This time I wanted to write my blog post about a video I worked on recently. It‘s a frame-by-frame animation with a very low framerate of 4fps using a very reduced grey-brownish color palette and a rough-looking art style. The topic of the video was how industrialization and the invention of new machines and technologies can be harmful to nature and the environment and we wanted to narrate this topic in an abstract way with fitting background music that was already composed for this video. While thinking of what I could draw for this video, I tried to think in a visual storytelling way. As the storyline idea for the video was showing scenes that slowly transition from a happy, peaceful mood at the beginning of the video to a dark, rather disturbing mood near the end of the video, I tried to use what I learned about visual storytelling to compose each scene.
For the first scene, I created a peaceful-looking little landscape that slowly emerged from outside the screen. For this scene, I used the lightest colors in the color palette and I kept the composition very open, simple, and uncomplicated, so the viewer would feel this atmosphere while watching this scene.
Even the raindrops that fall from the clouds a few seconds in seem light and airy so as to not destroy this light-hearted atmosphere. The flowers that slowly bloom right after should also put the viewer in a hopeful mood. Although the flowers are disproportionately big for the scene, they don‘t make the scene and therefore the viewer feel crowded yet.
This changes when more and more clouds come into the scene. The more clouds gather, the darker they become and so does the sky. By cluttering and darkening the composition, I aimed to make the viewer feel the more and more restless and uncomfortable mood of the scene. This feeling becomes even stronger as the flower petals, and afterward, the flowers themselves, disappear into the ground and the scene becomes cluttered by black clouds until the screen is completely dark.
As I was playing with the light-dark contrast in the scenes to convey a literal positive and negative atmosphere and outlook, I went with an even more literal visualization of this idea in the next scene.
A lightbulb suddenly lights up the darkness from the previous scene and, although it flickers while the screen goes dark again, it should give the viewer a small flicker of hope.
I drew the lightbulb to be in front of a rather bleak-looking brick wall to make the scene still feel constricted like the light bulb is in a closed-off, dark room.
As the lightbulb disappears from view, flowers emerge from the cracks between the bricks and due to the slightly lighter colors of the flowers, the visual seemingly brings back a bit of peace.
However, as the flowers start spinning, the scene feels hectic again as the light flickers to darkness again a few times and the flowers transition into gears. The harsh-looking shapes of the gears are in contrast to the soft shapes of the flowers, again giving off an unfriendlier, harsher feeling to the viewer.
The scene flickering to darkness again by hinting at the lightbulb going out or stopping to function concludes my part of the video.
