This project was in commission of Camp Vught National Memorial. They invited us (me and my fellow art students) to their exhibition, they taught us about the war and how life was within the camp and gave us a story which we had to turn to life trough an animation. My group got the story of Rudolph Böhmer. Rudolph was born in 1928 so he was only 16 years old when he got caught in 1944 for being sinti. He spent a 2 years in hiding from the CID-officers. He was the last of his family to got caught. When he arrived in Birkenau he learned that the SS already killed al his family. He later was send to Auschwitz, Flössenbürg and he was even send on a death march, which he managed to flee. Even after the war ended he had difficulty leading a normal life again, mainly because of the ongoing discrimination against Roma and Sinti. Rudolph was 40 when he died.
This semester was a pretty hard one. Besides this project we also had to do other projects and the subject matter was quite a heavy one. We had to work in duo's so I and I wanted to try stopmotion animation so I immediately went to someone who I knew also really liked stopmotion animation. Because some people were to late at making duo's so someone had to join us last minute. Sadly the communication was not great and there are lots of small things that went wrong because of that.
I was the person who came up with the story for the animation and mainly made the storyboard for it and I was very proud of that!
I made the big background of Birkenau. The background was very back so quite difficult to make. I also made a piece of the wall but we decided that the animation was going to be too long so we had to cut a lot.
I even went there while making this project which was very impactful. I have a great intrest in history and the second world war always touches me deeply. It felt very bizarre and heavy to see the place were Rudolph went to and his family died and it is insane that he survived it. And the most frustrating part of Rudolphs story is that even after the war he was still being treated like shit because of his ethnicity. Roma and Sinti people have such a beautiful culture and it had been destroyed by the war and hatred.
I had never worked with stopmotion and my teammates also were not skilled in stopmotion and camera's at all and we were not working with the right software. So the animation turned out a bit crappy. I was the soldiers hand in the animation and did things like the fire and the airplanes while my teammates did the puppet and shooting the pictures. I also did a lot of the 2d animation which was also something I had not done quite often but I think the parts I animated turned out very well!
These are the parts I 2D animated:
I like this project a lot. I get very motivated from making projects which I think are important. In the second world war Roma and Sinti were brutally killed and still they get discriminated against. And it's so rare to hear their story's so this felt like a very important thing to make.
When I look back on this project I see lots of things that could be approved upon. But I guess it's kind of nice to know that if I were to do this project again I would do a much better job.
This semester interested me a lot. We made lots of projects about the second world war and also some editorial illustrations. The 'Let the students rot' poster was also made in this semester. I like to be involved in social-cultural issues as an artist but it does weigh heavy after a while. I think I still need to find a balance between making art to say something and be emotionally very involved verses making lighter things to just make myself and other people happy and forget about the real world for a while. I think both are very important and there needs to be a balance of the two.
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