Faculty of Art

Integrated Media: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation

Gabriela Antonini Escovedo

Dores

Dores is an autobiographic single channel short animated visual poem about my pain events across my life experience. The predominant themes I am exploring in my project are different types of self-pain such as, struggle, grief, fear, anxiety and agony. Dores explores how these conditions affected me. The title, Dores, refers my current and past feelings and emotions. Dores is the title of my project because this word synthesizes the uncomfortable sensations in the body that have occurred with the persona of the visual poem, which is myself. Dores means pains in Portuguese. The name is in Portuguese because it is my mother tongue and it is the most intimate way to get close to my soul. I recite this poem and record my own voice to combining with the visuals. This artwork plays the role of expressive therapy where I express everything I have suffered in recent years and especially the deeper unfamiliar sensation that is the pain of loss.

“Dores is an autobiographic single channel short animated visual poem about pain events across my life experience. The predominant themes I am exploring in my project are different types of self-pain such as, struggle, grief, fear, anxiety and agony. The plot focuses on the uncomfortable bodily and emotional sensations that have occurred with the persona of the visual poem, which in this case is myself. The title, Dores, refers to my current and past feelings. The goal for this project is to explore how these conditions affected me. Additionally, my intention is to show the audience how diverse pains can be represented.Dores expresses pain in the plural (pains) translated from Portuguese. I selected Dores for the title of the project because this word synthesizes the chronic and ongoing unpleasant sensations I have been trough. The name is in Portuguese because it is my mother tongue and it is the most intimate way to get close to my soul. I recite this poem and record my voice to compose with the visual arts. This artwork plays the role of expressive therapy where I express everything I have suffered in recent years and especially the deeper unfamiliar sensation that is the pain of loss.As a person who suffers diverse injuries, I had the chance to look deep and put off my chest these internal agonies. Although it still is challenging to handle how these occurrences affected my personality and mobility, I would say I became stronger as I worked through this process of self-reflection to vomit those sentiments. Consequently, my inspiration for this project was based on an introspective and personal trip into my feelings. The amount of the research I did for this project focused on how my brain interprets and manifests visually these undesirable signs. However, by developing this short film, I hope I can promote conversations with others who may face similar circumstances regarding the pains.The experience of pain is distinct for every person. There are various ways to perceive and describe pain. Therefore, I implemented varied ways to illustrate the several pains reported in the video. The aesthetic of the project portrays personal experiences across mixed media techniques, such as, rotoscoping, 2d animation, stop motion, video clips and combined with sixty acrylic painted backgrounds. The backgrounds were depicted with acrylic paint. They emphasize the synesthesia episodes that I felt during my pain incidents and examination experiences. The drawings were illustrated using Photoshop. The audio was mixed in Adobe Audition. They video clips were edited in Adobe Premier. The video is approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds long. The work contains a serious tone and engages with the audience socially by relating to their pains across this intimate drama non-fictional autobiographic film. The animation is inspired by the work of Michèle Cournoyer, Marcelo Marão and Rosana Urbes, who all use their experiences to explore deeper personal tales. Dores combines drawings with monochromatic backgrounds and autobiographic narrative to explore the struggles some may deal with recurrent pains.”