The Storm – Animation

During the last few weeks I have been finishing a book with selections of my work from the last 7 years including some drawings that were hidden deep in some old sketchbooks. All the mosaics tell a story and together a bigger story emerges. It is a sort of “concept album” . The book has been uploaded to Blurb and now I am waiting for the first book to arrive to check it all looks ok before releasing it.

As I was generally  “chained” to the computer, I was really glad to escape into the fields on several occasions and go for a walk. I was hoping to get some real-life footage and sounds of the crows that were gathering together to include in my animation of The Storm. But every time  I could have got a really good photo or video something would happen; once it was the batteries that failed, once I forgot to put the card in the camera and another time I slipped and fell face down in the mud!

Finally I took my partners camera with a telephoto zoom lens and found that most of the birds had scattered, however I managed to take a shaky shot of two single crows in the sky!

I decided I would make my own pictures of lots of birds and made some photo collages on my editor, which I interspersed between the cropped photos of my mosaic The Storm

Here are some of the photo collages:

The sound on the video is a mixture of some of the sounds I made on my animation “How the Sky Becomes Blue” , a recording of the wind, and a recording of a storm we had here a couple of months ago when the lightning  knocked out our internet for several weeks! I edit all my recordings in a great audio editor called Audacity. On it I can repeat sections, add echo, change the pitch or speed and a lot more.

But enough of all that! Here is the animation. Wear headphones for the best effect on your loudest setting (the sound has been processed quieter on You Tube)