"Poppy Hill"

    

"Poppy Hill" by Dmitri Burilov from Dmitri Burilov on Vimeo.

"An animated story about a gypsy baker, a rich traders wife and their struggle for love. It was told to me by my grandmother when I was very little, and now I found a way to visualise my own interpretation of it. Set in the deep forests of Siberia, in a town that has since became a legend. "

The desire was, to create a beautiful story of love between two characters, with a similar struggle to the Shakespearian “Romeo and Juliet” but with generally positive resolution. I would like the viewer to feel a positive range of emotions rather than sorrow. I believe I have achieved my goal as well as supplemented my storyline with elements of comedy. 

As the media I have chosen lino-printing technique, as it has provided me with a good range of textures and markings to visually enhance my work. Lino printing is not the easiest technique to use in conjunction with animation, but this was a significant experimentation stage in my personal development process and consequently very rewarding.

Prints were edited in Photoshop, where additional layers of texture have been applied and later animated in Flash.

"Return the Money and Sleep like a Bunny"

In the foundation of this animation, stood the desire to experiment with a new and exciting technique. After some consideration, I made a choice in favour of printmaking. I have explored printmaking in the past , but not in connection to

animation. I must admit, that when the decision was made, I had no idea about the struggle I am going to put myself through to achieve this end result.

I have searched for similar type of work on the internet, but nothing I have found had a similar look or feel. Consequently I had to rely on my own understanding and principles of work.

I had developed a desire and to delve in my cultural past so I started researching fairytale.

Fairytale have always been significant through our culture and civilization, as they still are the means of passing over considerable amount of information to the next generations. Consequently they have been part of my childhood and up to this point in my life, as the means of learning about the surrounding world, cultural heritage and the notions of morality. Eastern European tales and legends are significantly different from what one can come across in Britain, for example.

Not different in the conveyed morality principles, but in the range of the characters, what they represent and consequently the scope of the conveyed

information.

One of the important points of visual inspiration, were paintings by Ivan Bilibin. His works are rich in colour and imaginative designs. I would personally recommend having a look at his work, as it might prove to be a time well spent.

'Safiah's Box' Animation (group project)

The final collaborative film of the second year of my degree. The film is loosely based on a Malaysian folk tale, but the story was developed and changed extensively during the the project, so not much of the original tale remained.

 We shared equal responsibility with my colleagues on the subject of animation, while some elements were given to specific members of the group in order to play to their strengths. 


 My personal responsibility was Flash animation and on the further stage working with sound (Soundtrack pro). Both stages were very creative, but personally I enjoyed sound editing the most, as I find the process stimulating.


 I can not say that this project was a straight forward success but it was definitely a strong learning curve for me and my colleagues. We have learned a few important lessons during it and in the long-run all of it is for our benefit.

MTV2- Ident project.

A four week project from the Nexus studio. The task was to make an Ident for MTV2 music channel. One of the musical directions of the channel was Rock, and after some thinking I came to a decision to make my character a Rock on Fire (As Rock music, in the contemporary "design", tends to be a bit aggressive, I thought that it would be an appropriate interpretation.)

This project was my first real experience of Flash, consequently it did not go entirely smoothly. I believe that I have overloaded the file with information, which made the further editing impossible. Fortunately, it has occurred towards the end of the project, and not much harm was done. 

"This Darkness" (Yr2-Group Project)

 The initial idea was to make this work to look atmospheric and a little bit sinister and I believe that the it was achieved.
The original story was about an elderly gentlemen who is trying to remember his past by the means of a cassette player. The principle of the story has remained the same, but the presentation has been altered.
 The puppet represents the thoughts of the latter mentioned gentlemen; his body is manufactured out of bits of old photographs, which represents the way in which his memories stopped being coherent. The set, in a way, mirrors the character. It is composed out of small bits of wood as well as a piano that is covered in leaves and together they represent the autumn of his life.
 Stop-motion is an extremely intriguing process, and I hope that in the future I will be able to experiment with it a bit more. 

Sting Project. (2009)

After viewing a number of films where Pixilation was used I decided that I definitely want to experiment with this technique. I like certain rough qualities that it possesses.

The direction of my project frequently changed: I made various animated/drawn experiments and was disappointed with their results, consequently each time I had to find a better approach. It started with an attempt to animate the movement of microbes on a page. I intended them to appear on the page and morph in to the necessary letters, spelling out Animation MaidstoneUCA. I experimented with timing and movement but eventually I felt a bit unhappy with the idea. Next experiment was to enlarge the figures and make them in to proper characters: I wanted to make them jump but eventually came to a conclusion that it does not satisfy my creative hunger.

The assembly of my final project version begun with the inquiry in to Pixilation: I signed out a camera, some lighting equipment and a tripod and started shooting my self in motion.

The camera angle and the quality of lighting are the paramount factors that determine the outcome. I spend about 3 days trying to understand various software peculiarities and shooting the necessary footage. It was hard but results seem acceptable in relations to the levels of my experience. People kept getting in the way or I made a movement a bit too quick, as well as I wanted to convey certain emotion throughout the animation. I wanted to make it reasonably light, and fast flowing, considering that the animated part had to be of up to 12 seconds. Eventually I used the footage that combined the elements of stop-motion animation and pixilation technique. I had to use anything and everything of a considerable size that I could find in the studio.

The next bit was to finalize the integration of a logotype into the composition. Recently I have been using ink a lot, as I think that the fluidity of line that one can achieve is visually pleasing. So in this project I decided to use this technique even though I did anticipate some problems. Firstly it would be the drying time and secondly the outcome which would be constantly boiling. After some experiments I found out that the effect I manage to achieve is actually desirable. I decided that it would be reasonable to make the animated part last for about 4 seconds as it would allow the viewer to get adjusted to the motion that is happening on the screen and take in the information.

I wanted the logotype to slowly form on the screen so I scanned my ink drawings and added colour and type in Photoshop. This was also considerably time consuming, as the composition became more and more complicated it took more and more time. The next step was to combine these to parts in to one: it was done with reasonable easy in duration of several days.