A Documentary about the Grassmarket:
Our first project of the semester was to collaborate with other animation years and create a documentary about a street in Edinburgh. We chose the Grassmarket; a famous and historic part of Edinburgh's old town. Visually the Grassmarket is very atmospheric with it's old buildings, dark closes and cobblestone streets, and especially with the Edinburgh harr/mist (as photographed below, on our first research trip to the street).
Our original idea was to create an animation that journeyed through the Grassmarket's contrasting history. The Grassmarket for a long time was one of Edinburgh's major market places - the name 'Grassmarket' supposedly deriving from grazing pens for livestock. For a period the Grassmarket had a darker history and was used for public hangings (the location of this, the 'Shadow of the Gibbet', is now marked in the modern street). Characters too such as Maggie Dickson and Burke and Hare are associated with the Grassmarket. A zeppelin bomb, intended for the castle, exploded in Grassmarket in WW1. The street has also gone from being a poor area of Edinburgh to a thriving tourist street. We wanted to focus on this contrast - the street's rich and varied history.
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| From "Haunted Hogmanay", by Edinburgh based studio Ko-Lik. |
We decided early on to use paper cut-outs as a quick way to make the animation. We also wanted to play around with a mixed-media animation and compositing onto real footage of the Grassmarket.
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| Cows and first-person viewpoints... |
Cows were originally going to feature in our film to show the marketplace history. I made a movable cut-out of a bull (shown above) - although in the end the cows were not so big a feature and wasn't used. On another note, I thought a film about the Grassmarket told form the viewpoint of a cow could be quite interesting! Cows were originally herded up the Cowgate from farms surrounding Edinburgh and then brought to the marketplace in Grassmarket...
The Final Film:
Our original idea was to have an overall journey through the Grassmarket's history, but this idea was lacking in interest. We changed the idea to a mysterious Grassmarket filled with actual grass and a first-person viewpoint as a character shifted through the grass, discovering the history and life of the street like an explorer in a jungle. We made paper cut-outs as originally decided, animated these on the rostrums, then composited this onto real footage of the Grassmarket. We also recorded the ambiance and sounds of the Grassmarket for the film, as well as adding additional sound effects. Editing and compositing took place in After Effects and Premier, and was the biggest challenge. The film required a massive edit in the end to make it more focused. Our film ended up being quite different from our original idea, and although it also didn't turn out quite how we hoped, this was a good exercise in development and decision making I think.
Group 1 The Grassmarket from ECA Animation on Vimeo.
Working as a Team:
Last but not least - the major aspect of this project was collaboration. Even if our film didn't turn out quite as planned, working with a group and learning from this experience was the most valuable exercise here. Our team manifesto is made up of pointers about how to work effectively as a group - what we ourselves learnt from working together on this project and can apply to future groupwork:
- Do work, but have fun.
- Don't be afraid to say 'no' to ideas.
- Respect your team members and their work/ideas.
- Assign roles early.
- Focus on individual strengths.
- Organise regular group meetings.
