Audiovisual Media
In this module’s assignment we had to create a title animation for a movie of our choice.
I wanted to create a title animation for one of my favorite movies, Thelma. It’s a norwegian „romantic mystery-thriller with horror-elements“ by, the director Joachim Trier. The movie is about the protagonist Thelma, who moves to Oslo for university.
She grew up in a very conservative-christian household, which creates many inner conflicts with her self-image and her romantic feelings.
She meets Anja, a fellow student, who introduces her to the typical student life; parties, drugs and many first times included. Thelma catches feelings for Anja in the span of the movie, which creates an even bigger inner conflict for her. Because of these inner conflicts and her growing obsession for Anja, the count of her psychogenic-non epileptic seizures increases. These seizures are a symptom of Thelmas supernatural powers. Her powers aren’t further explained in the movie but can be summarized as „if Thelma wishes for something to happen, it happens“.
This fact raises the question about free will and puts the viewer in a position to question everything they’ve just seen.
My Approach to decode the movie and create a fitting Title Animation
To really understand the movie and get a hold of its essence I rewatched Thelma and created a chronological synopsis and worked out the key visuals, motives and symbols, which I could then include in my animation to create a title animation that is close to the original in it’s essence and overall mood.
Motifs&Symbols:
The Christian faith and its effects on Thelma play a major role in the film, which is also represented by, many Christian motifs and symbols:
Biblical Symbols: -Snake: The snake as a universal and complex symbol. It can represent death, destruction and evil. However, positive aspects also associated with the snake, are: healing and/or rebirth when it sheds it's skin -Deer: as a symbol of loyalty and devotion to God; to remain steadfast to God in spite of dangers -Sperling: as a symbol of sacrifice; deeper meaning: own human incarnation on earth ->Faith: shame, remorse, sin; Thelma mixes sexual desire with religious/biblical visions of hell -Father figure as a Christian, patriarchal figure ->Religion as an attempt by, her parents to suppress her powers ->Seizures as a manifestation of her supernatural powers and suppressed sexual feelings; her internal experiences are thus carried to the outside ->Her longing/obsession for Anja threatens the basis of her religious life -Thelma embraces the ubiquitous concept of growing up, losing control of what is expected of her and finding out that she is different than she thought->becoming a confident individual and autonomous over her own powers -Magic Realism: "Are Thelma's powers real, or is she just having seizures?"
Key Visuals:
The Key Visuals of the movie pick up these motifs&symbols and are very important style elements, that leave a lasting impression:
-“Deer-Shot”: Father aims at child-Thelma with a gun; used as the opening scene in the title animation, on the one hand to proceed chronologically and on the other hand to polarize -"Snake-Scene": Thelma and Anja kiss-> climax of Thelma's sexual feelings-> at the same time remorse, shame and inner conflict ->is caused by, a snake shown who, instead of Anja, takes Thelma's "virginity" and is intended to illustrate Thelma's "sin"
Because the plot of the movie is, for first-time-watchers, a bit…let’s say…confusing, especially because of all the flashbacks from Thelma’s childhood that you can’t really pin point, I tried to arrange my storyboard chronologically based on key visuals of the movie. My title animation is so to say a series of the most important scenes.
Stylistically, I decided to make vector illustrations using adobe illustrator on my iPad to get a very reduced and clean look, to resemble the mood of the movie. This part of creating the Title Animation was the most time-consuming as I also had to think of the next steps in advance, like choosing the color-schemes or thinking about exactly which part of the illustration I wanted to animate and therefore had to create different layers for exactly these parts.
Color-wise I choose to use grayscales and red. I desaturated the illustrations until they were in grayscales and introduced the color red every time Thelma did something sinful and/or used her powers. For the red color I chose #52010B, the color of Thelmas blood that she shed as her inner conflicts climaxed into the disappearance of Anja.
I also tried to capture the feeling of uneasiness of the movie, by, using trembling elements as for the typo, flickering lights or shaking hands etc. .
For the sounds I tried to incorporate many of the movie’s original sounds like for the „deer-shot-scene“ and even the Song „The Wolves“ by, Cyrus Reynolds ft. Keely Bumford, that was used for the official trailer.
And if you pay close attention you can see, that I matched the lyrics to the illustrations shown.
Some examples:
Min.: 00:23
-> You can see Thelmas trembling hands as she sees Anja for the first time
„Hold on to what you’ve found“
Min.: 00:46
-> Anja now stands in front of Thelmas dorm, not even knowing what drove her there or how she got there; possibly lured in by, Thelmas powers
„I’m losing sight of our reality“
-> the question of free will and what is real and what is not arises
Min.: 01:07
->Thelma’s powers are reaching their peak as she is shown floating in the air
„Come set me free“
… or is it just one of her seizures?
Like in the movie the unanswered omnipresent question of free will and reality is also even more questionable in my Title Animation as it ends and challenges the viewer to question everything they’ve just seen.