Rationale

For our Kaitiakitanga project, we explored the idea of economic sustainability in today's society. Through our animation we wanted to convey the message that wealth is not sustainable. We chose to represent how easily someone can crumble from privilege to poverty by telling a story about the downfall of one man.
 At the beginning of the animation, the man sitting on the step is recently unemployed and has nowhere to live. To convey the slow change and decline we decided to represent the image as a time-lapse, having the environment subtly change alongside the protagonist to reflect his situation. In after effects we mostly played with opacity to give an impression of the gradual change you'd see in an extended time-lapse, almost with a stop motion effect.
He is seated with a box of his old possessions, all of which are useless to him now, to show the frivolity and the warped priorities of our society.Throughout the story, his living situation, wellbeing and the environment around him continues to decline, while the rift between the rich and the poor widen. We wanted to highlight the widening gap between the classes that is present in society, and show how many people ignore those who are in poverty. By using overdramatic silhouettes of happy people  moving through the window  contrasting with the main character, conveying the problematic issues surrounding economic stability and the obliviousness of those in wealth to the issues just sitting on their doorstep.

Final

Final submission for the Digital Illustration and Moving Image assignment.

Video Draft

This video is thirty seconds long and felt too fast once rendered out of after effects. We plan on extending it to 1:00 minute as it makes the changes more gradual and gives the audience more time to observe the events  to get the full impact.

Man Animation

Looking at the animation of the man separately. By slowly altering his possessions and appearance as he spends more time on the streets. After animation we realized the entire size of the figure was too small, so used a "Null" to constrain the proportions while re-sizing.

early in animation

half-way

towards the end

Animation Screenshots

Screenshots from one of our final versions of the story, with working on the side.

Background People

We wanted to include people in the window to work as a contrast of the poverty outside, and also show how people blatnently ignore the problem.

We went with silhouettes as we didn't want to detract too much from the central image, and used over-dramatic facial expressions to represent their contrasting success quickly to the audience.

Transitions of Items

Due to the time-lapse effect we're going for all of our items had to be altered to show the slow deterioation of the environment.
These are the best examples of that process:

The box of the protaganist's possessions

The poster on the wall

Garbage around the area also had several variations during the story as well.

Progress of Background

The background is constant across the narrative and is the side of a wall in an alley. We worked with various stages of degradation to mimic the downfall of the protagonist.

Wall fresh

Early wall

Middle wall

Gross wall

First Draft of wall at the beginning of the story

Background with stuff at halfway through the narrative

Progress of the Man

Initially the man was going to be shown in three main stages - fancy, half, and poor.

The digital versions of these:

Fancy

Half-way

Homeless

In the end to achieve a more gradual animation I placed all of these into the same file. So, while in after effects layers can slowly be removed/added and have a more cohesive look.

When colouring, we wanted to use a limited palette for the image so colours were taken and slightly altered from the background to bring emphasis to the figure. Starting with vibrant colours and working to duller tones to reflect the story and atmosphere of the image. The colours chosen were deliberately orientated more towards secondary colours than primary to give the image a slightly more whimsical look and add more impact.

Composition Draft

Working with symmetry we wanted to draw attention to the man in the centre, and have the environment around him deteriorate with him. 

In the actual copies we wanted to replicate the sketchy style, but balance it out with simple block colouring. 

The man is seated in centre in defeat, while surrounding items will deteriorate and comment on the events of the image

Initial Explorations

We decided to focus on the subject of the previous brochure of sleazy alley ways. To begin with we toyed with going through a city scene and focusing on alleyways or showing a scuffle, but it became apparent that to suit the subject of Kaitiakitanga, sustainability, showing the gradual degradation of a once successful man to poverty. The story began to focus on the parallels of the rich and poor, and the economic sustainability present in our world.

To begin with we decided to have a constant background and manipulate the surroundings for a time-lapse effect.

This is the first trial of the composition - with annotations for animation order

Inspiration

Artists who have still images and have small parts in motion. We liked these especially due to the style and how some pieces only have very subtle changes.
http://flexroman.wordpress.com/
http://www.rebeccamock.com/