Completed my final animation project on Friday. You can see it right here; just make sure to have the volume turned up on your computer; I composed the music, too. Or more correctly, I severely remixed it across multitracks to line up with the visual elements of the movie.
The animation was done in Maya, which is the same software that Pixar uses! I mixed the audio in Audacity, and did all of the post-production work in FinalCut Pro.
About the Painting
I chose Dorothea Tanning’s “End Game.” It was created for a Marcel Duchamp-curated 1944 Surrealist exhibit called “The Imagery of Chess.” I’m a fairly serious chess-player, and the game was incredibly important to Dorothea as well. In fact, she and her husband, Max Ernst, fell in love across a chessboard; she describes the fateful game in gauzy detail in her autobiography. She competed internationally at chess tournaments, starred in (and received story/writing credit for) Hans Richter’s experimental chess film 8 x 8, and as part of the “Imagery of Chess” exhibition, Dorothea was one of seven New York art-world figures who played against a blindfolded Russian grandmaster. Of course, all the artists lost to the professional.
I interpreted the bishop’s mitre as Dorothea’s characterization of the dictatorial André Breton, who ruled the Surrealists with an iron thumb, despised women, and who Dorothea had an understandably low opinion of. She thought Breton was “like a pope, who saw something and turned it into something much less unconventional.”
Take a look at my process storyboards: completed, and half-finished.
