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These animations are from a 6 month placement I did at The Natural History Museum in early 2022. We worked with CCK (Community Centred Knowledge) as well as The Pepperpot Centre and St Thomas' Primary School to produce 2 animations celebrating African Caribbean stories about survival and wisdom.
Pepperpot Centre Animation
This animation was based on celebrating Caribbean folk tales, through conversing with knowledgeable Caribbean Elders who have experienced the Windrush (when many Caribbeans were asked to come to the United Kingdom for work) about a traditional children's folklore character by the name of Anancy. Anancy is a half man, half spider who enjoys getting up to mischief. However we looked at this character in a deeper compacity and explored how he was a symbol of survival for the enslaved Africans in the Caribbean.
We interviewed these Elders seen in the video with help of a particularly interesting origin story of Anancy and how he is said to have come to the Caribbean. Once we had spoken to the Elders and shared wisdom and stories, we took that footage and using a Wacom and Adobe Animate began the process of rotoscoping and boiling (an animation process where you draw on top of footage frame by frame to give the illusion of movement, or in the case of boiling, draw the same picture over frames).
We went back to the Pepperpot Centre multiple times during the making of the video in order to record audio for the film as well as facilitating workshops in order to show the Elders our process as it was important that we conveyed them visually in the best way possible. Towards the end of the rotoscoping process, I planned and facilitated an Art workshop with the Elders where they used watercolour paints, pencils and crayons in order to create the backgrounds for the video. The idea was they would use pictures of plants, fruits and patterns from the Caribbean to inspire them to create backgrounds, we would then make stencils in the shapes of Caribbean foods that we would place over their backgrounds and then with those cut outs we would create a collage with them for the backgrounds.
We had wanted to make it a collage as that would have given both animations we did a common theme to connect them. However the problem was with the clarity of being able to see the Elders as well as appreciate the artwork they had created. This led us to decide to have a mixture of plain colour screen (of the colours the Elder desired) and then more abstract patterns of the cut outs of the Elders artwork. We also played with the opacity and lighting to make sure that we reached a happy medium between the Elder on screen and their artwork in the background.
Children's Anancy Animation
We made this animation in collaboration with St Thomas' Primary School. We facilitated an Art workshop with some children who had African Caribbean heritage from the school and told them the story of Anancy and the calabash of common sense, we then gave them coloured paper and card, inspirational pictures of Caribbean infrastructure and story books from the Caribbean so that the children could create collages in which we would use to tell the story.
Once the children had made their collages, we scanned them onto a hard drive as well as uploading to our Sharepoint on Microsoft. We then began manipulating the collages on Photoshop and creating more collages if and when we needed them.
We also needed to find an actor to play the human Anancy. We used services like Fiverr as well as asking our own contacts and the museum's. We wanted it to be a male of African/Caribbean heritage who enjoyed acting. Once we had found our actor I filmed him using my phone (Samsung Note 20) and a phone tripod I had gotten for this. I took multiple takes and once I had chosen the best, I edited them on Premiere Pro. Once we had the footage of the human Anancy we then started using Premiere Pro to compile the animated sequences from photoshop and the footage I had taken. Because the workflow between Photoshop and Premiere we found it very easy to edit the photoshop file and have it update in Premiere.
During this time, we were also working on the rotoscoping for the Pepperpot Centre Anancy Animation. Because of this and the little time we had I wasn't able to be as involved with the beginning stages of the Children's Animation, other than facilitating the workshops with the children, helping with the collages, filming the actor and contributing to the concept design for the animation.
However, I wanted to make sure that I was ready for when I had completed my rotoscoping so I kept myself sharp by doing an After Effects course so that when the time came for me to help with the Children's animation I was prepared. I ended up working on both animations simultaneously as we had a lot of pressure on us to finish both animations and were running out of time. I added motion graphics to the animation to bring it more to life.
Whilst working on the animations in a visual capacity I also worked with a film student on the soundtrack using a combination of Ableton Live 11 and Logic Pro. We wanted to have background sounds and sound effects for the story. It was very difficult trying to find sound effects for the different parts of the story and some of the sounds we had to make and edit them in ourselves. I enjoyed the sound design aspect because I am interested in music and I was able to implement all of the techniques that I had learnt from teaching myself music production and working on a soundscape for an immersive multi-sensory journey.
The animations for this Anancy project will be released to the public in September 2023 when the Gardens at the museum will open.
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