first run of my animation; just as all frames were transported into my Premier Pro file and exported. The set-up was too fast, so in total the animatic is only 5 seconds long. I nearly had a panic attack, until I realised I’d simply set the Still Image Default Duration (which is what dictates the speed of the stop motion) to 2 frames per second, instead of 12.

[hannahfaulder]

Illustration Process

Using a lightbox, I sketched out each frame of the animation following the process laid-out by Molly Fairhurst (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6FqwQpAFzQ). It was a laborious process, some of the illustrations being free hand, others traced from photographs - such as the scene of my hands holding one another. Once I had these sketches done, and I had filled in any blank space with extra stills as I worked, I moved onto inking them. I removed only some of the pencil lines, as I wanted these initial markings to still be somewhat visible, before colouring with ink and letting dry. Once all images were inked and dry, I traced the outlines and redefined with a thin black pen liner, which I think adds a nice layer to the illustrations.

This whole process took about a week, with a final total of 127 stills for what would be a 1 minute animation (yes, this did cause me physical pain when I realised how my work equated to such a small amount of time, but we hurt for our art, or at least this is what I will tell myself at night). After all this, I scanned the images and touched them up in Photoshop: cropping them to the right size, brightening and evening the colours, and removing any obvious marks. I didn’t want to over-edit them, however, and loose that hand-drawn quality.

[hannahfaulder]

Colour Palette And Ink Experiments

Before starting the sketches of my animatic stills, I wanted to lock-down the colour palette I’d be using, and what kind of technique I’d apply to the illustrations. I opted for a spectrum of pink, yellow, green, blue and purple that could be mixed into varying tones. I wanted a flat but bright and joyful colour scheme, with I would then illustrate over with thin, scratch black pen. I thought to use black ink for a thicker look, but I felt this looked too clean.

[hannahfaulder]

Storyboarding Transitions

My next step was to detail my traditions and the actual motions of my storyboard. Although the style of animation I have chosen is very much ‘everything but the kitchen sink’, there is a certain level of care and attention to detail needed to pull-off the charming, hand-made feel (otherwise it may look like something a little kid did and not an illustrator in her 20′s, and we wouldn't want that, would we?). I used sheets of tracing paper to map-out the basics of these traditions, and I found this step particularly useful, as my ability to visualise the outcome was much more solid, and I could make more decisive actions during the next step of actually rendering the frames. In the end, I drew about 40 slides on the tracing paper, and when it came to drawing the final stills I would double this number and then some.

It is also at this stage of my project that I realised I would only be able to produce one short animatic - rather than the three or one longer version of this project - in time for my new deadline. This is to a standard that I think is good. This decision was a hard one to make, as I worried that I would not generate enough content worthy of the brief. However, it did allow me to focus my project down to the very core question: What Is Queer Joy?

[hannahfaulder]

Storyboarding, Draft 2

I went back into the final three audio clips I had settled with, and created a more detailed plan for each storyboard, referencing the audio I was drawing upon under each still so that I could better track the timing of the animation. At this point in my project, I was still aiming to animate all three storyboards, but thought that I should go back to one long animation (roughly 3 mins) instead of three separate 1 min animations. It was also during this process that I decided to move away from character portraits, and concentrate on interpreting the interviews through visuals. This was a crucial point in the project, as it helped me push through the burn out and art block, and finally begin to visualise the end goal of the animation.

[hannahfaulder]

Hand-Styled Type

Something that I really enjoy and want to explore more in my illustrative work is hand-rendered typography. For this project, I thought that it would suit the styling of my animation, and add to that personal, self-curated feel that I’m aiming for. Shown is only a selection of my experiments: I tried a mix of more illustrated type forms, my own hand writing styles, and something in-between. I also took this opportunity to experiment with watercolours. Originally, I had intended to use watercolour when rendering the animation stills, however after this test I thought that it was too easy to muddy the colours on the page, and that watercolour provided a painterly feel that was a little too much for what I wanted. I decided to use inks instead, as they were slightly more controllable, and provided a more stable medium that was similar to watercolour but even more vibrant.

[hannahfaulder]

Initial Storyboarding

As I listened through and re-edited my audio, I scribbled out some rough ideas in storyboards. It was mainly first impressions, what descriptions or phrases really stood out to me, and how these might translate into something digital. I wasn’t concerned with transitions or anything too detailed at this stage of my project: however, I did begin to think about typography, as I knew that I wanted to create something hand-drawn to fit with the more personable style of my animation.

[hannahfaulder]

Character

I thought abut using portraits of the people I interviewed in the animation; a reference to the research I did (see Anna Ginsberg or Lily Scott), where similarly animated interviews dualise abstracted self portraits to fill-up visual space when there is no other imagery to draw upon from the content of the words. However, I feel that this idea may not translate so well to my project, which utilises such a small amount of time. I’d rather emphasise the words being said, express them through more abstract imagery, so that the message may be better absorbed. Moreover, I do not have any video from my interviews (as most were done online, and some people either did not have the streaming capability, or were uncomfortable with me taking this data).

[hannahfaulder]

Cutting & Sticking

As I began storyboarding for my animations, I realised that creating four animations was perhaps too many, and I was already biting off a lot of work. I decided to cut the second question in my lineup (How Do You Express Your Queerness?) as I felt that it was the least relevant to the overall purpose of my project, which is to define/celebrate Queer Joy. I did also have the most difficulty finding a way of translating this audio into animation, which influenced this decision. 

It’s because I decided to cut this clip that I went back to the remaining three audio files to tidy them up. Due to my approved mitigation request, I found myself provided an opportunity to return to the work I had previously been rushing due to unknown deadlines. I wanted to make sure that the audio was clean, concise and more striking, which made it easier for me to work with it and finalise my storyboards.

[hannahfaulder]

Heartstopper & Queer Joy

Since I started this project, the Netflix adaptation of Alice Oseman’s ‘Heartstopper’ graphic novels arrived on our screens. Where straight audiences might watch this little eight part series and see a heartwarming, sweet love story which just so happens to centre queer kids - the LGBTQ+ audience will instead find themselves weeping uncontrollably throughout its run... at least, this was my experience (and, thanks to TickTock’s invasive algorithm, it appears that every other queer person on my feed had the exact same reaction).

What is hard to express to a straight audience, the nuance which is lost on them, is that this show evokes a duality of seemingly conflicting feelings. Myself and many others in the queer community who sat down to watch ‘Heartstopper’ were left both with an overwhelming feeling of joy, and a sinking feeling of deep melancholy. We shed joyful tears for younger queer audiences, who would now have such a tender piece of media to connect with. A show that reflected back at them queer identity: not as a death sentence, a painful burden or something to be ashamed of, but as something that is normal, beautiful and which proves that you can find the kind of love that fairytales, Disney and Hollywood has previously allocated only for cishet people. And moreover, that the show had such a range of diverse characters - for me personally, it meant a lot that the character Nick was bisexual, as representation for us, especially male bisexual people, is so abysmal. I cannot describe in words how much it meant to see someone like me on screen; and how deeply I related to Nick during the scene of him watching ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, and realising he liked both Kira Knightly and Orlando Bloom (which did make me laugh from teenage embarrassment).

The second, perhaps more impactful emotion of melancholy, came from the knowledge that us older queers did not have these same pieces of media when we were young; and that even five, seven, ten years ago this kind of show would never have been produced. I’m only twenty, and I came out as bisexual when I was seventeen - young to queer people in the generations before me, but to my fellow Gen-Zers, this is incredibly late to realise your queerness. A large part of why it took a long time for me to realise I was bisexual, never mind come out to people as such, was because bisexuality wasn’t widely understood (still isn’t), and also because it required me to acknowledge the amount of pain and discrimination that came with that identity. This was also beautifully demonstrated in the show as Nick types ‘am I gay?’ into Google (all to relatable), only to be bombarded with news articles about hate crimes and suicide rates in the LGBTQ+ community.

I think many older queer people mourned for the younger versions of ourselves who only had token characters and harmful stereotypes to look at as examples of queerness. However, it was more than this - queer people, we’re born behind enemy lines. The bank, the park, the supermarket and the street are all straight spaces. You are assumed straight until proven otherwise, expected to conform and conduct yourself in a certain way, adhering to the gender binary and the patriarchal society crafted-out for us by previous generations. For a straight audience, ‘Heartstopper’ is just another teen love story: for a queer audience, it changes everything. I think that this duality is how I view Queer Joy - it is both the overwhelming love and happiness for our identities and our communities, and the sadness of knowing these identities are not yet liberated within society.

[hannahfaulder]

Mitigation

Due to the physical and mental pressures I’ve been under, it was advised to me by Sally to apply for mitigation. I was originally very hesitant, as I was worried more time would only truncate the anxiety I’d been festering in; however, with the perspective that mitigation could provide a kind of safety net for me, and the ability to not rush my work, it did take a weight off my shoulders when my request was accepted. I will be using this time more efficiently, to really lock-down my storyboards and animate the project properly.