Process & Purpose: Hamlet Text & Performance
My inspiration behind this piece was to portray the inner thoughts and feelings in Ophelia’s mind as she's floating in the water to her death. I chose the medium of motion graphics because it's all about timing, coordinating the beats of the song to dictate the placement of key visual frames and the abstract movement of form and color. This places an emphasis on how visuals sound, much like when scansion is performed.
I’ve included quotes from both Hamlet and Laertes throughout to convey the tensions these two men wrought on Ophelia’s psyche, which is also represented by the use of the visual triangle. Ophelia is torn between her affections for Hamlet and Laertes, which are diametrically opposed, as well as the issue of class hierarchy. The form of the triangle undulates with the pulsing of the music as I coded it to function as an audio spectrum reactor.
I wanted the visuals to be flowery and organic in appearance, contrasted with modern motion graphics elements that are coded to track the accented points of speech from scansion. I painted specific watercolor visuals and brushstrokes to simulate light and dark water, blood, flowers, and skulls to tie in thematically with Ophelia’s watery death. I handpainted all of the watercolor assets and digitally incorporated them into the animation program. Each visual asset required individually keyed video footage of ink penetrating water to track its movement via Inverted Luma Matte keyframing and motion-tracking with a 3D camera. Since Ophelia’s scenes with the flowers are very descriptive, I tried to incorporate as many flowers as possible and used the text as direction. For example, I included the garland she wove with flowers representing her role as Hamlet’s queen and then juxtaposed that flower crown into the skull at the end to symbolize her crowning herself his queen in death.
