Through experimentation within animation, we used practices that allowed us to to focus less on thinking and more on relying on intuition and sound to guide us through drawing and narration. We watched videos that Mario played, with artists creating abstract drawings and connecting them with sound or connecting each drawing on the composition, through animated loops over on top.
We used these distorted and resonating music to direct us with abstract drawings that didn’t require us to rely on thought, but on instinct. The outcome to me was very visual but not much made sense when you looked at the drawings I created. A lot of the patterns or shapes I drew looked familiar but also abstract at the same time which is what we are supposed to be showing in this workshop.
From here we started interpreting our drawings onto a digital space where we started working on animated loops. We used TV paint for this and focused on creating the first loop of a moving ball within 12 frames. This process is then repeated with a different drawing or element from our base drawing and connected it to the previous loop on the animation.
In the end of our first session I was widened by the experience of letting go of thought and just being free with creativity and letting sound fuel that. From this workshop I reflected that overthinking can stunt creative control and the output. To me it can be an obstruction to natural flow of art and it’s form, therefore experimenting with using careless and loose drawings to create a piece of animation feels like I am speaking through a composition. Instead of thinking about what where and next, what I create as a drawing through sounds being played shows a true expression of how I feel which reflects on the drawings. I definitely feel this type of work flow is useful and meaningful towards communicating my emotions in visual language, because it becomes a natural thought of how I really feel and in terms of utilising this for my final major project, I think the idea is to create and show whatever comes to mind in terms of intention and structure. For example something that is animated or comes across visually as chaotic, can be seen as a reflection of pain and turmoil which could be a reflection of one’s mental state.
Tasked with choosing and researching 5 words and themes that are personal to me or relates to my idea and proposal for my final major project. I looked at Love, Pain, Reality, Identity and Surrealism. I felt like these themes are all interlinked within the way they can represent the human emotion on their perspective of life. My Final Major Project will look at Surrealism vs reality and how the two defer but are interlinked with my perception on life.
Using videos and paintings as my source for inspiration led me to the Danae Gasse and Belgian artist, Magritte. Magritte is a surrealist artist who’s works depicts human nature and behaviour. What I found when looking at his most profound painting “Son of Man,” and linking it to one of my favourite rappers “MF DOOM” was that human behaviour has a natural desire to stay hidden and keep secrets. Magritte said in an interview that “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.” This referring to the apple placed in front of the man which hides his face, causing us to grow interest in what the man looks like behind the apple. The same thing with MF DOOM. His ideals as to why he wears the mask is because he feels that the hip hop community is too focused on the image of rappers and buying into the look as opposed to what the music sounds like, which is why he wears the mask because it doesn’t matter what he looks like. And then with Danae Gasse’s work, I love the motion graphics of Motion and stillness. Just like Magritte’s artwork, the art speaks to me as how in life we can be present in our reality but passive when things happen and move around us. The colours are vibrant but with the way the colours start moving around in motion makes it seem like a distortion or break in reality is being conveyed.
Ideas and concepts
With these ideas and themes from my sources, My plan for the vignettes is based around hiding from reality. My first vignette looks at this through a looped stop motion video of someone covering their face, but every time they feel forced to reveal what they look like, a fruit covers the face. Intentionally intriguing the reader to understand or figure the persons identity. I used a collection of images I photographed and sequenced them in Adobe after effects to play as a moving image.
My second vignette takes a look at pain and surrealism within identity. The concept is a pair of sunglasses floating around space with the eyeballs and sockets still attached and glued to the glasses.
The animation shows the glasses moving around space and then rapidly flying off camera just to come back to the screen. This is intended to show the idea of everyone having something to hide in life. If someone asked me to remove shades off my face, my reaction would be a reflection of what you see in that animation, disappearing or simply saying no.
My third vignette looks at attitude towards identity of being placed in the world, with a looped animated video of a middle finger spinning the globe on his finger like a basketball. It’s titled “fuck the world” A common phrase I hear in hiphop we can all relate to. I think the idea of pain must come with acceptance. That was the idea for why I changed it from just focusing on the hand spinning the basketball, to a SKELETON. I think exploring the concept of pain in a way where it is not physically shown, but rather portrayed through a series of signifiers that interact with each other is something I will be using and looking at new ways to show for my final major project.
fuck the world
For my 4th and 5th vignette, I created a series of soundscapes using vst’s (virtual instruments) and sounds that I have collected relating to my themes. My fourth vignette titled “lets just start again,” was made with these dreamy and lofi keys complimented with a noise that I found in a sound pack that sounded like feet trickling and then you hear the sound of a TV plug being pulled out, and then the feet sounds restarts. This represents the reality of being able to keep moving forward in life even though sometimes we have to reset.
The fifth vignette titled “hands up” was created in a similar way. I used a synth to create 3 layers of sound over each other, while including audio from the black lives matter protest that took place in London. This is identity.
Interestingly, this workshop pushed my thinking forward the most which is ironic because it was the workshop that required us to not really think too much and just create whatever comes to mind. I believe this process is best for what I’m planning to move forward within my final major project that will be exploring my own personal emotions expressed through an animated story. Like how I created the soundscape vignettes, is also an idea of how to implement meaningful audio and sound throughout the animation which can communicate my themes with pain.
For reinterpreting composition, we looked at conceptualising storyboards for scenes from a told story. Cinematography and how shots are framed in a scene is important to telling a story and building a scene for either tension, character interactions or action in the scene.
For example, an establishing shot tells the viewer where the scene is set and where the story will begin or follow from. With all these shot types, it’s important to have a beat board to start visualising your story and what main shots need to be shown. From here this is where you start developing the main shots you have in your sequence and build a storyboard around this.
Little Red Riding Hood
We worked in small groups and created shots for the script from the story of Little Red riding hood. We were tasked to think about how we could communicate visual language and play around with perspectives of the characters in the story. All the shots we had showed the characters and movement, but some of the shots could’ve followed a better camera position to show either conversation or establishing the scene.
One thing I learnt was the 180 degree rule and how it is used in film when shooting 2 characters. It is an imaginary line placed between 2 characters where the camera follows on a straight angle and at no point crosses the line. This is to show that when both characters are interacting, they both are in their own sides where the camera will show them and this doesn’t usually tend to switch making the shots logical and easy to follow conversation. The same goes to an action scene or where we see movement of a character. The scene should usually have the character moving from left to right and shouldn’t change unless intended for effect. But the character should stay from left to right to communicate that the story is progressing, whereas switching from left to right, to right to left shifts the story and shows the character going back to something in the story. So we created more shots that showed the conversation between Little red riding hood and her mother, by including the 180 degree rule.
Using what I learnt from this first half of the workshop, I was tasked to create a storyboard from 3 lines in a script, from the film “The Hunchback Notre dame.”
These shots I drew intended to show who had power and dominance in the scene. The first shot of Frollo is a medium close up at lower angle with his hand pointing to attack Pheobus, showing who is in control in the scene and showing his movement. I then wanted to build tension of Pheobus’ escape and his demise of getting hit by the arrows by showing the movement of the arrows in 2 different shots and having a break between those shots to show Frollo’s smirk on his plan inevitably succeeding.
One thing I specifically want to develop my skills on and have creative direction, is concept art. I chose a shot that was intriguing and analysed it to show how the shot creates movement between characters. This concept art by Ralph Mcquarrie for Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, shows Luke Skywalker battling Darth Vader. Cinematic design is broken down into 4 elements that is used to convey meaning for each shot.
Grouping
Focal Area
Balance
Rythmn
This concept art tells a story and visually communicates an idea of whats happening in the story. We were tasked to break down and analyse how these elements have been shown in a piece of concept art that we like, so that we could use these elements for our own work and compositions for our own projects.
The AI workshop allowed me to explore new ways and foundations to start making concepts from any ideas that I have. I used mid-journey’s discord server to create prompts that generated AI images based on the description.
I found this result of the prompt to actually meet my expectations of what I was expecting it
to look like. It could be said that the AI used MF Doom’s abstract style of hip hop and lyrics to rejuvenate that same abstract style but in a painting rather than a realistic image.
Overall I found the AI very successful in interpreting my idea. It was able to actually create a concept that looked somewhat close to what MF Doom would look like running. However I will say that the one weakness the AI had was getting legs to look right on the 2nd image
From here, because I was impressed, I wanted to see if the AI on mid journey could generate a more complex prompt. The prompt was “Spike Spiegel fighting Goku.” This one didn’t really work and instead of showing them fighting each other, it just merged the 2 characters together.
Spike Spiegel fighting Goku
However one thing I did come to realise at this point is that in using the prompt for AI to generate your concept, you have to be more detailed and specific so that it can get a more accurate result of what you want. For example, instead of saying ‘Spike Spiegel fighting Goku,’ I could’ve thrown in “each other” in the prompt so that it may have not merged the two characters together. However one thing that I noticed throughout these workshops is that AI is overall accurate on obtaining and exhibiting the right colour schemes based on your prompt and the mood you ask for.
Using Dall-E
Dall-E is a machine learning model developed by OpenAi that generates digital images from your prompt descriptions. I found that using Dall-E was able to create a more accurate image from a more complex prompt I was using.
As an example my favourite outcome from using this site was the prompt Takashi Murakami style painting of God. I didn’t know what to expect to see from this but the result was interesting yet not shocking. Interesting because its depiction of God reflects a Buddhism image of what that would look like which isn’t suprising because Takashi Murakami is from Japan where that religion is mainly believed in. I think it was quite accurate in getting the colour scheme and abstract style of painting right.
Finally to conclude the workshop, I wanted to show how I can use AI to create or finish my own concepts for my own work by me. I used one of my paintings and asked 2 people what 3 words they felt from my artwork.
Person 2: spirituality, love and doubt.
Person 1: authentic, meaningful, thought evoking.FKA Twigs. Nujabes
Your Sons Are Brighter painted by Samuel Alalade
From these adjectives I was able to have enough words to try and use Dall-E to finish this piece of artwork, or rather expand upon it.
After many prompts and variations later I had this as the final piece and what came to show was a part AI part handcrafted artwork. I thought that the AI was very accurate in creating the abstract style of the artists Nujabes and FKA Twigs on the left side of the painting and also picking up on the correct colour tones that I used. However, one thing I did feel is that I preferred the painting unfinished or in my case how it originally looked. This isn’t to say that what the AI did was good, but I think it is a case where you either love it or hate it when AI is developing your own work depending on what you’re looking for.
On concluding this workshop my views on AI have changed. It went from being skeptical and discouraging for using it as an artist to using it as a way to create quick and rough concepts for your own thoughts and imagination. The art world is always constantly changing and is adapting faster than ever. I feel as if AI is here to be interpreted by artists for a reason whether we like it or not, so using it should be a tool that we could least be open to using. Even if it is just to simply create concept art or use a prompt to generate some ideas for backgrounds, colour or even character ideas for our own projects, I think I will somehow see if I can use it for my own final major project for developing ideas in the concept art and storyboard part in my production. Or another interesting and innovative approach for using AI is to let it finish and generate abstract images of artwork that we have already done along the line of our production for the project and see if it makes something look better that we can include in the final outcome.
In our first week back we were put straight into working with video cameras to have a sense of direction of what shots we want to show in our FMPs. We practiced with lighting by adjusting the iso to allow the right amount of light in our scene to control what mood we wanted to show or practising filming different shot types such as, a close up or a reverse close up.
We thought about how using different shots can introduce different characters into our stories.
This workshop has mainly helped me to think about different approaches on directing and how certain shots convey meaning in a story.
