Visual Production

"They'd conducted a funeral service and were asked if they would go and fly over the sea in the Wellington Bomber and drop his ashes over the sea." 

As a direct response to the audio, I knew from the World War II image at the start of one of the books that gave me inspiration, that I wanted to animate in the same style. In order to line up with the style of the image, Rick pointed out the fact that the piece is most likely some form of monoprinting, and therefore a technique I could experiment with.
Monoprinting is a technique I personally haven't explored in full so it would be good to explore this technique further and perhaps even produce the whole animation in such a way if the experimentation itself is successful enough.
I intend to use Photoshop to then alter the print to match the colour scheme and general theme of the rest of the World War II composition.

Monoprinting
Due to me having limited experience with mono printing as I've never properly carried it out in such an illustrative way before, I requested a demonstration from my friend Luca, a L5 Illustration Student who provided a lot of insight into how to best replicate the technique, and allowed me to capture the visual elements needed for the story to be told.
To be moving in synchronisation with the movements from the opening scene of the illustration, I wanted to replicate the appearance of the Wellington Bomber plane that is spoken about in the story. I think also having this opening scene allows a nice steady beginning to the story and really sets the scene for the animation's theme.
An important aspect was to ensure that my mono print matched up to the existing images around it, even if it's for a small duration of time. I chose to use a shade of blue for the mono printing, not starting with planes, but instead with alternate line elements to see what best worked out. I tried the aspects of pencil, fine liner, biro and pencil crayon to see which applied the most pressure consecutively on the paper to produce a nice clear mono print.
To begin with, after having produced a range of experimental pieces with the mono printing technique, I began sketching a Wellington Bomber freehand based on an illustration in one of the old war books I had collected in my research stages. To print the plane on the paper then with mono printing, I used biro to sketch in the tonal areas and added a reasonable amount of pressure for the lines around it, this produced the amount of shading necessary to add print from the ink around it, allowing a tonal aspect that is already existing on the other illustrations that it needed to fit in with.
There are certain aspects of mono printing that I learnt that could be altered if I were to do the technique in future, due to you adding pressure in order to produce a print, I had to ensure my hand didn't lean on the page, therefore the drawing wasn't as detailed as it could've been and therefore the print didn't have realistic details. However, for the aspect of the theme of war and the fact that it needed to match with the rest of the images, this outcome is perfect to edit into the composition.
After having produced a wide range of alternate outcomes to play with on Photoshop, I am overall happy with the outcome, and will experiment this further and see if the mono printing technique successfully matches up to the technique used in the original composition.

Editing the Monoprint

After having completed the Wellington Bomber prints, I picked out the one I felt successfully captured the aspect and theme of the original composition that I am using. Using the colour match tools and filters on Photoshop, I matched up the elements of the composition to that of the print to ensure that they work well together. Overall I was happy with the end result, as I feel it successfully fits in well with the remainder of the composition.
Using a cut out as well as a background of the plane, and using Photoshop to edit the background textures into clouds, I could then have the elements to make the plane look like it's travelling through the air whilst the audio is telling the story.
When editing the mono print into After Effects, I ensured that I asked for feedback from my peers as well as people who hadn't already heard the audio as this supplied a new train of thought as I needed to make sure that the story was being successfully illustrated to the audience.