1. Moving Text - Using a Lite-Brite animated text to illustrate how a typically mundane message can achieve more impact through light, colors and movement. The animation can show the idea of people being drawn to light like a moth to a flame. This can also serve as a comment on how society is susceptible when it comes to the presentation of a message. A message can become a persons mantra or reality if it is presented to them in the right light (pun intended).
2. Using cutouts of characters from 8bit games - The characters from the old 8bit games can come alive and leap out of the screen. This is a role reversal of sorts. The stigma of people who are addicted to video games is that their reality is within the games they play. They retreat to the gaming world to escape their reality. If the characters within the games felt the same and escaped into the gamers reality it could serve as a satirical comment on the hermit style lives of the people who play video games. This can also be a comment on the importance of removing oneself from a tyrannical situation. The 8bit character is breaking free from the control of the gamer.
3. Chalk board drawings - The juxtaposition of the things students think or dream about can morph out of the mundane arithmetic or text that usually plagues the chalk board in a school. This can be a commentary on the reality of the material that is being digested by a typical student. When people read, their mind sometimes wonders and even though there is a conscience act of reading, only the dreaming is being digested. The illustrations can be of things that illustrate freedom in contrast to the feeling of the shackles of institutionalized learning.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
3 ideas
While there aren't any of my concepts attached to these examples, I think these are some interesting analog animation examples and they use techniques that could be helpful with this process.
Self Critique
Self Critique
Kevin Reuter
Experimental Cinema mca-dm475
9 September 2010
1. Title of your project
The presented material is Project 1/2 and is entitled, And the Band Played On.
2. Main idea that you started with
The idea of the film was originally a cathartic visual exercise. I was trying to display my own personal feelings of exclusion, specifically from the distress I felt from not being included in the reunion of a band I was once a member of. Rather than dwell on visual presenting the personal anguish I felt, I chose to use stand-ins for the band and thumb my nose at them. The piece was supposed to initially convey the sorrow of exclusion, but then visualize the transition of sorrow to rage and then finally revenge. The band photos were taken from a website called The Hall of Douchebags. http://www.rockandrollconfidential.com/hall/index.php By using images of these “douchebags,” as stand-ins for the band that inspired the piece, I am in turn calling them a collective douchebag.
3. Source of the idea and its importance to you
The most important basis and underlying concept at the core of the piece is revenge. I have the most fun watching revenge movies. I really enjoy movies that feature a bully getting silenced in the end. I was trying to convey the human nature of wanting the worst for the people that have wronged you. My revenge here is making a broad generalization about the ephemeral and pathetic existence of bands. If I say that all bands are lame, then this generalization must include the band that wronged me.
4. Key emotion or experience that you wanted your audience to experience
I wanted the audience to laugh at the bands. The catharsis here was to make myself feel better by humiliating them. I want the audience to empathize with the initial feeling of exclusion, but then gain a vicarious relief in the destruction and humiliation of the bands. The bands can act (or should) as a stand-in for the bullies the viewer comes across in their lives.
5. Brief, clear synopsis of the story
The viewer is bombarded with a barrage of rapid fire images of bands. This is to illustrate the trite over saturation of mediocre bands in our society. Then a disgruntled child is shown in black and white. Considering this is personal piece, I will have to confess the child is a stand-in for me, which was my attempt to address and admit to the juvenile nature of the piece. The child becomes enraged, a fight breaks out and all of the bands whither away into oblivion.
6. Theme or premise of the piece that you discovered after finishing it
I feel that piece was visually too literal. I felt this way even before the critique. I often underestimate the calculating mind of my audiences and feel the need to spell out the emotion of my concept through use of loaded imagery. Admittedly, I feel there is too much of a negative emphasis put on the use of literal loaded imagery, but I’m beginning to see that to use them means using them in a new light and a clever way. I did not do this. I relied on explosions to convey an explosive emotion and fire to express the burning distress of rage. The parts of the movie did not segue well enough from one to the other to express the desired narrative. I think the message is still clear here, but it is displayed too simply and without cohesion.
7. Strengths of the project. Look for these in all areas including process.
I agree with the class critique in that the structure of the piece is sound. I feel the beginning, while not specific enough to the idea of “bands,” conveys both an ephemeral nature of groups like these and the irony of someone feeling excluded from them.
8. Problem areas. Include notes on your own and others suggestions for improvements. What can be done to resolve/improve problem areas.
I do not feel that the overall piece is slick enough, meaning there is an undesired amateurish quality to the finished work. There are problems with pixilation and the frame transition had an undesired “choppiness” in parts. I think this will improve with practice and eventually with the inclusion of more advanced programs (e.g. Final Cut and After Effects). There is also too many non-sequitur transitions which cannot be blamed on the program knowledge.
9. Journal-type notes on your own learning process, discoveries and frustrations. Frustrations should not be the focus of your self-critique -- aka this is not a rant or self-pity party.
I had problems applying the scripts and shortcuts learned in class. The loading of the images in a stack did not work how I had intended it to work and I finally gave up on relying on the shortcuts. After the tedious and arduous process of hand placing a majority of the images, I unfortunately became complacent with having anything to show, rather than a polished piece that would have come out of either more time or the time saving use of the presented tools, scripts and shortcuts. While I would like to have sat on this presented work for a day and made some necessary changes, I was working in a way that did not allot for that opportunity. I was rendering from one Photoshop file. So I had many clips to piece together with Quick Time, but only one Photoshop file that was constantly changing. If there is a way to open a rendered movie file in Photoshop to then make changes to, I don’t know it.
Monday, September 6, 2010
a position regarding google or the larger concept of the interweb in general
I feel like I keep resorting back to a very strong inner dichotomy when it comes to the pros and cons of a life that revolves around the computer. The article talks about “reaching for the fast-forward button” in real life only to find that one does not exist. I can relate to that. I think about quickly “COMMAND Z-ing” any mistakes I make while sitting in a drawing class. I rely on the ability to work out every possibility when I am designing something in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop. Command Z allows the creator an endless amount of attempts to get it right. But what if we are supposed to make the mistakes that COMMAND Z can only erase in a virtual world? What if having endless opportunities to “get it right” disables a creator’s ability to commit to literal or metaphorical stroke of the pencil. Too many choices makes decision time difficult.
Michael Cain in Batman Begins says, “Why do we fall sir? So we might learn to pick ourselves up…” I often think that if our lives revolve around a machine that allows us the opportunity to so readily erase any mistakes we might make, we are not learning to “pick ourselves up.”
I have friends that will only communicate to me through texting or email. They will not answer the phone when I call. While this might be a financial decision, or maybe they just don’t want to talk to me….part of me wonders if they have become too accustomed to crafting or distilling their speech. One on one conversation does not allow for COMMAND Z. Once a person says something live to someone else, it’s out there and there’s no taking it back and no anonymity. Are people going to become afraid to talk in person because they become accustomed to getting it right in a virtual world. Facebook addicts are like this. They’re able to arduously craft every thing that their “friends” see and know about them. People are much more naked in the real world than they are in the computer world.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
critical response to article (9/1/2010)
Nicholas Carr poignantly addresses all of the same idiosyncrasies that have plagued my love/hate relationship with this new “plugged in” world. From my perspective, the computer has become this really fancy social networking gadget, but to see someone sitting at a computer or laptop renders him or her unapproachable. The device has encased them in this imaginary, yet socially understood, cocoon of solitude. There is a very sick irony there.
I have been concerned for a while about the consequences of having the answer to any probing query so readily at my fingertips. I’m worried about the biological ramifications of relying on a Google search to remember something that my brain could not. This is why I feel the need to take ginkgo biloba twice a day. The computer has become a crutch for thinking. If a person breaks their leg and they are forced to use a crutch to walk, the unused leg becomes weak. If that person were to continue to use that crutch, the unused leg would eventually atrophy. What if we are atrophying the part of our brain that is responsible for recall with the Internet?
Carr talks about Google’s philosophy. Google wants to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful” to improve upon our productivity as thinkers. I hear this and I can only think of another analogy. Imagine two lions. One lives a lazy existence in a small habitat at the Toledo Zoo and is spoon-fed a steady diet of raw steak cutlets and the other is a cunning predator that relies on its’ prowess and intellect to survive in the vast Kalahari Desert. Can one argue that the Toledo Zoo lion is being denied his instinctual purpose in this world? Are we denying ourselves a necessary developmental hunt for knowledge if everything is completely distilled and spelled out for us by the Internet?
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