Artefact project: Concept & Planning
For my experimental artefact, I want to create small looping animations that would create an ‘oddly discomforting’ feel. The idea is to create a ragdoll-like mass of human bodies and experiment with physics simulations.
These would be based on real-life scenarios, as seen in India, where the huge population causes accidents and harms the natural urban fabric of cities.
I picked 3 scenarios to represent this concept.
1. Ghazipur Landfill Mountain – This is a waste landfill site near New Delhi that has been filled over capacity for the past 20 years, making it a huge mountain of waste. It causes pollution in the air and water.
2. Mumbai Local Train – There are a number of deaths every year in accidents on the train station or tracks. A recent news story was about a few people dying after falling from a moving train.
3. Bengaluru Water Lodging & Flooding – Water lodging during rains is common in many cities in India, this both due to corruption and mismanagement from the authorities as well as illegal constructions by citizens.
Inspirations
For the style and mood, I decided to take inspiration from the style of the artist ‘Extraweg’ (Oliver Latta) https://www.extraweg.com/art
The ragdoll-like simulated bodies, moving in a clump, gave me an eerie feeling that I wanted to recreate in my experiment.
To show the massive scale of population (and not to complicate my idea further), I decided to use a tilt-shift-like effect for my compositions. Keeping an orthographic view from top with a still camera, similar to one seen in BUCK studio’s Night of the Mini Dead from Love, Death and Robots (2022)
Advanced Body Mechanics: Blocking Plus
For the body mechanics, I continued fixing my poses and timings in blocking. Adding more keys in places of longer spaces between existing keys.
I fixed some of the arcs and timings from previous blocking, but it need another pass before moving to spline.