Animations - Holger Meins
- Finn Chapman
- Feb 10, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 15, 2021
I decided to take this animation and repurpose it as an element of something else, since I liked the visual style but didn't think it stood on its own well.
One idea I had was to combine it with footage I found of Holger Meins (a member of the RAF who was arrested in 1972 and died in prison due to a hunger strike in 1974) on his hunger strike.
The only version I could find was about ten seconds of footage, in very low quality and with a large watermark on the bottom, so I wasn't working with much, but eventually I had 24 frames like this one from 6 seconds of the video.
I turned what I had into a few different GIFs so that I had a variety of options, including these two.
Finally, I combined the animations made from the footage with my original animation, and created about 15 variations, a few of which aren't included here because the difference is so slight that it's almost identical to one that was included.
Originally, this was an unfinished version, I was going to blend together both animations rather than intersplicing them, but I ended up liking how this looked even more than the 'final' version, so I used this in the majority of the variants.
This was how I originally intended for the final versions to be.
I played around further to create this version, and while I prefer the others, this looks different in quite an interesting way. It seemed almost psychedelic, and to push that further I added colour to it.
The coloured version, along with a few others exceed the 25mb file limit, but I've linked them below.
Out of all of them, these two are my favourite.
The one on the left looks almost intensely aggressive and stark, as if you're looking at something traumatic and vicious, which given the subject matter of the fatal conflict between the RAF and the West German state, in this case a conflict claiming Holger Meins' own life, seems fitting.
The one on the right looks more faded and surreal, as if it were muffled by frosted glass. It makes the footage seem like more of a memory, one which has perhaps been altered. His death in prison sparked anti-government protests; highly publicised photos showed his emaciated corpse, evoking imagery of concentration camps that was fresh and sensitive in the German psyche. As such, his death was politicised and mythologised, making this implication of an omniscient altered memory similarly fitting.
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