Deep sea test

Basilosaurus movement test

Would like to figure out how to take a square photo instead of a rectangle. Think i need to get out a medium format digital slr?!

Projection slides.

I made a load of deep sea slides to put into my old singer projector, which has a really dirty yellow light and generally looks lovely and cosy, so thought I'd try out projecting ink washes through the light. It works exactly how I want it to, so it will be in the final animation although I need to figure out how to flicker between them in a stan brakhage style.

Basil tests

Whale tests.

Puppets to appear in the animation, fin whale just over 1 meter long. Made from ink washed soft canvas and stuffed like a teddy bear with a wire skeleton for movement. I may possibly add a more defined blowhole.

Basilosaurus, made from ink washed soft canvas and stuffed with a skeleton. Slightly smaller than the fin whale and much slimmer. - I think i may add some teeth...

Set of some of the slides projected onto the fin whale. Really happy with these, but need to figure out how to animate them in a flickering way, maybe put them into some kind of order.

Sesame street stop motion

Ladislaw Starewicz and Henry Selick and Stan Brakhage

Basilosaurus

ahhh basilosaurus!

Mood bored.

Vestigial limbs

My animation will focus on whale evolution and particularly how modern whales still have vestigial limbs left behind in their evolved bodies. The animation will tell the story in 1 minute of how the most ancient whales (eg Basilosaurus) evolved into modern whales but kept their hind limbs.

I think perhaps i will go into more depth about the evolution and the proof that is out there by looking further into skeletal structure. (5 fingered hands and flippers and paws)

Biologists believe that for 100 million years the only vertebrates on Earth were water-dwelling creatures, with no arms or legs. At some point these ?fish? began to develop hips and legs and eventually were able to walk out of the water, giving the earth its first land lovers. Once the land-dwelling creatures evolved, there were some mammals that moved back into the water. Biologists estimate that this happened about 50 million years ago, and that this mammal was the ancestor of the modern whale. Despite the apparent uselessness, evolution left traces of hind legs behind, and these vestigial limbs can still be seen in the modern whale. There are many cases where whales have been found with rudimentary hind limbs in the wild, and have been found in baleen whales, humpback whales, and in many specimens of sperm whales. Most of these examples are of whales that had only leg bones, but there were some that included feet with complete digits. It was reported recently that whales and hippos were distantly related.

ISABELLA ROSSELINI.

Simply cant get enough of Isabella Rosselini at the moment, she is inspiring me for my 'it only takes a minute' brief for which i am making a 1 minute animation about whale evolution. This animation will be a tester for my live project in which i propose to install the whale evolution animation into the whale hall in the natural history museum.

Welcome collection Skin exhibition

.... wouldn't let me take photos in the skin exhibition which was very annoying as most of the exhibits in there were perfect. Even the way they had curated the exhibition was something I wanted to take note of photographically.

I remembered that in the other parts of the museum there were areas of interest to my skin project though.