Sand Animation

Ilana Yahav is a sand animation artist the video above is of her work. She creates scenes while recording, using the sand in different ways to change scenes. these kind of animations  are usually done with a music track in the background and so would be created as a form of entertainment. She has used a light box and sand to create the animation, pouring different quantities of sand to make tone and structure. Each scene is created by pouring or sprinkling sand to from shapes that become backgrounds, people, and animals. After each scene is created she morphs it into the next one by wiping over parts of the scene and building them up into something else and gradually working across the screen. To add detail she builds up lines of sand or wipes through a section with her hand in a pattern to create something such as hair. The imagery used is of people and places to try and create a narrative, the narrative is hard to find as there is not so much story telling within the work, that is because of the technique it's self, as you are working with sand it's very difficult to make a clear story based animation. The change of composition with each scene is one of the only ways that enables more variety. Her work inspired me because of the meaning on the stories that are personal to her and she puts in emotion to her work.

For this workshop we were put into groups and asked to decide on a narrative that could be told using sand animation and how we wanted to portray it. Our group decided it would be best if we fused all of our news stories together to benefit us all, thanks to this our narrative is about a train on an island that gets ambushed and crashes into a rock. For the technique we decided to attempt a stop motion style were we poured the sand into cones, and cut off the bottom at different sizes to use the sand to 'draw' onto the black paper. with each bit taking a picture for each frame. I found working with sand in this way to be very difficult because moving it in anyway would destroy the form and you would then have to recreate it all over again. Sand as a material is quite difficult to work with as it is messy and takes patience to be able to do as you want with, but it allows for an interesting technique and gives off a certain mystical quality when used well.