Embroidered Animation (another)!!

Remember in my last post I said I had been working on a super secret embroidery/ animation project? OK, well, I have finally finished it! Ta-da!

A 21 frame embroidery/ animation/ skateboarding mashup. So basically all of my favourite things combined into one 2 second clip. Was it worth it? Well kind of…

I must admit, I felt the result was a little anticlimactic or at least on having immediately finished it. I think because I had spent so long creating the piece, I thought I’d be super ‘wowed’ by it on completion, but for some reason it fell a little flat. Though that is often a quite common feeling after any big project (or at least in my experience): like when it’s done, a random all-singing all-dancing fanfare isn’t going to suddenly appear and you’re not going to get your favourite producer calling you up out the blue asking if you want funding for a feature film (though one can dream). In reality, you’ve just finished a piece of work and then the day just carries on!

Perhaps it’s a sense of a loss/ emptiness (of finishing the project) juxtaposed with expectation vs result, which is why I felt a little underwhelmed. But also, because it’s not my first embroidered animation, I have something to compare it to and on the whole, I feel the first one I did was much more impactful. Maybe because the previous one was fully hand stitched, whilst this one was only partly hand stitched, part mixed media, so not quite as impressive?

I’m not saying I dislike it, not at all and I am extremely proud of the accomplishment- to hand stitch 21 frames of animation is quite a feat and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I think because the sewing is neat, it perhaps looks too ‘clean’ and not ‘hand made’ enough for my liking. Especially when viewed on a phone screen- I feel the detail disappears. You can’t really tell it is sewn unless you play it frame by frame (or watch it on desktop), so it feels like all the hours I spent hand stitching each frame have kind of got lost. And as an animated clip itself (say if it wasn’t sewn), it’s a little straightforward.

I also think the choice of using plain white fabric wasn’t the best for the background- because once scanned in, the texture of the fabric is so blown out. This of course I wasn’t to know going into the project, but perhaps I could have thought ahead and done a scan test of the fabric to see how it might look. Anyway, what good is an experiment such as this if you don’t learn anything from it? I didn’t want to recreate what I did previously because I had already done that, so here I was trying something different, which is (often) always the point of these small clips I make. Perhaps the next one I try will just be stitched outlines- though that might be a short while off, as I’m pretty deep into creating my next narrative short…

Below are a few of the frames before I edited them in post: outlines, hair and shoes were all hand stitched; for the jeans I scanned in some denim and added it in post, the t-shirt and wheels I coloured with gel pens on the fabric and everything else coloured in post and used a ‘multiply’ blend mode, so the texture of the fabric showed through.

Several of the frames

Close up

Final comp image