Daniel Cooper

The first version of ‘Moomin’ was a lot more colourful and combined shapes within the painted layers.This was inspired by a lot of the early experimental and abstract films which we were watching in our lectures.In fact it was those films that made my mind up to experiment in it and to leave out the straight forward storytelling I orginally had planned for ‘Moomin’.The bottom layer was to be the computer layer which you can see below while the next layer was the hand painted frames.The top layer was to be footage that I had filmed of my dog which was then edited and altered in Aftereffects.I really prefer version 1 to version 2 of ‘Moomin’ as I feel I was being creative and experimental in what I could do by combining film,paint and computer generated images from Photoshop.However my teacher didn’t like the lack of plot or the style of the film and I had to redo the whole film.This meant losing the complete abstract/experimental with no story type of film I was aiming to have.That’s not to mean that version 2 doesn’t contain elements of version 1 because it does e.g.the combining of the paint layers with the film of my dog but I didn’t enjoy it as much because it seemed rather flat when compared with what I originally had planned for the film.Anyways here are some of the computer layers used in version 1 which tried to stay close to the paint effect as possible:

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The paint effect in ‘Moomin’ was achieved by taking each background frame and covering the paper in water with a brush.After that,I took a different brush and chose a coloured paint and dipped in water to make it less thick and painted a smooth layer of colour.After that,I added another layer of water and then took some white paint and watered it down before dabbing the paper.Then using tissue paper I dabbed the white paint to reveal the coloured layer.I didn’t allow any of the layers to dry until it was all done and after letting each frame dry for roughly 3 days,I got the effect you see below:

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For some layers I added tissue paper.I did everything like I did for the above but instead of letting it dry,I added a layer of flat tissue paper.Then once I had pressed down to let the water soak through,I took some coloured paint and watered it down before dabbing the tissue paper layer and then tidying up the gaps by dabbing it with tissue paper gently.These layers took roughly five days to dry but they look just as good as the normal layers as you can see by the layer below:

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Both versions of ‘Moomin’ can be seen in my film section on the right hand side.