Making an Animation

The Poet Fish of the River Allen
Hannah Small recounts the making of her animation during Lockdown, involving three generations of family creativity – Clare, Hannah and Eva Small. The film was shown as part of the exhibition Undercurrents at Walford Mill during the Green Festival in October 2021.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Lockdown April 2020.
Boredom was setting in, I was making face masks for nursing homes and playing too much x-box. In a moment of madness I signed up to do an online course with the Australian Film and Television School in production design for film and TV. It was fun. I signed up for a second, this time in animation, with the National Film and Television School in the UK. This required the submission of a 30 second animation to complete. At the same time WCT was asking for lockdown contributions to the River Project. The two things resulted in a 30 second clip of a fish swimming.

 

Then things got a bit out of hand.  Mum was also bored and painting happy clouds and trees thanks to Bob Ross, so I asked if she could make me a background for fishy to swim through. I thought the river by the museum would be nice. Several weeks went by and fishy had almost the whole of Wimborne to swim though as a background. He was also joined by Otter, Kingfisher, WCT Dave and alarmingly Me.  Mum had decided to practise figure drawing.

In the real world things had started back up, school was back and I was busy doing the school run and working again. A few months later and we arrived at another full lockdown. So out came the paints and I got all my stage lights, green screen, tripod etc. out of the loft where it had be abandoned at the start of Lockdown Number One.

Part of the course was run by Aardman Animations (Wallace and Grommit, Morph, Chicken Run etc). They had developed their own software for animation which ran on both a phone and computer, this meant I didn’t need a fancy camera. The whole thing was filmed on my phone, in my lounge and edited on my laptop. I used a mixture of stop motion and still images that I zoomed and panned to create movement.

Lacking a recording booth, my daughter Eva (who now had a starring role thanks to Mum’s foray into portrait painting) read the poem from under a king size duvet on my bed, who needs expensive soundproofing?

The Fish was almost complete!

At this point I got side-tracked by Regency Wimborne and all the alterations my clients had been stockpiling for the past year. Once that was taken care of Mum came over and I brought her paintings to life, much to both of our surprise it not only worked, but looked quite good!

The final animation was shown at Walford Mill to accompany the WCT production and exhibition about the River Allen.