Written, Directed, Produced, Animated and Post Produced by Ste Balza (www.giallovagare.art) , Matthew Joyce and myself. Violet Noise is a coming-of-age short stop-motion animation film where Character and Light interact in an aesthetically-pleasant, technically-fascinating way, to (light) paint a story of self-acceptance.
Created @ Bau - Centro Universitario de Artes y Diseño de Barcelona (Barcelona)
Music by Jaime Lavradio
Music Recording and Sound Design by Mogno Studios
Behind the Scenes:
Developing puppets from noise, Transforming sound into colour, and Creating structures to Manipulate Light
A bit of Synesthesia
Ste, Matthew and I often discussed how music moved us, how each of us, somehow, would like to belong to that "musician world".... but it was as if we discovered another way to make music - through visuals. As Matthew says "Sound and visuals go hand in hand. One cannot be completely appreciated without the presence of the other and animation brings these two things together".
And so we embarked on the journey of creating a project “where music is central”. Sound became essential in our story. But how to represent it? Visually, of course. We discovered that frequencies and colours are strictly connected: particular sound frequencies are associated to colours (think 'white noise'). Along this spectrum of “coloured noise” we came across Violet Noise - an irregular disturbing high frequency.
Hence, Violet was born - along with her violet-light coloured irregular mistakes, the ones she keeps on trying to hide away and which seem to disturb the tune. It seemed fitting that she should have violet hair too.
A bit about light painting Animation
Light painting is the art of creating photos by setting long exposure times on a camera and using a moving light source to “paint.” Light painting photographers opens a camera’s shutter, and keep it open, as they draw around in the air with, say, a torch. An animator, however, has to do the same but for multiple frames.
Our passion and curiosity for light painting brought us to explore the possibilities of interacting light with a puppet on set. In particular - we wanted to represent such immaterial concepts of fear of judgment, self acceptance and internal liberation (central themes to our story) connecting with something more concrete, something that we can look at, grasp, feel, connect with. We found out that combining the evanescent effects of light painting with the materiality of a puppet and making them interact could create the atmosphere we were looking for, and tell our story.
It is uncommon to see light painting animation shot alongside puppet animation. In fact, light painting animation is usually shot in a lower amount of fps (frames per second) which makes it more fitting to adapt to the erratic and unstable nature of light. Our film explored how we could create a more stable and fluid animation with light to accompany our puppets, shot in twos and even ones. And so the experimental journey began!
Below, a visual summary of free-hand light painting material that was used (mini LED lights and watch batteries) and from-scratch-building of the structures for laser-cut stencils used for some of the light painting (we digitally designed and laser cut over 250 stencils),
This was, without a doubt, a one-of-a-kind, adventurous, challenging and exciting project due, particularly, to the amount of experimental techniques we tried out... most of the times directly on set! Heck, we were shooting most of our film on 20'' long exposure shots! Our perfectly pre-planned (naive) animation calendar went down the drain after day 1 when we only got half of the animation that needed to be done. It was, however, from this stimulating, up-beat environment that there emerged some quite interesting and experimental animation. We quickly realised that having a 20’’ exposure allowed us to play around with our frames, such as creating blurring movements, fading scenes (we call this the ghost effect), and light flashes, that ended up being quite important in our storytelling.
