Finished loop

So I've finally finished my loop, its not what I first envisioned it to be at all but I like it none the less.

Reflective statement:
Elements that I think are working well about this piece are its tranquility and it's simplicity. While I would have loved to animate more tangled jungles of mushrooms Flash has its limits and while I attempted it(for several hours) I couldn't get an animation more complex than this one to work with reflection. I did tinker with having a more complex loop without the reflection but I couldn't resist the harmony it seemed to add to the scene. I think in the end that the striped back result works in its favor as less is more.

One obvious flaw(to those in the know) is the way the mushrooms die; mushrooms actually fall over sideways when they rot! There are things that I would have liked to animate that I could not and things that I did animate that I did not do well. The end result may seem a little bit too much like a screen saver but the original concept idea was a very low art idea anyway. Sound was interesting, nothing fit, I just like xylophones really. All in all though I am happy I like the fact the entire thing is just two loops.



Edit:

I have been having some trouble uploading to youtube so I finally fixed the issue and uploaded my finished loop project there too. Now you can full screen!

More tests, closer now

I really like this reflection effect however its only really letting me do it to this one mushroom.



Or no reflection at all:



What to do about sound? I'm not sure bolero suits these at all.

getting somewhere?

Another test but I am starting to like it.

Still Fail

Tests for potential loops:

Further Inspiration

The more I look at mushrooms the more I like them. Here are some quite mesmerizing videos I found on youtube











the more I look at these the more I think my loop would be better with something like this rather than the storyboard stuff that I worked out.

Everything is broken

So youtube and blogger have been pretty much broken for the last couple of days and uploading stuff is impossible. It is frustrating as hell and I am trying to work out a work around for it but it might just mean I have to wait until youtube is fixed. So anyway, backdating and backtracking. My original concept was based off watching bill bailey performing a stand up show where he explained his first experience on lsd as getting stuck in a loop. I decided I wanted my loop to have a somewhat psychaedelic feel to it and being a big fan of mushrooms and them being moderately easy to draw I decided I wanted to have a loop of mushrooms growing. I have always been attracted to low or pop art so it was interesting looking at the works of Takashi Murakami who works with japanese pop culture. If it wasn't already obvious by my ident project I like bright colours and fun projects plus I always feel like I come across self righteous when I take myself seriously.

Anyway I came up with this storyboard here for what I wanted to do (hehehe amusing). I became heavily influenced by watching Fantasia and Dumbo and they influenced what my mushrooms looked like heres a few videos of the kind of stuff I meant:

It's been ages since I posted.

Keeping blogs or journals is definitely not my strong suit. First things first I need to finish up my entries for my text project before I continue on to the loop. The short story is that I essentially ran out of time. I realized half way through that my written comment didn't really mean anything, was not poetic and didn't work at all.
I had a flash of inspiration closer to the due date and essentially it was about the ability of the mind to make connections instantaneously:
The sharp tang of ozone
and then
a flash of pure luminosity
utterly silent
building into a raw of noise
in a field a lone tree stands burning
all around the grass is greener, filled with nitrate
in the incandescent snow globe of the mind
a thought has struck.

I ended up cutting a lot of that out too in order to get it made within a reasonable time frame.

I wanted my imagery to reflect the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind. I thought about two levels of gears, neither touching the other but occasionally leaps of lightning jumping between them and thought it was a good allegory for the way problems get churned away in our subconscious and reach us in a flash of insight. However despite the fact that I built the gears I had no time to animate them into the sequence and so that part was dropped out.



these are the cogs that I made. I just exported the movie clip of them so they wont really spin properly.

Here is my finished work: My god its shite:



Here also is my two hundred word reflection:

Synopsis:
The text I used was a reaction to the process of automatic writing. I struggled hard with the loose creative process making many notes and discarding many ideas until finally in a flash of inspiration the words came fully formed into my head. Thus my piece is about the ability of the subconcious to make intuitive leaps. The animation is focused on heightening the sense of the words and building tension.


Reflective statement:
3 or four half formed animations where discarded in the process of creating this one and if I had my way I would still change 80% of this one. I feel the piece fails through a lack of personality. The text is rigidly Computer font Impact and kept pure white, I feel perhaps using Flash has made the animation too commercial in feel. As per usual I believe my fast reading speed may be throwing off the pace of the work and areas may be unreadable to some.

An animation of cogs moving in two layers and lighting flowing freely between them was meant to be added to the end of the sequence to give the impression of thought flowing between conscious and subconscious and though the cogs where made(after many tedious hours) the final animation was never completed as I believed it would possibly take the tension out of the ending.

I feel the simplest animations within the sequence are perhaps working the best for me. The blurs and the fades. I'm very impressed with the sound I was able to find and adapt. It's just a simple distortion wave of thunder with tweaks by me.