So this pretty cool compilation of short animation popped up on Metafilter. It’s a side project of a bunch of pros and students, based around the theme of “ghost stories”. Lots of pretty work in a bunch of different styles.
Late Night Work Club presents GHOST STORIES from Late Night Work Club on Vimeo.
It kinda made me want to animate a short. I tried to resist this urge, but about halfway through, it was too much. Animator brain had woken up and was digging around in the ideas sitting around to see if anything could be done in a scale that makes it a semi-sane project.
Then animator brain found an idea I’d filed away explicitly for a short film: appropriate the dense, beat-driven obliqueness of this trailer for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.
I really love the way it leaves you with an impression of a story. I’ve never seen the film, and may never, but I love this trailer. The slow drive up to the mansion threads through the whole thing, holding it together and being obviously very important. You stop blinking, focused on this rapid montage of images; the music creates a mood and helps stitch everything into one piece.
I wanted to see if this trick worked with a very, very different soundtrack. So I ripped the video, threw it into Premiere, and mashed it up with the first thing iTunes played that had a very very constant beat.
Yeah, this works. There’s a really awkward bit 2/3 of the way through where I chopped a big chunk of the source track out and really didn’t bother trying to hide the seams; it wasn’t worth it for a quick experiment like this.
Now to decide if I want to come up with a feature-length story, throw 95% of it away, and do about 100 separate scenes with pretty much no re-use possible between them. Or less if I keep it shorter. Which might mean the slow build of one continuous shot through the whole thing loses its power, I dunno. I’ll find out if I ever get to the point of making boards, I guess.
edit. Next step in this feasibility study: grab an animated feature, edit it like this, see if it actually works. The eye takes a little longer to make sense of a moving drawing than of a moving photo, as a rule, and it may not be possible to cut this rapidly and keep things legible. I’m torrenting ‘Treasure Planet’ as a test subject, and will have it handy the next time I feel like playing with this idea…