Collage in motion
“Hart , kantig und einfach”
My road to working as a collage artist includes a long tangent in motion graphics. I was a part of the first big boom of motion graphics artists in the late 90's and early 2000's and a lot of the way I still think about visual culture and how one simply gets the work done goes back to that time. Mograph has changed a lot since the early days - point-cloud depth maps from still images, automatic rigging, realtime rendering, robust 3d packages built with designers in mind...The field is undoubtedly better now than when I started out. Still, when I spend time in the mograph world, I often find myself missing the good old days of "meat and potatoes" animation where you created strong, interesting compositions, set some keyframes, and made it all work.
All that's been bubbling around in the back of my mind, even as I devote more time to analog collage work. An issue that was always there when I was a fulltime motion graphics artist was that I wasn't making anything tangible. I love holding things. I love paper, books, prints, etc. Even as things I can't touch move me emotionally, or teach me things about the world, I want to make things I can hold. Enter collage.
But I miss animating! But I want something physical! Ugh, so complicated.
Or not. What if I made an analog collage, and also made an animation about that collage? Yeah, not a bad idea.
I started out by selecting a handful of collage elements from my morgue file - a couple of pages from old books, some painted pieces of cardstock, old letters, and whatever else looked interesting. I photographed the elements before I cut or cropped any of them, and set them up to be used as layers in After Effects.
Then I went about my usual process of building a collage and made “Hart, kantig und einfach” (the last image in the gallery above), the name taken from the book where I found the photograph of the houses.
The next step was to recreate this in After Effects, and figure out a through-line to take me from random scraps of paper to a finished collage. This was the longest part of the process, and most difficult. Shapes moving randomly around on a screen isn't that interesting. Here I lucked out by having a good friend who's also a kick-ass composer. Emily gave me a track based on an early, somewhat direction-less, animation and from there the project took off. We worked together through several rounds of animation, writing, and scoring tweaks to get here - and I'm thrilled.
It's a tiny peek behind the curtain of what goes into making a collage - or at least how I make a collage - and likely the first of more new animated work to come.