Similarly to my morph animation, Midnight by the Lake, this piece Stage Fright was heavily inspired by the 2010 film Black Swan, but the film definitely had less of a direct influence. I wanted to follow the theme of The Black Swan and continue through the animations of dance and movement in my final project. Animating dynamic, full-body movements have been difficult for me, so I was extremely interested in taking on this challenge. I started off by sketching simple ballet dance moves in a sequence and seeing if I could smoothly animate them frame by frame:

After I created a basic movement, I knew that I could continue. I made an animatic of different scenes I wanted to incorporate into my final animated film. I went a bit dark with the scenes in the storyboard, adding a scene where the dancer gets injured and bleeds all over the stage (inspired by Black Swan). 

I wanted to use the song Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker because I adore how the song has the qualities of any classical waltz, but the ending crescendo is one that swells so intensely where it has a touch of chaos that perfectly aligned with the concept of Stage Fright that I was going for: a kind of beautifully chaotic fear. My housemate is a ballet trained dancer, so I talked with her about ballet terms and key aspects of dancerly movement that would sell the image of a ballerina. In terms of the actual animation, I rotoscoped the movements of ballerina Ashley Bouder as she was the lead ballerina in the Waltz of the Flowers of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at the New York City ballet.

Following the rotoscoping stage, I imported a background and animated the dancer peeking through the curtains and even boil animated the title at the start of the film. I imported audio clips of audience applause and the song Waltz of the Flowers, and the film was completed. When I watched it over, I realized that the dancer’s movements timing could be improved a little bit, and the audience could be animated to have a little bit of movement when they are applauding the performance, to add another dimension.

A lot of my pieces, especially those in my animated “series,” are influenced by pop culture and film. When I wanted to animate the steps of a figure walking across the screen, my initial instinct was to be inspired by the film, Mean Girls, with a puppet of the “Plastics” from the 2004 film walking across the screen through a mall.

However, as I was creating the puppet, I liked how much I could play with the proportions, with large breasts and long legs, almost playing up on the unrealistic body proportions of a Barbie doll. I changed the directions of my project, instead transforming it into my feminist project, Girl Lemme See You Walk (alternatively: Not Your Barbie Girl). I created the puppet figure in Adobe Animate, and imported a background in from Procreate.

The piece speaks for itself: My Eyes Are Up Here. This loop animation adds another layer of depth to this retort; when the viewer zooms in closer to the breast of the figure, her top opens to reveal her unforgiving, disdainful stare. This piece really heavily utilizes imagery of eyes and is a play on the concept of the objectifying “male gaze,” throwing this concept back to the viewer of the piece.

I was inspired by this top that I saw when I was scrolling on Instagram. This top resembled gloves that held the breast, and I thought it was an interesting choice, especially since it was both sexually empowering and censoring at the same time, almost suggesting something more sinister.