Animating at the speed of light: The Uu
Animating at the speed of light: The Uu
Animating 345 frames in 30 minutes. Finding life in light.
A while ago I looked up from my breakfast and saw this patch of folded light sitting beside me. Hello, I thought. It shimmered back something indiscernible. I have fun trying to trace how these spots appear on our walls, so I did some detailed investigation (waving my hand around to cause a disruption) and found sunlight from my window was bouncing off of a plastic lid, and onto my wall. Before long it was gone.
Who is this light? How would this light move? how would this light socialize with other light? light is fast; can I animate fast? who can I deceive into helping me answer these questions? Here are my findings.
I’ve gotten so used to labour intensive processes that animating a frame every 2-4 seconds feels like cheating. Relative to other animation, it felt like we were moving at the speed of light (ha-ha). The Uu is a close collaboration with Anna Chandler with animation support from Marvin Lau and unbelievable sound work by Daniela Andrade.
These patches of light, called caustic light refractions, are comprised of rays which have been redirected into a shape of concentrated and diluted light. Commonly this phenomenon is seen and admired at the bottom of a swimming pool or the underside of a bridge. They’re also often on your bedroom wall or kitchen ceiling, but go less noticed. The quiet moments when you do notice are nice; you look up and see a brief addition to your wall. I started asking myself about these visitors, and found the Uu.
The Uu is/are the spirit of sunlight. Primarily they are one great presence, though ‘stray’ Uu will occasionally break off from the greater mass and indulge in independence, for a time. It is both a singular being and a culture of beings. While stray, they explore the walls of the world, the staircases, the roads, the cliff faces, and take on innumerable different shapes. If they encounter another stray, they may pass by unnoticed, or in this case, join together.
Sunlight is a challenge to animate. What exactly is it? It feels as though it is everywhere, yet somehow we occasionally feel like we can see it clearly. Just it, sitting there alone, surrounded by a less noticeable version of itself.
Our scrapped idea to create these refractions involved freezing blocks of honey for light to pass through, forming ‘organic refractions’. Obviously that didn’t work. To create the Uu refractions, we directed flexible lenses hit by sunlight. This is my smart attempt of saying we stood by a window with plastic container lids, rotating them toward the ceiling.
During this project, I was reminded that when you search for life, you need to accept what you find. Initially I wanted the characters to move in a smooth, slow, silky way; the way you would expect something so ethereal-looking to move. I wanted them to slowly melt into their next shape. Nope; after doing the first tests that was obviously not how these characters wanted to move. They are composed of light, which, famously, moves quickly. Small movements to the lenses we held drastically changed the shapes we were making. The results from our tests were these staticky kinetic characters that would not sit still, and so we embraced them.
Like the quick kinetic nature of the characters and of light itself, the animation process was fast, spontaneous, and intense. We created a ‘flight path’ that we projected onto the ceiling, and both Anna and I used a lens (plastic lid) to puppeteer an Uu to follow the path, capturing each frame individually. In making the flight path, Anna realized that like rays of light, the Uu should dart around in straight lines, rather than arching curves. We included a lot of easing into the movements, but micro movements were so hard to include that the Uu ended up moving pretty linearly. Each frame of this animation took between 2 and 10 seconds to shape, place, and capture.
As we got better at puppeteering, we found how to direct the kinetic movement so it felt continuous rather than random, giving a better sense of life to the character. While we guided the Uu, Marvin operated the equipment: capturing the frames from two cameras simultaneously, advancing the projected flight path, and monitoring our progress.
While writing the lore of the Uu I was curious about a living thing that has a fundamentally different relationship with independence than us. We have plenty. In mammal and insect cultures there are different social structures like eusociality and swarm intelligence that allow groups of fish or bugs or birds to physically move together, folding like falling fabric in the sky. Save for flash mobs, which thankfully are mostly extinct, we don’t really do this much. As a human it’s interesting to see animals and insects cooperating, seeming to be a part of a greater living community. But we are like this too; we congregate and coordinate and join together, we just forget that when we do, we become something bigger than each of us. The Uu don’t forget; they’re as much at home together as they are apart.
Thanks!
Organima: The Uu
Story by Nik Arthur
Animation by Nik Arthur and Anna Chandler
Design by Anna Chandler
Animation Assistance by Marvin Lau
Sound and score by Daniela Andrade
Thank you to the Canada Council Of The Arts for supporting this work.