Animation explanation

 OK, I've now recovered from my one woman animation extravaganza. I enjoyed every minute of it though and have been reading up on animation all summer and hoping to improve my skills.
I hope that every one has been enjoying both my map of the future and my Dancing with myself  animations, I'm certainly very proud of both of them. I think perhaps I'm more proud of the fact that working this way is a very time consuming venture, which would be a lot easier if i had a whole team of people to help, however I do not have this and so every bit of these films has been done by me , and me alone. When I see the finished product created by all my time and hard work, I feel extremely proud indeed.

In the map of the future I wanted to portray the idea of a map in a very different way, I didn't want to do a traditional map and as I wanted to develop my animation skills and continue with narrative ideas, I thought that an animated story of a map would be the perfect idea for me to pursue.
     I chose the map of the future as I found it a very interesting option, mainly because no one knows what will happen in the future , so the idea of a map of the future wasn't rigid and left me free to create a narrative of my own. I wanted to create an internal narrative for myself( the knitted doll of myself) in which I portrayed my thoughts about the things I was feeling and thinking about the past and moving on into the future. I've always been a big fan of metaphors and so used a lot of them within this animation IE; witches spoiling the day, and weeds obscuring beautiful gardens etc,,

I used the Robert smith doll to symbolise all the good things from the past and to show that not everything should be repressed or forgotten, good things and nice memories should always stay with you and remain part of you, past present and future.

I also wanted to represent the omnipresence of 'bad people' because no matter what you do or where you go, there will always be people who try to ruin you ,, the wicked witches Frank L Balm wrote of and the weeds ready to over grow the rose gardens. I though this a very poetic way to describe such people, a beautiful way of describing such ugliness. Because as much as we all may like to believe things will one day be perfect and peachy, these people will always be around the corner wherever you go.

The main point of my film was to say that the future is a blank canvas, you have to draw your own , and you must never use the maps ( symbolic of other peoples opinions) to guide you though, everything has to be your own. You have to deal with the horrible witches and weeds and continue to draw and make yourself and your own future.