Portrait and Place Project : The Regeneration of Lewisham

My idea for the portrait and place project is the “Regeneration of Lewisham”. I discovered that areas around Lewisham were changing. I had taken pictures before the regeneration began and have recently taken more pictures showing the progress. Phase one and two are now completed. Phase three is now being discussed. There appears to be some resistance towards the demolition of the primary school replacing it with a combined primary and a secondary school. The logo used by Lewisham is “Making Lewisham the best place to live, work and learn”.

I researched a few artists who gave me ideas to develop my project. Masayashi Nakano gave me some insight into using the different sites undergoing regeneration in Lewisham. e.g houses, restaurants, train station. Researching Maira Kalman gave me the idea to use mix media of photographs and drawings to enable me to finish within the time frame.

It went very well because I planned which software to use early in the project and which media to use to animate the scenes. I used the pictures of areas around Lewisham from years ago with the recent pictures I took. I decided to choose a few pictures of the new road called Silver Road, the new site of Burger King and Lewisham Train Station.

I used Photoshop and After Effects. I used Photoshop to animate using layers and overlapping the pictures with a mix of drawing and photographs. To animate the scenes I used Photoshop and made many layers to create a character walking into the Burger King and a Taxi Cab driver travelling along the road near the train station. I decided to add in an extra scene of the Gypsy Site before the changes.

I have recorded many sounds around Lewisham. The sound device was small so I needed to get a closer range to obtain the sounds I needed and then I mixed them with other sounds using Soundtrack Pro. I decided to use text and the DVD menu to display the title and to play the animation film. The title screen is “Regeneration of Lewisham” and it ends with a text “Making Lewisham the best place to work, live and learn”.

I experienced difficulty using Flash. When I was importing my drawings and photographs I used the wrong settings. I used Photoshop instead because I realized it was better for film and TV and Flash is for web design. I used After Effects because I was able to import files from Photoshop as JEPG, PNG to put them together.

I forgot the number of frames per second to animate and the instructions. To remember the frames per second and instructions I then decided to type the notes to remind me. I was thinking of using Dragon (I Stop Motion) but it was not possible to use Dragon (I Stop Motion) because I decided that I wanted to use more photographs and drawings to develop my project. I enjoyed this project because it made me more aware of my surroundings.

My Final Animation