Animation Research: Blu

BLU

Before beginning my animation complimentary studies, I had previously looked at Blu as inspiration on my Foundation Art course. I recognised his work again as soon as Bec showed it to us, as he has a very distinctive drawing style which is continued in his animation work.

I was excited to discover Blu’s animations as I enjoyed them as much as I had done his drawings and illustrations. His animations are just as surreal and interesting as I would have imagined, they involve a lot of weird creatures and images moving in and out of spaces, and evolving into each other.

One of the things I especially admire about Blu now that I have seen his animations is his patience... he must have patience to create the lengths of animations that he does, all of which are consistently well made and would take days and days to film. He uses outdoor spaces a lot, or abandoned looking spaces... and his animations follow his drawings of creatures and shapes around the space using the process of adding to the image over and over again.

I find his animations very ‘smooth’ as although the camera angles are sometimes very jumpy, as he moves across a lot of space, the drawings evolving itself are normally very smooth and carefully animated. He must take thousands of pictures, and work very slowly to create such beautifully constructed animations.

This is something my group took forwards into our own animation... our ‘Consequences’ animation is an image building up and changing as you watch it, not too dissimilar from Blu’s work at all.

If I had more time, or the chance to revisit this project even, I would love to have taken our consequences idea, and tried it on an outdoor space in the same way that Blu does, and experiment more with how it could move across the space.

To see Blu’s work visit: www.blublu.org