In Spring 2010 I began working on "Black Caroline, White Caroline"(now titled "Pennipotens") an animated re-interpretation of a Flemish fairytale, first printed with illustrations by Edmund Dulac in 1916.
The original fairytale may be read at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25513/25513-h/25513-h.htm#Page_15.
I'm using a digital variation of a technique called cut-out animation (similar to the style used in South Park on Cartoon Network and Wonder Pets on Nick Jr) combined with traditional drawn animation.
Adobe Photoshop was used to prepare the images (six interns from UNC-Charlotte helped me with this process in the spring). After Effects was used to test the character movements. The animation will be created in After Effects and Toon Boom Animate 2 Pro at 1080p and printed to Blu-ray Disc. The interns who worked on this project were fantastic! They were UNC-Charlotte studio art students Emily Furr, Giovanni Gutierrez, Lauren Holiway, Ashley Owens, Brim Soh and Sammy Zheng. Elizabeth Carpenter will be working with me during the 2011 Summer Session to help produce and distribute the BDs and DVDs.
I've storyboarded the fairytale to focus on the complexity of the infanticidal mother character in a contemporary context. Aesthetically, this work is very similar to the digital collages I create in Photoshop and will stress both surrealism and symbolism with animal-headed characters situated in familiar contexts. An early scene test developed in collaboration with the interns may be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyG7Oq7cCww. (5/20/11: The final animation should be posted on my YouTube Channel in the next week or so.)
This work uses several images and many sounds that were contributed to the Creative Commons, therefore this work uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for an explanation of this license.
Examples of my digital print work may be viewed at http://www.EpicAnt.com.
This project was made possible, in part, with a research grant from the College of Arts and Architecture of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The project was also made possible, in part, by a grant from the Arts & Science Council and by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources, the Blumenthal Endowment and the arts council of Cabarrus, Cleveland, Gaston, Iredell, Mecklenberg, Rowan, Rutherford and York (S.C.) counties.
Production Stills
