Artist Statement - Week 11

I was thinking of what could be fun, yet manageable. I figured Spider-man would be fun, and doing it in a similar style as the 1966 Batman series would be fun and uncomplicated. It ties themes together: both are live action series based on a comic book character, which is why animation for the trailer fits well: it references the original medium.

I had wanted to do a more visually interesting (and easier to draw) character than the Lizard, but I felt that since I was basing the trailer on the upcoming film, which has him as the villain, I ought to put him in there. I was pleased with the outcome: the green added a nice colour (though it had prevented me from setting the backdrop as green, which is what I had originally intended, and what is used in Batman).

As for the action, I figure, Spider-man pounds on bad guys. Have him do that. So Spidey gives an uppercut to the Lizard, jumps out and grabs the title with his web. It all just fell into place and made perfect sense.

The text resembles the text used on the Amazing Spider-man comics (blocky letters). And I set the colours to that of Spider-man's costume.

As previously stated, I hand-drew each frame (five in total: Spider-head, Spider-arm, two Lizards and the web). I Sharpied and scanned them and coloured them in Photoshop. The rest is just basic animations an movements.

Show the Motion - Week 10

Here are the Spider-man stills with which I am working:

The method I used was to simply draw them free-hand with pencil. I then went over them with a Sharpie and scanned them. I put in the colour and darkened the Sharpie through Photoshop. I also warped the web in Photoshop to fit my size needs. Here is the Lizard:

After Effects is simple, for easy things. It gets harder the more complicated you go. That sounds obvious, but the curve is steep; I was able to do simple things (ie: what I needed to do to complete this assignment) with the knowledge I gained from the first hour of fiddling around with it.

Stop! Motion Time - Week 9

I've always been a fan of stop motion animation.
Correction: clay animation.

Gumby is king of the genre.
Correction: Art Clokey.

The creator of Gumby did his first animation, titled "Gumbasia," in 1953:

The art-style video is free form clay animation; it's a visual piece, not a story piece. Gumby, nor any character at all, makes no appearance. But it was so well done and innovative that it led to the production of the first Gumby short, Gumby on the Moon:

Clokey's series was picked up and ran for 233 episodes spanning 34 years and a movie in 1995.

Clay animation is something I did as a child. Typically violent shorts, about five to 15 seconds of little characters murdering each other in various ways over and over. No dialogue or any audio at all. I used a low quality web camera and shot at 15 frames per second. A decent amount, but the videos often looked very sped up. I'd also shoot little shorts for assignments in high school. These typically yielded near-perfect marks despite poor production quality. It doesn't take much to impress a high school teacher. These productions would have monologue/dialogue and audio and would span for several minutes, depending on what was required to be said.

I'd like to get into it. But it's a tedious and arduous task, animating. Something for which I do not have the time or funds to produce what I would deem acceptable today. Perhaps if I find myself so inspired, I will make time.

I Have a Vision - Week 8

Five seconds isn't a long time, but it also is.
I'm finding After Effects to be simple, so far, and I can't imagine anything too complicated being done in it. But I also barely know the program, so I'm expecting to be surprised, if that's possible. I can see it as a useful tool for the credit roll/opening credits. Like I said, simple animations, words/images flying across the screen. Maybe I'm just expecting too much of it. Perhaps I saw it as an application for full animation, but it's looking more like an assistant to pre-done video and the like. I'm interested to see what people at this level come up with.

My vision: Spider-man meets Batman. I'm going for a video of the new Spider-man film due out next year or something, but in the style of the 1966 Batman series intro. I'm not terribly interested in the new film (I think it's called The Amazing Spider-man?), but I do like the guy, and I do like Batman. And I feel like this vision I have will look good at the current level with which I am working.

Fonts, fonts, fonts, fonts. Now the word is weird. - Week 7

A wise man once said "Fonts are the lifeblood of written word."

Maybe. Probably not. But they are kind of neat, they way in a simple design of a letter can evoke emotions and draw relationships to events, culture or styles. Where does that come from?

The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, likely a custom font for the album, evokes a throwback to the 60s.  The font was created to correspond with the album's cover illustrations, in with which it fits perfectly. It also fits well with the album's content: bubbly, happy, psychedelic and cartoony. The lack of any kind of corner removes any anxiety or stress that could possibly be associated with text. It really gets across the playfulness and love that is the center focus of the album.

No Doubt's Rock Steady uses a filthy mess of a font. Each letter isn't necessarily done in the same way every time. Which brings forth the question if it can still be considered a font. All the letters are certainly the same style. Either way, it's dirty. It's uneven. It's all over the place. That's how this album by No Doubt works; no particular consistency.

Weezer's Weezer (1996). Century Gothic. Simple. Lower case. Goes really well with the art, though not either way in terms of the album content. These guys were among the first to set indie style in the mainstream, and their use of lower case simple font is still used by indie artists now. Placement justified left at the top keeps it more simple. Sans serif also keeps any complication away.

Motion Commotion/Devotion/Emotion/Promotion etc. - Week Six

Thank Each Mistake - Maniac

This is an animation created only using the iPad Brushes App. A statement from the artist, Shawn Harris:

"I illustrated this video for "Thank Each Mistake" using the Brushes app for iPad. I heard about it through Jorge Colombo's New Yorker covers, but for me, the best media for this technique wasn't print, but video! By taking advantage of the actions playback feature, and by using a brushes viewer application for my Mac, I found I could export my painting as a quicktime movie. The app isn't designed for animation, but the playback feature, which records each brush-stroke as a separate frame, lends itself to a coarse morphy style of stop-motion fingerpainting, if you can manage to be deliberate enough about not lifting your finger from the painting..."

What I appreciate about this work of motion graphics is it's (almost) seamless transition from each section/animation to the next. It's a little choppy, but it flows nicely. It's interesting how the brush/finger strokes are both the foundation and the animation.
The content in interesting; I can't conceptualize the flow of imagery. Night sky to teeth to an eye? Or faces as icecream melting into a palm tree? There is no logical flow and it's refreshing because you can sit back and let it guide your mind fluidly.
And in the spirit of the music, it's not afraid of the mistakes; there are clearly errors in the video which could have been cleaned up, but the artist wanted to have used only the iPad app and put artistic integrity over neat and polished. The video and audio fit well together, thematically (and sometimes literally).

Artist Statement - Week Five

My inspiration came from a theoretical dirty punk band named Rat Funeral. I was inspired by the general re-imaging nature of punk culture: army boots in fashion, heavily distorted sounds, alternative piercings, etc. Alternative uses of typically mainstream/systematic things.  I needed something dirty and punk juxtaposed with a typically "normal" item. I find the combination of milk and cigarettes unwholesome. Milk is often symbolic of purity and life force, and cigarettes are seen as dirty and death. In the combination, the cigarettes contaminate the purity of the milk, making it seen as the mucusy bodily fluid that it actually is. I also tinted the photo a slight yellowy green, to give it a sickly feeling.
For the logo, I created something that could easily be stenciled, because it's an easy way to piss off authority figures without heavy, if any, repercussions (and isn't that what punk is all about?). So it had to be simple. The face of the rat is obviously appropriately relevant to the band's name, and it's important to have something that can immediately be recognized as the main logo. The colour scheme red, white and black is common among the dirty, punk and seemingly "unpolished"/rough music scene (The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, Green Day's American Idiot). I split the logo to give a "two rats or one rat?" question.
I named the album "Honesty Versus Tact" because sometimes you can't have both, and you've got to choose. Like dairy and tobacco, they don't mix.
Overall, Rat Funeral is a way to capture punk culture, all the while being tongue in cheek enough to put it on the edge of sincerity and parody.

On the technical side, I did a whole lot of clone stamping and heal patching. With those I removed the lettering from the cigarette and milk cartons. The graphics (lettering, logo) were made with text and basic shapes and then warped/distorted/skewed to fit the perspective. I also played with the colouring, changing the wall colour from a bright green using the magic wand. Most of the text was done in Photoshop except for the "Rat Funeral," which I drew and scanned.

From this, I learned that if I look long enough, I can figure out how to do what I want in Photoshop. Unfortunately I also learned that I am not too good at remembering how to do things. I tried working with a tablet and learned that it's not as easy as I thought it might be. In-class critique wasn't anything less than positive, and hearing that my piece looks like it was "professionally done" is a nice shot in the arm.