The Water Watches Back: Bewrop
All about bewrop
Hello. Here I’m going to discuss the lore of the bewrop, how I animated this technically, my trip up a small mountain, and the observer/observed relationship.
A bewrop [byu-lop] breaches the surface searching for a snack, when it notices a foreign device sitting nearby. Investigating, it concludes it is being perhaps monitored, or inspected, or watched. An audience. A bewrop savours a spectator, so it skids and bobs along the water, performing tricks and flaunting, before soaking its audience and sinking home.
I crammed gear into my bag: tall rain boots, two little tripods, a couple glass droppers, a tool made of clay I had sculpted, a book, and a sandwich. My backpack looked like a big turtleshell as I biked to the mountain, climbed up , ducked around the route-barrée-construction-zone fence, and arrived at the hidden marsh on Mont Royal. Here I will drop droplets millimetres apart for hours while bugs gnaw at me, and a Bewrop surfaces.
Most often I work from my studio, but I’ve been wanting to animate on-site, and the right environment for the bewrop didn’t feel like a water-filled plastic bin on my desk— a sad place for a spirited being. A plastic bin is where this began though, performing experiments and doing studies to understand how a sentient water droplet would move, breathe, and appear.
When I initially had my aha moment, I imagined the Bewrop maintaining the form of a water drop at its crescendo, the peak height of the splash, and gliding along the water’s surface. So I filmed in slow motion and picked apart the footage’s DNA, grabbing precise frames. If any of my work is stop-motion, it would be this: stealing individual frames from life and reanimating them. I watched back my test and laughed. Far from become alive, the would-be Bewrop appeared more like a sliding statue, trying to breathe but suffocating. I cleaned my glasses and watched a droplet drop. The droplet looked back at me, taking a big gulp of breath before descending into the water. Why would I take the same frame from each droplet cycle? I was freezing it mid gulp, suspending the natural animation. I should be accepting how it wants to move, not hiding it. This became the breath and the stride in the bewrop, that we expect to see from a living thing. After a new test, I felt that which animators crave; the feeling of seeing undiscovered life for the first time.
To clearly lay out exactly how technique this works: I set up a tripod in the water, with my phone filming at 240fps. I would drop a single droplet, move my dropper, and drop another, and repeat. Find new angle, shoot new shot. Later, on my computer, I would dissect this footage. I mapped out the droplet cycle and applied it to corresponding frames. Say the droplet cycle can be broken into parts A-J, for drop 1 I’d use frame A. For drop 2, frame B. Drop 3 frame C, 4+D, 5+E, until 10+J, when 11 starts back at A. That’s the gist of it, but I would break these rules and experiment with how else it might move, to keep it from feeling too predictable, and to reinforce the spirit of the character.
The bewrop are a particularly fun and festive entity. They live in small-to-medium reservoirs of natural water. Residing near the bottom, they mostly relax and breach the surface only occasionally to snack and explore. That is, until it rains; festival is marked by rainfall, when they come to the surface all together, eating up floating algae, bobbing around endlessly, and generally making a ruckus. Between these festive periods of rest, awaiting the next rainfall.
It should be evident what is so sad about keeping a bewrop captive in a plastic bin in my studio. No logs to jump over, no algae to snack on, no rain festivals. I was happy to release it back to the wild on the mountain.
There were other technical problems that I needed to solve before my day on the mountain, though. It was proving nearly impossible to drop water in a coherent path by hand, each droplet would land in a random spot, meaning I have to rearrange them afterward, which felt a little like cheating and was a pain. As a solution, I sculpted a dropper-holding-tool with air-hardening clay and attached it to a tripod. By panning the tripod arm incrementally, I could control and plan the droplet’s motion path across the water surface with precision.
My day on the mountain was meant to be a research day, and it was both that and more. My good omen was a splash in the water next to me, and looking I saw a hawk bathing in the marsh. It was just the 3 of us (me, hawk, bewrop) for half an hour, before it was suddenly gone. My other encounters included a spider, chipmunk, and a baguette sandwich. Once I finished my animating I tried to find more shots to capture, but I had finished my investigation, watching droplets, for the day.
Conceptually, I wanted to explore the idea of observation. We act differently when we don’t expect to be seen, and a key component to this Organima series is the act of studying, recording, and watching the behaviour of organic entities. How does this behaviour change with awareness? The bewrop’s understanding of the situation creates a relationship between it and the observer, where the entity cannot just be wondered at, but wonder back. Breaking the surveillance model of the interaction creates opportunity for deeper storytelling, and can prompt our own self reflection. Like looking in the still water, seeing yourself and the environment around you, before ripples distort what was recognizable.
Organima 6: Bewrop
Story, animation by Nik Arthur
Sound and score by Ouri
Title design by Anna Chandler
Special thanks Toko, Emi, Ben.
Thank you Ouri for the enchanting, enlivening piano and harp.
I acknowledge the support of the Canada Arts Council.
-na
loved being a (tiny drop) part of this <3