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.

Text Update

I've been looking at so many different awesome animators, here's a few that really caught my attention.









While I'd envisioned doing something similar to these animations I'm getting more and more worried however about the content of my automatic writing and how much time I have left. I haven't found anything I'm prepared to use and I think I am going to have to strip back my concept idea.

First automatic text class

So we've just sat down and had a chat about what we are going to do for our text project. I really need to get cracking as my last project was handed in late, something I definitely don't wish to repeat. I've been thinking about my animation style and I am determined to go with found objects as I think computer generated stuff is too sterile to believably bubble forth from a subconscious.

Our subconscious natural takes all the things we see on a day to day basis, fragments them and puts them back together to give them a deeper newer meaning. Our brain is constantly firing finding new ideas, making new connections that is how we understand the world in a big web of interrelations and puzzle pieces. Anyway you can probably tell my brain is busy bubbling away at the moment.

I read Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester over the Easter break and I have a suspicion it is going to heavily influence what I do in this project as some of my best automatic writing was done directly after reading it. You can get some information about the novel here.

Some of the things that struck me about it:

• He does this really cool thing with typography to show changes in the way the protaganist experiences things after he is concussed in a massive explosion
• The themes are about human survival, fighting death and raising ones level which I really like and I think have influenced the kind of automatic writing I have done.
• It reminded me of the first time you are really struck by your own mortality and you realize not only are you going to be extinguished but that your life is so insignificant in the scheme of things that it really doesn't matter what you do.

Anyway ideas, ideas, too many bubbling ideas. My mind is babbling and gushing and I need to focus and get stuff done....

Text Project

I'm looking forward to this text project as I have far more experience working with animation than I do with film and I also really like Typography so I'm looking forwarded to dabbling in that.

I've already had several sleepless nights getting excited about what I can do and I've written some automatic text already. I particularly like the emotive and unusual combination of words that come out and I am going to keep writing until I get enough really nice snippets to work with.
Some ones that I've written so far are : A twitter of white noise, incandescent snow globe and what the furbie?
I'm also finding myself writing a lot of song lyrics. Strangely it seems the ones that come from songs that possible had some automatic writing themselves such as:
The dog days are over by Florence and the Machines
Full grown man and A Picture of our torn up praise by Phospherescent
I also got little snippets of nursery Rhyme in there such as Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head from Oranges and Lemons.
As for treatment of animation, timing and rhythm I'm overwhelmed by all the possibilities.
Some thoughts are:

• Taking found objects with writing on them that have similar letters to words I am using and finding interesting ways to turn them into the words I want
• collecting different media with words on such as magazines and newspapers and building them up into a ransom note style of animation
• I had a look at this on Youtube and like the artists style of erasing what he'd written as I think it has an interesting meaning when what you are doing is automatic writing
• Writing on arms and hands, filming and dropping into an animation sequence
• sparkler and neon sign writing.
• Normal scrabble and vertical scrabble

I need to look more at artist works related to text media before I make any definite plans.

Backdate Ident project.

This invariably happens. I forget to update my blog and then I feel I have to backdate.
So the Ident project is over but it lives on in my need to backfill my blog.

Essentially what happened is my home internet got shaped because my flatmate downloaded 28gb over our 12gb cap and I've been too sick to come in to use the computer at school specifically to update my blog. Here are a few links that I've been meaning to put up:

My Finished video



Some videos I referenced to get the look right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PERvvv318aE&feature=PlayList&p=3AF9EC64D5D6F60C&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28hlxAgHoE&feature=PlayList&p=3AF9EC64D5D6F60C&index=11
both of which aren't really very exciting but gave me a better idea of how to get the flickering right.

The actual content was heavily influenced by the tv shows the Gogs and the land before time.
Here are some links to the tutorials that I did:
Old film look
Making titles
Mixing effects

The music I ended up using was Maple leaf Rag, it's kind of funny but when I was working on this idea I was staying out at a friends house and his younger brother kept on practicing this piece on the piano over and over again to the point where I was pulling my hair out. Weeks later after I forgot about it I was searching for music heard this song and thought that it would fit perfectly and it wasn't til after I had edited it in that I realized why it was familiar. I guess it had subconsciously linked itself to this project in my head.

There is alot of other stuff that I looked at that wasn't directly related so it's hard to track down and probably not worth posting but this covers the basics. Now on to the Text project! Yay!

Ident Project Reflection

If I had ten words rather than ten seconds to express my identity it would be these:
Random
Eccentric
Frivolous
Chaotic
Humorous
Low-brow
Earthy
Colourful
Messy
And wild

I didn’t want to take myself too seriously; I think in expressing all of the above things my projects succeeded. I knew my inexperience in working with film I would have to embrace low production values and I’m still impressed with how many hours I spent deteriorating the quality of my film til it was comedically appalling. I was searching for the cult film appeal – i.e. it’s so bad it’s good.

Failures in the film are that the titles may go too quickly for some people to read and the whole thing had to be squashed together quite hard, however I like the rapid fire pacing. I also had a lot of trouble lighting my set as I didn’t want dual shadows on my background -sure it’s obvious that it’s a set but I didn’t want it to be that obvious- and there are some quite hard highlights bouncing off my painted volcano but they just add to the tacky brilliance.
Another failure of the piece is that the score is definitely not original however I feel it fits quite well and isn’t too distracting.
Overall I am quite pleased.

1st post

There are two things I am terrible at doing regularly: keeping blogs and keeping journals. How do I expect to pass art school again? It seems like every class has one or the other and you are expected to show the progression of all your ideas for artwork like a mathematician shows all his workings out for sums. I think its BS but hey, I'm pretty cynical by nature and there could be some merit in it, maybe.

So let's get on with it shall we. First project, show identity in a 10 second film recorded in the art school studio. Okay well first of all how do we approach identity? Is it what we look like, what stereotypes we fill, what we do, how other people see us or how we see ourselves. As far as I can see it is all those things however what I think is most important is not what we get up to but how we approach things.
So what am I like? Here is a list:

• Playful
• eccentric
• crazy
• cynical
• energetic
• enthusiastic

It already being the 4th week of school I've been through a few ideas for what to film. My first idea was to use my hair in the piece which is crazy and curly and I feel expresses parts of my character quite well. I wanted to use the curls as waves and show a shot of a small toy boat traveling along it but discovered that such a scene would be nigh on impossible to track.
So I went through my room looking for objects that expressed me.
I found:

• A giant bubble blower that is blue and looks like a light saber
• Some fairy bread that I made(and proceeded to eat)
• A silly jester hat that I bought at circu de solei
• a miniature orc that went with some sort of game
• a toy dinosaur.

The dinosaur made me remember the school project that I had always wanted to do but never got to; the paper mache volcano. Hmmm, not only is this project an excellent excuse to make one but it fits my nature pretty well, it's energetic, playful, eccentric. I spent hours combing youtube for suitable ways to create the volcano and the explosion, the funnest way appears to be hydrogen peroxide, potassium iodide and soap creating a reaction thats called "Elephants toothpaste". You can see one of the videos here. This is also extremely cool using diet coke and mentos and is very ammusing. I even played around in my back yard with potasium maganete and glycerin. However all of these ideas had to be discarded due to the fact that I can't really blow anything up or set anything on fire in the studio so i'll have to keep to the traditional bicarb and vinegar explosion.

anyway more up dates later. I'm tired