Michael's Art 328 Process

This 3rd animation uses a recognizable image of an orchid in a pot along with the content limitation of only using a plant:
train_referential

It took me quite a while to figure out what kind of recognizable image I was going to use. At first I was thinking of a worm but then I thought about how hard it would be to make it meander in a curvilinear fashion. The very next thing I thought of was a flower growing and breaking which lead me to the very nice potted orchid.

This animation almost built itself. As soon as I clipped the flower and pot from the background in Photoshop and assembled the layers on the stage I instantly saw how the flower would interact with the sound. It became a very fluid mechanical process that was a lot easier than the previous animation (Thank God!).

I went through the sound clip a few times to decipher all the sounds and I noted at one point it sounds like a second car squeak comes in. I also noted the steam venting happens twice and trails off each time. So I started with animating the first plant growing out of its pot in sync with the train squeak. I instantly tested movie and got a laugh out of the train squeak noise now relating to flower growth.

From there I continued to match up the different types of car squeaks. I listened carefully for the sound to see if it sounded like a quick directional break or a simple up and down motion. As you will see I applied the quick 2-part squeak to the flower breaking and the 1-part squeak to either the bottom half moving up/down or the top part re-aligning itself. I began to see the sound define the structure of my animation and within an hour I had the animation complete. But not without adding the background changes for the steam venting sounds.

I found all 3 animations I did to be quite successful under the limitations chosen.

The following animation uses only one font with the other limitation being a restraint to two colors:
kids meeting with coach before game
**Needs to be run in a small window! If you run it larger than 550 x 400 it will go extremely slow**

Before I started animating I recalled from our first small group session that Chris suggested I try playing the sound clip backwards so that the words are not recognizable. I agreed that this would help relieve any continuity between animation and interpretation from hearing English words. So I went ahead and reversed the clip which worked out in the end to my advantage.

After getting about 2 seconds into this animation I realized I picked a sound that had way too many major and minor sounds to keep track of. But I chose not to back down from the challenge. The other challenge was trying to think of letters and letter combinations that I could use which would not represent humans too literally. For font choice I chose one that looked handwritten called TaylorsHand. This particular font had specific qualities that I felt mimicked the human voice in a subtle way. The edges were not sharp but organic and the proportions had good variation.

When first beginning the animation I tried to instantly start separating the sounds to letters. After an hour or two it became too aggrivating so I left the computer and went for a walk to 7-11. On my walk I tried to think of the other parts of the animation that needed attention so I could let my mind cool off from the tedious task of separating out all the kid chatter. On my way home I came to the conclusion to use two letterforms for the coach since he stood out and to make him a different color. I also thought of making smaller movie clip animations of letters jostling about to act as the background chatter; then to add irregularity to some. When I got back infront of my computer I went straight to working on the background chatter as it seemed easier to get started with.

Indeed it was easier and I had it done much sooner than I thought. I previewed the animation with two background movie clips and realized I needed more movie clips in the background to make it feel like you are surrounded at a soccer game by about 20 or so people. I went a lil overboard on syncing and duplicating which resulted in a very slow-running animation. So I pulled out the background movie clips until it ran better but still not full frame rate. I forgot to mention I added a blur effect and faded out these clips to reinforce the background quality. I believe the filter might have been causing the slower frame rate. Basically after some fine tuning I had the perfect set of background movie clips.

Next I got back to picking out the voices that stood out during the animation. There were 3 kids, grass crunching, the coach, random voice beeps and a mom sound. I picked a letter or symbol for each sound except the coach had a combination of two letterforms since his voice stood out the most. I then proceeded to follow the voices down the timeline and accent each outstanding voice with a variety of animation styles. I made the letterforms/symbols move directionally up and down and side to side depending on how the voice trailed in or out. Then depending on how loud or soft the voice was I adjusted the size over time. The only time I did not stick to this animating rule was when the odd grass crunching sound came in. To abstractly portray that grass sound I used a mask on some tilde symbols and revealed small bits in sync with the crunching. If there was a group of kids from the background shouting and coming into the foreground -- I took one of the background movie clips and brought it's alpha to 100% and animated it according to my previous animation rules.

During this animation process I tested my movie many many times to make sure I was still in sync and not killing the frame rate too bad. After a while I didn't have to test it as much since I knew from previous tests I was getting the sync correct.

On my last test I was truly amazed how well the irregular movieclips ended up matching up to voices both on purpose and by chance. It really was a work of art functioning on it's own. For the next animation I hope not to have as much tedious syncing.

Here's my abstract animation with the one media limitation being hand drawn. Even though it's all vector I used my Wacom tablet to draw the assets:
abstract_animation

The initial concept was to remove the referential sounds of the wood fire burning into a completely different image. At first I was thinking of using found objects and still photographs of a pencils rolling around and breaking whenever a crackle-pop from the fire was heard. After taking the photographs and thinking more on the concept I realized that it was still too literal. The pencil is wood and would make a similar sound when snapped. Therefore it might be too easy to understand the sound you are hearing. I wanted more of a challenge.

This drove me to instead, choose to digitally hand-draw shapes and lines. I thought about bowling balls rolling around for the rumbling noise the fire makes constantly so I drew some lopsided circles. They needed to be lopsided because the low rumbling fire burning sound was not a constant tone but slightly wavering. As these lopsided circles would roll, they give the look of an uneven sound much like the fire. The circles are also semi-transparent so that when they pass over/under each other they show a color interaction much like the rumbles you hear from the fire. I tried to have the circles animate across the stage at a pretty constant speed but at different times so you can relate to the constant hum yet unevenness of the rumbles.

Secondly I noticed there was one odd sound in my recording. This bell dropping sound. So in order to represent it I drew a circle that appears to go up then come down. As it comes down 2 more circles appear from it and all of them bounce off the ground and fade away. I chose this animation because the sound's pitch goes up and then down. On the downward part it has a few different tones; therefore multiple circles.

Lastly I animated different types of lines breaking to reference the crackles and pops. You'll notice in the beginning the first two lines reveal from a beginning point and at the end of the reveal they snap in half. I chose this method because the first two crackle sounds meander around before making the pop sound. All the rest of the popping sounds are quite instant and do not need a lead-in. You will also notice the first two lines are curvy which is trying to mimic the change in pace of the crackle before popping. All the other lines are sharp and vary in weight and size depending on how loud or close the popping sound appears.

All-in-all I am quite satisfied with my abstract interpretation of fire using only hand drawn shapes and allowing the referential sound determine the structure.

Well I watched atleast 10 random seconds of every video in the essential flash group and found that none of them provided anything new for me to learn except for the inverse rounded corner feature you can apply to the rectangle shapes.

I chose the following 3 sounds from the previous 6:
1. Fire Crackling
2. Kids Playing Soccer
3. Train ride

You will find the in-class comments below the last image.

The following are my sketches and accompanying mindmaps of what I heard:













Comments from small group discussion:
Fire burning::
The forms illustrated were a good abstraction of the formal qualities. The crackling noise illustrations would be better represented if they appeared to come out of no-where. By have the forms evenly spaced out they do not relate to the variation of when the crackling noises occur

Kids playing soccer::
Try playing the soundclip in reverse so that you cannot understand the conversations and instead focus more on the formal qualities. There are interesting interactions between all the voices. Some of the child voices try to over power or push away the other sounds. This could be represented by shapes over powering or pushing others off the stage. There is a pretty clear definition of space between the group discussing the game and the background games going on. The background feels muffled and softer with a more constant tone vs the foreground sounds.

Train::
The metal sounds screeching are much louder and more piercing than they are illustrated. The sketches could benefit from a larger scale difference to showcase the aforementioned metal qualities. The 2nd and 3rd sketch do a good job of abstractly defining the metal screeching sound by using sharp lines that change direction in a perpendicular fashion.

You can view a copy of my film notes in PDF form here»

In summary I felt the film served 3 purposes:
1. To show the class a variety of ways of interaction and storytelling.
2. Make you think about the ways in which limitations can sculpt a project.
3. How the distance and pursuit of failure changes the expected outcome.

I came upon the trailer for this film on youtube and the trailer makes it appear the movie is much more dramatic and intense than I perceived it to be.
view the trailer»

4. Cars passing in wet weather
5. Fire burning and crackling
6. People at concert screaming