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.
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.
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.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y6gvwwegy5rw8fh/reset.wav?dl=0
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.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r4bceap6lfr1wxn/hands%20up%20.wav?dl=0
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.
Mr Shady (2nd Vignette)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k3jzoo5q30ub9mt/very%20shady0001-0240.mp4?dl=0
Fuck The World (3rd Vignette)