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.
