Joseph Beuys.

So. I had to a biography of Joseph Beuys, the post WWII german artist who was a pioneer in performance. He produced number of drawings, sculptures, performances and installations that were in a whole very political commitment.  He mostly used felt, honey, grease, dead animals, blood, wood... He put in his work a mystical dimension, used the WWII as a recuring theme. He created the concept of social scuplture, that would allow to fairer society. He believed that every man is an artist, and that if everybody uses their creativity, all will be free.



Firtly, I thought about making a comic, as I was very inspired by Les Culottees, by Penelope Bagieu, which are short biographies of women who sometimes changed history by rebelling agaisnt the social pressure of their time.

Mae Jeminah, first afro-american astronaut, Hedy Lamar, inventor and actor, Wu Zetian, Chinese empress.
All of these have the same structure : their birth, their childhood/main interests, their particularities, the context (respectively the 60s segregation, WWII, and the 7th century, a time where the highest rank a woman could get was to be a concubine), their fights (to be taken seriouly, to change society or obtain power), their succes, their death.
They are short, but they tell enough. If I had done that, I would have used the same formula.


I also thought of doing a spiral where we would pull a strip that would take the character through his life

However, I felt like I could make something that was more revelant to Joseph, and after making a trip to the V&A to the costume section, I thought about making a reproduction of his famous felt costume, and telling his story from the top of his head (his birth) to the bottom of his feet (his death). I thought that telling his story through a body would rend a spiritual side, which was recurent in his work.

It would have been a performance. I would have worn the costume while drawing on the blackboard on my chest with a chalk, with a noise in the background  of people talking. On the top of my head, there would have been a cutout picture of nazis, on my nose a crashed plane, on my arms the Tartars who saved Joseph, my arms bandaged in felt, the blackboard, then cutouts of Joseph at different stages of his life, and artwork.






At the end, I decided to make an animation. As I would have to make a lot of frames, I decided to simplify the visual of Joseph, and make a mix between Tom Gauld and Herge's styles, to make him look comic-ish.








Hergé.
I thought that keeping some of his characteristics would make him instantly re
cognizable, his bone cheeks, distorded nose and felt costume. That is enough. The change of expression would be expressed through the eyebrows and the mouth.






As I had never done animation before, I used an animation app to experiment, and make something that has nothing to do with Joseph Beuys, aka science fiction and kids becoming animals !

Each took me at least 2-3 days, as I had to come back and go forward several times, I had to make sure that each frame was close to the previous one to make it fluid. A lot of time, there was either something missing in the next frame, either the transition wasn't smooth enough, especially in the teeth.


I wanted to make a digital animation, but at the end, I decided to make a chalk on blackboard animation to stay in the theme. I mixed it with cutouts.


I looked at these animations with chalk on blackboard :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UyHTkQS168&feature=youtu.be


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDxDf-96Og


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F38oz8UJPic


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8TwLi3XFTs


 The final, that I filmed with my phone using an app:

I feel like it came okaly, for a fist try. However, the blackboard kept moving from the floor (impossible to masking tape it on the carpet) , I sometimes forgot a paper of piece of felt that appears and dissapears between 2 frames.

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