Thursday, February 25, 2010

Curiouser & Curiouser

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I never actually saw Disney's Alice in Wonderland with the lovely Katherine Beaumont until this past summer. I made it through being a flower in our third grade rendition, and watching my eighth grade class put on a musical version. It was one of the {very} few Disney movies we didn't own on vhs. But I guess I spent too much time daydreaming to actually go and rent it. When I finally watched it, I fell in love. The animation (go figure) is amazing. And the story, though I had heard it a hundred times before, completely fascinated me. I felt as if I had lived so much of my life daydreaming about some place a little more like Wonderland and a little less like Detroit, that I didn't even realize how often my head gets stuck in the clouds. But now that I'm going to art school and making things like animations, it really helps. It's rather nifty to get ideas almost instantly, just by hanging upside down for a minute or two or lying in the grass just for a short moment.  My mind wanders, and I get ideas.

Yesterday, I was frustrated because the animation that I had spent so much time, storyboarding possibilities and such, had stumped me. I was stuck. I had a million fragments of ideas and I couldn't decide just which direction to go in. And this time, with midterms next week, I didn't really have time to lie upside down or do cartwheels for half an hour. So my teacher suggested I look at a series of photographs by Anna Gaskell, based on the story of Alice. He had a sneaky feeling that her ideas might help me out. So for today, I'm revisiting Wonderland (and looking for Anna Gaskell's book in the library, of course).




























One of my favorite magazine spreads ever!












And of course I'm super excited for this! I can't tell you how many times I've already watched the trailer. I've had a countdown in my phone since May! Only 8 more days! It's the perfect kick off to my spring break...Mia and I are going to go see it together!


Next to do: hunt down a copy of Casablanca, another suggestion to inspire my animation project.

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