Exquisite Corpses by London Animation Club.

My daughter Coco Cripps, now 17 has just written and made the music, for London Animation Club’s group project, Exquisite Corpses. She wrote it in about 4 hours. I think it works really well and is in the spirit of the rest of the project, which was supposed to be a bit of fun.

Martin Pickles who runs London Animation Club, invited me to show my work recently, he also asked me to set the club goers a project. This was in response to regulars wanting to make a group film. Martin had already in mind a sort of consequence type idea, so I just set something based on an animation project I used to run at Farnham with Roger Noakes. 

Martin also asked me to animated the title sequence. This was quite fun as I hadn’t done any drawn animation for a while but, I did end up doing about half of it in Photoshop and After Effects.

For all you animation tutors out there, here is the project. Thanks to the Surrealists and Roger Noakes.

1. All sit in a circle. Then think of a famous historical human or animal. Write it’s name down in secret and pop it into the hat.

2. Each draw out a name from the hat, (if you pick out what you put in, put it back and take another.)

3. Give your name and email to the person on your right.

4. Go home and research your character, think of an animation idea that is a clever and fun way of representing the character. To keep the project quick and doable I am restricting your palate to black, white and red.

5. Keep you idea very simple as you are only allowed to use 100 frames that’s 50 drawings if working on doubles, 4 seconds of animation per person.

6. Send your 1st frame by email to the person on your left. If you fail to do so by the deadline you will be out of the loop.

7. The transition between your character and the next is going to take up quite a few frames and must be incorporated as an animated transition not a cut or dissolve and must be included within your 100 frames.

8. The transition is almost the most important part of your animation, so don’t fix your idea in stone until you have received the drawing from the person on your right. Incorporate your idea into the next scene, work out how your artwork will animate into the next person artwork, how dramatic of funny can you make this? You can abstract things if you want, but try and make it possible for people to try and guess who is who, when the film is running. No text or Captions allowed!

9. Do your animation, think concept, movement, timing and design and email, when you have finished.

London Animation Club. Runs first Tuesday of every month but not this May. Check out Facebook for info.