As development work for my silhouette dancer animation I made a Plasticine figurine and was considering to make a stop motion by casting a light on it and making a shadow. This turned out to be too complicated to do as there were leaps in the dance and I wasn't sure how to capture that. So then I decided to experiment with the scanner and see the effect I got from it. Here are the outcomes:

Meet Ayla. 

She is a girl that has grown up living the beach bum life and has to finally start a life in the big city. It's all still a really rough idea, I just enjoyed making doodles of her. 

Sea animals done in biro.

Sketchbook pages.

I discovered a blog by Will Terell and that inspired me to loosen up my drawing, break away from keeping everything realistic so I did some studies of different facial features and hands. I found it to be very liberating to draw in this way and will post some character designs up soon. 

* Link to the Will Terell's blog: http://willterrell.com/

 The final animation.

Throughout the Foundation course I explored different aspects of art that were very new to me but the one thing that has fully grasped my attention was animation. The ability to make something move fascinated me; it was a way to bring your drawings to life. Over the course I experimented with very traditionally based animation exploring the movements of different life forms. I then decided to expand and push myself into a more ambitious project. I have always loved the fluidity of dancers and the stunning grace they portray. The perfect balance and poise they achieve fascinates and greatly inspired me. I wanted to capture the elegant flow of dancers in a similar style to Ryan Woodward’s ‘Thought of you’.

Floris Neususs’s photograms heavily influenced my work. The figures are ghost-like, haunting and they seem to convey a sense of longing, a need for a connection with another world. The figures have been positioned in beautiful feminine poses, and they appear to be in mid air flying peacefully or falling down. His work brings you closer to them and their plea, questioning the boundaries of life and death, or even the in-between. The actual method and processes of Neususs’s work is what intrigued me the most. He uses large sheets of silver bromide paper placing a model on top, this paper is coated with special chemicals which react to light thus ‘catching’ the shadow left behind by the model, the end result is a white figure on a black background and with reversal paper the figure would be black with a white background which appear to be more familiar and similar to the normal human shadow. It is a basic photographic process done without the use of an actual camera and explored professionally by numerous artists such as Susan Degres, Adam Fuss and Floris Neususs. 

Ryan Woodward's 'Thought of You'

Floriss Neususs Photogram

 Frames from the animation.

Hi, my name is Clara Anganuzzi and I am an aspiring animator. Recently I completed the Foundation in Art & Design in Falmouth and now I am moving on to the Digital Animation and Visual Effects course at Falmouth University.


For my final piece in the foundation course I created an animation of a silhouette dancer, she represents a lost soul forever looking for her substitute body but alas she never finds it and spends eternity in an infinite dance loop, stuck in limbo. Initially I wanted to produce the entire animation using silver bromide paper but that was almost impossible given the time I had and the costs involved.
I filmed a dancer called Aimee Baker in the studios at Tremough Campus. Together, we choreographed a dance that we felt suited my theme and what I was I trying to express in my animation. From that footage I took a frame to frame shot and then proceeded to edit each individual shot on Photoshop to get the photogram effect I was looking for.