Self-Assessment 1

          This is an advertisement for the Campus Community Farm as part of the aspect of my SMP where I implement a publicity campaign for the farm to get people to experience the spiritual benefits of gardening. This project will ultimately be shared on my website, and also as a projection on the day of my SMP presentation.  This particular commercial is supposed to share the importance of the gardening ritual of planting. Planting is something that has been done since before the beginning of agriculture, and the metaphor of planting extends into the metaphysical and mental aspects of our everyday lives. Humans and plants are connected by this metaphor. By animating a person and a plant growing out of a seed, I wanted to show that both are capable of growth, separately or together. The abstraction of the animation would allow for the possibility of a human growing out of a metaphorical seed, developing into a better person, but also the rate of growth together would mean that this process of planting helps to create a relationship with the surrounding environment. The background of the live action stop motion helps to enhance the context of the farm.

            I used four programs in order to create this project. I started with Photoshop to resize the photographs that Sam helped me to take at the farm of my hand planting a seed in the ground. This is where I learned how to use the “Actions” feature on Photoshop, which saved me a significant amount of time in other endeavors, such as adding a green backdrop to my illustrated frames. I then used Illustrator to draw my animated frames. This was the painstakingly long and arduous step of creating the piece. I was expecting to make at least 80 frames of hand-drawn Illustration for fluidity, but I ended up only drawing 38 frames of the human and seed growing. Toward the end, I think the growth happened more rapidly, perhaps creating a choppier and quicker transition than I had earlier anticipated. I had to sacrifice some fluidity and slower action for my own sanity and for time’s sake. I also learned how to delete particular sections of the pen lines using the white arrow tool in addition to using the warp tool to manipulate my images for subsequent frames. When using the white tool to delete and recreate lines, however, I had to be consistently wary of the lines not meeting at the right point because this small mistake would cause the image to be transparent in the incorrect place. Using only the warp tool made my lines very wavy and hard to smooth out, but it worked wonderfully for the degradation of the seed pod and its shadows. I then used iMovie to create separate projects for the live action planting stop motion and the illustrated animation. iMovie is incredibly user-friendly, and it offered basic overlay features for creating the movie.  The first one I tried was the cut-out effect, which was terrible. Basically, the clips cut from one clip to the other, and overlay can occur when the opacity levels are tampered with. However, there is a black or white film on the overlay clip, which did not offer the aesthetic I was looking for. iMovie also has a green screen effect; however, iMovie automatically cuts out a certain portion of the image in order to compensate for the deletion of the green, which did not serve well for maintaining the thickness of my lines. In all reality, I probably could have used iMovie entirely for the creation of my project, but I decided to use Final Cut Pro instead. Learning this program was interesting and not incredibly difficult for my purposes. It was a lot more flexible than iMovie in terms of giving me more effects options and manipulating the clips. Instead of the green screen effect, I ended up using the Chroma Keyer to key out the green, adjusting the luma and saturation levels to key out the Photoshop green background from my images. This was incredibly easy. Achieving the zoom feature correctly and flawlessly was more difficult because I had to zoom in exactly the same for the five “GROW” stills so that the word “GROW” did not move on screen. Once I figured out that the coordinates could be typed in rather than merely dragging the red cross, I was incredibly relieved. Adding in the audio was not difficult, but picking out the music itself was a painful process. I downloaded my audio from Creative Commons, via the website Free Music Archives.

            I went to the Mac Lab to work on this project at least every other day for three to five hours at a time, in addition to in class studio hours. Aside from the plaster sculpture I made two years ago, I have not spent so much time on a single art project. Though I was familiar with most of the programs that I used, there was still a lot of learning that I had to do, which was incredibly frustrating and took up much of my time. Much of my time was spent looking up instructional tutorials because I was determined to attempt to figure out the inner workings of simple solutions without additional help. The Internet was my Godsend, in addition to the help of Sam and Billy. Once I figured out easier ways of working the animation, the process of my illustrations became much easier, and making the animation a little choppier and sacrificing some fluidity definitely helped to save time.

            The commercial is successful in its intended purpose of advertising the farm. The beginning of the commercial starts with a story, drawing people in with a singular hand. The purpose of this faceless hand was to help the audience identify with the hand in some way, and to serve as a metonym for the whole person. The music starts out slow, but changes with the introduction of the illustrated animation. The slow piano marks the slower and less dynamic action of planting the seed, while the accordion crescendos with the growth of the seed, enhancing the fantasy of the seed and human bursting from a seed pod.  The text slides change at the start of each measure of the musical piece, introducing a dynamic change where one would be expected to happen. The audio was a last minute decision, and a decision made without much confidence, that effectively helps to improve the quality and tone of the commercial. The overlay of animation on top of the live background contextualizes the commercial, and also maintains the earthy atmosphere where the transformation and growth suggested is expected to happen. The mixture of reality and illustration serves to make the transition between physicality and mindfulness, noting that the physical action results in a nonvisible transformation. The white color of the animations also serves to provide a nice contrast from the dirt; the white is pure, clean and smooth, while the dirt is rough, shaded, and consistently shifting. This notes that though the farm is a very dirty place, there is still some sense of purity there. An accidental success of the piece comes from the background shifting while the text is on screen, so as to make the commercial consistently dynamic and changing throughout, rather than ending on a very static note. Overall, the commercial seems to be a success. There are a few things that could be improved, though. First and foremost, the sizing of the video does not translate well expanded, and should have been fitted to an HD screen. Secondly, the words “Life”, “Energy”, “Food”, and “Together” are in a darker shade of black than the rest of the outlines in the animation. This does not help with the sense of unity of the animations and also makes these words stand out more than everything else. However, this might be an accidental success because it adds additional focus to those words instead of “GROW”, which is a word that remains static throughout those four frames. I am also wary of how the word “GROW” expands on the frame. It seems somewhat cheesy in the film, and transitions like a Prezi presentation, which I had hoped to avoid. I don’t know how else the transition could happen though.

            I believe I deserve an A on this project. I put a lot of effort and time into this project, and was willing to learn a lot about the different programs. I did not effectively fix the project to fit an HD screen, nor was I attentive to the image sizing in the beginning either, but despite that mistake, I think that enough time and effort was put in to deserve an A.

the GIFs were too distracting

The “Conversation between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke” was extremely difficult to read due to the incorporation of several obnoxious GIFs throughout the text, and I have to admit that I found the language overly pedantic. They talk about the glitch as an art form to aspire to, and present the engagement of technology with art as a revolution in art that allows for a more general and accepting form of making art. Image is everywhere, and thus, the subject of art is consistently apparent in everyday life. Art can be made out of anything, and the accessibility of art is far more rampant with the introduction of technology.

The authors seem to delight in the fact that people can create art out of the use of cellular phones, webcams, and easily downloaded software. I think that the accessibility of artistic expression is great, but I found the intolerance of working with outdated modes of technology unfair. This appreciation of older modes of making art may connote a false sense of superiority and WASPish attitude, but the attraction to this traditional and outdated mode of art-making also reflects something about society- progression is happening rapidly, but too rapidly for people to fully absorb. The nostalgia of the past is something that is consistently there, but with the exponential growth of technology and progression, the expanse of time that is romanticized and missed increases as well. Progress could be happening too fast for humans, just as those GIFs of glitches transformed too fast for me to process.

While I find glitch art quite interesting, and it certainly takes a lot of attention and knowledge about code in order to purposefully manipulate certain aspects of the image, I am wary about how the artists here are regarding glitch art. To start, the GIFs of the glitch art are not a successful way of presenting the art, especially in the midst of text- it is too distracting. Perhaps I am using this distraction as an escapist excuse as Osborne seems to think most in the contemporary age regard art, but given a reading task, it felt like I was being accosted by a series of nonsensically colored images that I was unable to process, resulting in a sickening feeling in my stomach. The degradation of these images and their reflection upon the intricacies of digital art and their continual transformation and travel in the computer world is reflected in the glitch pieces, but what else can they say? 

Finished for Critique Numbah Wun

Animation Artists

HAYLEY MORRIS

With the advent of new technologies, one might think that stop motion animation would become obsolete, but the new technologies have only served to increase the flexibility and the possibilities of stop motion for animator and animation director Hayley Morris. Morris works out of her studio in Brooklyn, New York to create animations for music videos and companies that wish to advertise their projects (Hayley Morris). Her animated works include a mixture of mediums, such as drawing, painting, sculpting, textiles, lighting, and sound. Conceptually, her works tend to be surrealist dreamscapes due to the very saturated color schemes that she chooses, and the transformations in her animations that take place.

            

In connection with my work, I admire Morris’ ability to balance advertisement and art, but also to combine multiple modes of animation and film. I aspire to create an advertisement for the Campus Farm that includes 3D and 2D stop motion animations by layering the stills. Morris has combined different lighting techniques, rotoscope watercolor animations, and live action into her stop motion. To focus, I will limit my critique and analysis to her work on the music video for Iron & Wine’s “Joy”.

For the music video, Morris shot all of the stills of the music video, using paper, paint, and other materials to create a foundation for the music video, setting the video in a somewhat bland or dead forest. The image of a woman was projected onto the set pieces and then she rotoscoped those images frame by frame using a computer program like Dragonframe that has many animating features, such as the ability to rotoscope, lip-syncing with animated facial features, and vector-based drawing tools (Dragonframe, Motionographer). The rotoscope added a dreamscape element to the video with a brightly colored woman who would appear throughout the gray scenery, adding “joy” to the landscape, and replacing the dead with the living. The animation went well with the nature of the song and captured the meaning and tone very well: the chill and somewhat haunted tone of the music with the loving and romantic lyrics about a very emotional testament toward a person who is the only one that can bring joy to the singer.

            

This piece is very strong in creating a sense of tone and atmosphere in the piece. Combining the method of rotoscoping in combination with the 3D stop motion creates a depth and atmosphere that could not have been attained alone. The continuous shift in the coloration of the woman enhances the dreamy atmosphere of the sound and imagery, and while the majority of the set remains still, the rotoscoped overlay creates an ethereal sense of motion.

            

In terms of her dreamy worlds, she says that creating animations that too closely imitate reality are pointless and does not fully capture the possibilities offered by animation (Bowlegs). I hope to emulate her sense of imagination in creating a strong setting and tone in my work by successfully combining 2D and 3D animation styles in order to enhance the spiritual, magical nature of the work.

http://www.bowlegsmusic.com/culture/film-director-hayley-morris-24740

http://hayleymorris.net/

http://motionographer.com/2013/04/15/hayley-morris-iron-and-wine-joy/

http://www.onepointfour.co/2012/05/25/the-amazing-animated-world-of-hayley-morris/

MATT SMITHSON

Matt Smithson is an animator who has also exhibited works in painting, printmaking, and motion graphics. Smithson has created several animations for different companies and movements for humanitarian purposes. His animations are uplifting, inspiring, and informational. His art background and interests extend beyond this commercial art, delving into more surreal and odd concepts that are inspired by his dreams (Cataloguing), but I am most interested in his advertisement goals in relation to animation.

            

In his advertisement for First Book, a nonprofit organization that helps to provide new books for children of lower income families, he uses a simplistic and abstracted cartoon style of animation combined with bright, saturated colors to create a fun and warm-hearted setting for the animation. Having the characters abstracted with little identification helps viewers to identify with the characters, along with their issues and successes throughout the course of the advertisement. Smithson also abstracts the setting down to very simplistic and symbolic images- the unshaded lines capture the essence of each object- a book is simply a rectangle with a line or smaller rectangle indicating a title. The use of geometric shapes to fill the setting is also another characteristic of his work. While for this particular animation, it may help to enhance the focus on the child, in his other works, it serves to keep within the theme of abstraction and to aid in the transitions. Smithson’s transitioning method is very smooth- the transformations of the objects and the scenery flow seamlessly and are not distracting or jarring. The only problem I have with the transitions are that they seem very typical of these types of animated commercials, and also somewhat relate to the sense of space and transition in Prezi presentations.  

While this style may not necessarily be entirely original, I think they speak testament toward the effective flow of advertising, storytelling, and how to get the message across to a viewer. The storyline of the advertisement is captivating, and emotionally appealing, which serves to successfully draw the viewer into the message in order for the branding to appear at the end of the advertisement. The characters are simple and relatable, the rest of the art and symbols are also simplistic and do not distract from the main character or the conflict, but enliven the commercial with constant motion. This is typical of any commercial, and I hope to emulate this successful storyline with such a captivating manner. 

http://www.manvsmagnet.com/Firstbook

http://nottoscale.tv/director/man-vs-magnet/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB3MXD0ThFo

Project 1 Brainstorm

I'd like to do an animation. In terms of bringing attention to the screen itself, I'm hoping to explore how the animations interact with the frame and depend upon it. In my Anime and Manga class, we are talking about how the frame is essential in comics in terms of creating time and space. This is true also in animation and film, but the effects of the frame are taken for granted. The concept of the animation will touch upon the interdependence of humans and plants, and how they grow together. The animation will be a simple line drawing and abstracting the figures to allow them to be representative of all humans and all of nature. The circle will be a repetitive and flexible image within the scenes that ties the two seemingly separable figures of the person and plant together in every frame. It acts as the seed, the water, the fruit, and the overall cycle which they are part of.