Category Archives: 2017 Old’s Cool

PB4 Update #2

My project is chugging along at an alarmingly slow pace, which I had anticipated but is no less frustrating. I decided to use plain ol’ white A4 printer paper, as I’m going to need a lot of paper and this type is cheap and in plentiful supply. Traditional animators use a backlit drawing board in order to let them see the last few frames they’ve animated through the paper, but I am not fortunate enough to own one of theses. Therefore, I pulled an old glass table out of the garage and attempted to build my own with a desk lamp and some manoeuvring, to moderate success. It’s pretty much only useful in a very dark room, so I feel like somewhat of a reclusive hobbit when I’m animating.

Make shift drawing table. I accidentally stabbed myself on a rusty bit of metal that was sticking out from the iron and I thought I was going to die from blood poisoning but I didn’t. Unfortunately that meant I had no choice but to continue.

The story of the animation has not changed since my last blog post, though I suspect as I continue my work some shots might be sacrificed because of time constraints.

At the very top I linked a video of a test animation I did, using a charcoal pencil on the printer paper. It worked reasonably well, even though some of the frames are not very well aligned because I just took the photos quickly on my phone. I was still pretty amazed by how sharp the photos were though – kudos to 2017 smartphones and their siq cameras. Even though I had hunted around on the internet, I couldn’t find a program that would easily let me composit the frames into a video, as the only ones I could find were targeted purely towards stop-motion animation. Therefore I decided to use Adobe Premiere Pro to put together this sequence, as I already knew how to use this software which saved me a lot of time as there was no learning curve associated with using the program. However, this meant that my plan of “x amount of frames per second” turned into more of a, “hey this looks pretty good”, approach, which I don’t think affected the final result negatively.

From here on in I pretty much just have a tonne of drawing to do, which should be pretty straight forward but also very time consuming. With some good time planning I should be able to deliver a short narrative that has some sort of arc. I hope that there will be no more blood shed, but I can’t make any guarantees. After all, art is pain. Or beauty. Whatever they say. I should get back to drawing.

 

 

PB4: UPDATE

Storyboard progress.

As I have stated in the final reflection for Project Brief Three, the main ideas I’m interested in exploring throughout Project Brief 4 are ideas linked to materiality, especially the history behind a physical object and the memories that can attach themselves to this object for an individual or a group of persons. 

I’m drawn towards using old media, not only for my personal enjoyment but also to put to the test notions regarding old media that we have discussed throughout the semester, for example increased concentration and ‘flow.’ I would like to do this by creating a hand-drawn animation in the form of a short narrative. I have quite a strong background in drawing and I know how I engrossed I can get in a drawing, and I’d like to see if this holds up with a time consuming and potentially frustrating activity like animating. I’ve done a bit of research and groundwork in setting up the animation, like looking into traditional animation techniques. Videos like this one provided some good insight into the work required to animate. I’ve done a few character designs and tested a few mediums.

I want the animation to run for a decent amount of time in order to be able to tell the story, ideally 1-2 minutes. If I animated at 24 frames per second, I’d never get this done in time, especially seeing as how little experience I have. Therefore, I think I will aim for 3 or 6 frames, resulting in quite a choppy look, but I think this will add to the rough charm of the work. Thus far, I believe my final medium will be charcoal, with maybe a highlight colour. The smudgy nature of charcoal will also help create a dreamy tone to the video.

Character design progress.

 

The rough outline of the narrative is this:

The character is a man who lives alone in a small house. One day, he goes outside and finds an old clock in the dirt outside his house. He picks it up and remembers that the clock used to hang on his wall, and it reminds him of when he lived with his wife in the house and they were happy. He dusts off the clock and hangs it back on the wall.

The story will be told quite ambiguously, so that it may be interpreted alternatively by the audience. After all, memory is incredibly personal and different for everyone. In the narrative I’m drawing strongly on the notion raised by Philip Gore, who, speaking about an antique clock, said that “if it could talk, it could tell you a lot of tales.” This is where I got the idea of a clock being the catalyst for the character feeling a stronger connection with his memories, and it also stands as a symbol for time, and its passing.

I think that this project will provide a lot of insight into the the principle of patience and time in regard to old media. Hand drawn animation is less efficient and more challenging than digital, but that is precisely why I want to attempt it.

Data Visualisation

Data visualisation is an incredibly useful tool to help us make sense of data.

My day yesterday visualised as a pie chart looks like this:

Yesterday was a bit of an anomaly because I don’t generally spend almost 3 hours in a hospital unless I can’t avoid it, but interestingly there was two big slices of pie, sleeping and working that sandwiched the other smaller activities. If I did this pie chart on a different day, like today, those big slices would become uni and sleeping. If I did a pie chart for every day of the week, I think that the charts would alternate between these two big sets of activities, as those tend to be the dominating parts of my day.

This is a visualisation of my last two academic essays and reflections for this studio. I think it’s pretty clear that the last two essays were cinema essays, as cinema related terms dominate in the world cloud. However, when I only use the media reflections it starts to look very different, with photographic terms taking over:

PB2: A photograph is more than just an image.

Full album here.

A photograph is more than just an image. This statement was partly inspired by the idea put forward by Sean O’Hagan in his article that a photograph is made, and not taken. Photography is more than pointing a camera at something and clicking the shutter, in fact, you can take photos without even using a camera at all – all you need is light and photographic paper. Hubert Damisch also reinforces this idea:

‘Theoretically speaking, photography is nothing more than the process of inscribing… a stable image generated by a ray of light. This definition, we note, neither assumes the the use of a camera nor does it imply that the image obtained is that of an object or scene from the external world.’

He goes on to purport that a photograph does not belong to the natural world; it is a product of human labour. It is also a form of craft, that can be experimented with: in the words of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ‘the enemy of the photograph is convention.’ Photography is many things: it can be placed in different contexts, remixed, and made in various different ways, but most importantly it is intrinsically linked with humanity, especially with memory and history. This connection to memory and history is essential to photography (Murray) – so a photograph is more than just an image not only in the different ways a photograph can be produced and contextualised, but also in the way it carries meaning for us. A family photograph is not going to have the same impact on someone who doesn’t know the people in the photo, as it is to someone who knows intimately the people in the photograph. Photographs are always going to be a representation of something, and because of this it is impossible for them to be completely objective. It is invariably going to have some personal element, no matter how minute.

I focused on this connection to memory in my exploration of the statement through the media artifact. I found photos of my mothers family in old photo albums. These photos have a lot of meaning to me because of seeing how different my family was in the 60s, and how they have has developed and changed. Someone else who looks at the photo won’t know any of this, so they won’t feel this connection and the same feelings – aside from maybe sharing my amusement for their gorgeous 60s outfits.

I took the photos, scanned them, and placed the copies in Adobe Photoshop. I then drew over the photo with the Paintbrush tool and a Wacom drawing tablet. Thereby, I created an alternate version of the photograph, which is not quite a drawing and not quite a photograph. This process forced me to look at the photo with a level of scrutiny that one wouldn’t usually use to look at a photo, the colours, the shapes, the tiny details in the subject’s faces and expressions. Whilst my hands and eyes were busy, I also had a lot of time to reflect on the photographs and my family situation, and at one point I even had to stop because I was getting too emotional. 

After making these media artifacts, the meaning of the photographs has changed for me. Especially now, they are more than just images.

 

Works cited:

  • Damisch, Hubert (1978). ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image.’ October, Vol. 5, pp 70-72.
  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.
  • Risatti, Howard (2007). ‘A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression’ North Carolina Press, USA.  

 

PB2: Photography is crucial to digital culture.

 

Full album here.

Today, you don’t need to look far to encounter photography of any kind. From when you cheekily check Facebook on your phone before you even get out of bed, in print, on billboards, on the news, a phone camera hovering tentatively above a piece of avocado toast. There’s no denying that photography has made itself a loving home in the 21st century, and this is none more true than when you look toward the digital realm.

Photography is a part of the digital language, of which kids growing up today are “native speakers.” (Murray) Yet, just a short time ago, photography in the way we knew it today was still developing – just as it, like any medium is constantly developing and will continue to do so. André Bazin once called photography an ‘embalmer of time’. In the 19th century, photographs were commonly taken post-mortem, partly because it’s quite easy to get a dead person to sit still for the length of time that was required by cameras of the time, and also as a way to preserve the memory of the person that was lot. This practice, the one of preserving memories – not so much the dead people part – continued into the 20th century, especially with Kodak creating a mass market for amateur photographers to arrange their lives into nostalgic snapshots. (West)

In the digital age, however, photography has become less about rare, ‘special’ personal moments and more about the mundane – like the aforementioned avocado toast, and what Britney Spears wore yesterday. Murray explains that this development has signalled a “definitive shift in our temporal relationship with the everyday image, and (has) helped alter the way that we construct narratives about ourselves and the world around us.” The landscape has changed even more since her reflection on online photosharing platforms in 2008, however – she notes Flickr as one of the largest communities, but social media platforms like Instagram have emerged with an even greater focus on sharing photographs with other users.

It is this integration of photography with the digital landscape, and by extension, our lives, that I explored in my media artifacts. I took a series of photos of my own social media pages, accessed on different devices, and removed all the images from the pages, to demonstrate how alien these sites look without the images that we are now all so used to. I also took a photo of another common scene that is very much linked to the image-sharing culture: people taking photos of the mundane, their lunch, and removed the cameras, in this case mobile phones, from the photo. There is no doubt that photography is crucial to digital culture.

 

Works cited:

  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.
  • Prensky, Marc (2001),”Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1″, On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Iss 5 pp. 1 – 6
  • Van House, Nancy A. (2011, June 9.) ‘Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual.’ Visual Studies, 26:2, 125-134.
  • West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.

PB2: New Media is Less Tangible

View post on imgur.com

The statement, ‘New media is less tangible’ refers to the idea that digital media is less tangible because you can’t hold the internet in your hand like a book. To a large extent, this statement is very true and applicable to the digital media landscape, but yet, this statement also subtly implies that because of this loss of tangibility, new media is less valuable. This is a notion put forward by many critics of new media, as well as particularly by older generations who look back with some fondness to the age of bulky cameras and photo albums. Indeed, who makes a photo album these days that is not of the Facebook kind?

I decided to explore this statement by focusing on the role of photography, interrogating how it has developed, and whether it has become less tangible, or less valuable. I produced a short animation, presented as an infinitely looping GIF. I photographed myself holding various objects in my hands, including a picture slide, an SLR film camera, a printed photograph, a DSLR camera, and a mobile phone. These objects are supposed to represent an evolution of different mediums spanning the last few decades – the picture slide has been replaced by the mobile phone as a primary medium of capturing memories in photographic form. The photograph I pulled from an old family photo album – it is a photograph of my mother. All theses objects are family possessions that are quite important to me because of their nostalgic value. I enjoyed having the opportunity to rumble through a box of old slides and a pile of photo albums to find these images. Both these processes are very different to the way I search through my own photographs, which are stored online and on digital hard drives.

“… early critics feared a loss of texture and authenticity, features that they believed were inherent in old image technologies and missing in the ‘cold inhuman perfection’ of the digital.’ writes Susan Murray about digital photography. She continues, arguing that digital photography has actually raised our standards for the quality of the image, by taking several photos, editing them, discarding ones that have errors such as the wrong shutter speed. Anyone that has used an analogue film camera will know that with film there are far fewer chances to get the ‘right’ shot, so the level of perfectionism that is present in the photo you took of your breakfast this morning would not be there if you took it with a film camera. But perhaps it is this level of im-perfectionism that makes old media so appealing.

I intend for the viewer of the animation to consider whether this transition to less tangible media, specifically the method of capturing and storing memories through photography, actually devalued media, or merely transformed it. What have we lost with digital media, or rather, what have we gained? Is a loss of materiality really a bad thing?

 

Works cited:

  • Murray, Susan. (2008, August 1) ‘Digital Images, Photosharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 7, Issue 2.
  • Palmer, Daniel (2010) ‘Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation of the Self.’ Photographies, 3:2, 155-171
  • West, Nancy Martha (2000) ‘Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.’ The University Press of Virginia, USA.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Our guest lecturer was artist and lecturer Rebecca Najdowski. Her talk was really inspiring because she introduced us to a lot of different artists and processes of photography that I hadn’t previously encountered, for example the labour intensive work of John Chiara. This really relates to the article by Sean O’Hagan that brought forward the idea that photography is ‘made’ and not ‘taken.’ Anna Atkin’s botanical photographs was also really interesting and beautiful. These methods are definitely things I’m interested in exploring further.

Photography by John Chiara. Source.

A Lumen print. Source.

THURSDAY’S CLASS

My personal photo starring my kitty.

We brought in a bunch of personal photos to class today to discuss. Samantha chose the photo for me to talk about, which prompted me to look back on to this moment, and especially think about how what has changed, and also what has stayed the same. This photo was taken when I just moved into my new house. The plants I planted outside hadn’t grown yet, my fern has now doubled in size, my tiny desk has been swallowed up by an excessively large desktop computer and has moved against another wall (damn sun glare). My cat, however, is still the same, seeking out a sunny spot wherever it may be found. Even though this photo captured a particular moment, I have experienced many moments like this one so I wasn’t able to remember what particular day I took this photo. Therefore I am not really as nostalgic as I would be for a different photo, because I know that I will still enjoy many moments like this to come.

We also watched a documentary about the photographer Platon, who has a very distinctive style of taking portraits.

There aren’t really any TV shows or movies that I revisit often, as I’m not a big re-watcher – I prefer to experience a new story. However, I revisit songs all the time because they have a powerful emotional impact on me. Sad songs would be my guilty pleasure, except I don’t feel guilty about it. For example, the song Ghost on the Shore by Lord Huron is a song I revisit all the time. I was first introduced to it by a guy I was dating when I was in high school, then it became a breakup song, later it became associated with a trip to Queensland and a particular friendship. It’s a song that keeps developing new meaning for me as time goes on.

Portraits of power: Obama as photographed by Platon. Sauce.

PHOTOGRAMS

After the guest lecture in class yesterday, we had a go at making our own photograms, which is, at it’s most basic, the process of taking a photo without a camera. Essentially, this means taking a piece of light-sensitive paper, putting an object on it and exposing it to the light.

The photograms probably looked cooler when they were developing than when they were finished.

I found this to be a super interesting process, as I never even knew this was a thing you could do before yesterday. The process behind photography in general has always been a thing that’s kind of bamboozled my brain, so stripping it down to three simple ingredients – the paper, the object, and the sun – helps me to begin to understand how the whole light thing really works. And plus, it makes for some super cool effects, as long as your chosen strand of flowers doesn’t blow away in the wind. The warm toned paper and the fern are my favourite ones because the effects produced were the most interesting.

 

Tanbark

Ferny ferns

Another fern

Some leaves.

8-TRACK TAPE

Source.

What is it?

It was popular from 1965 to the 70s. Consisted of endless loop of 1/4 inch magnetic tape, which had 8 parallel soundtracks. Often associated with listening in a car, even though it was first developed by an aircraft manufacturer. It had a recording length of up to 80 minutes. It was eventually abandoned in favour of the cassette.

Who used it?

People used it in their cars and their homes. At its height, it was the most popular of tape systems and had the biggest music library available. It was the first mass produced car music format.

What was it for?

Developed for music systems in cars. (An older version, 4 track tape, were marketed as CARtridges lol). Car manufacturers in the 60s would give away a free 8-track if you bought a car with an 8-track player!

What craft was involved?

Multi-track recording, which was first developed in the 1950s. It allowed for superior recording, especially of music, because it meant that every sound, e.g. vocals or guitar, could be recorded on a different track, and thus allowed the studio engineers to edit each track differently.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape

http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/8track1.php

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/god-save-the-eight-track/