Elise Filmore // Digital Methods

The first day of the Workshop I was in charge of video documentation. This was a very enjoyable experience, since I enjoy behind the scenes work.
As a mentor for the rest of the workshop I aided in the animation process with the students. We used the following programs with the students: Photoshop, Quicktime, and Garageband. In my post processing I also used Adobe Illustrator. I found myself wishing we could just focus on one or two aspects of the animation process. This would have been to the students benefit to learn a program really well rather then having to learn a completely new interface every afternoon. Even if we had just cut out Garageband they would have had more time to work on the animation. I felt like my fellow mentor and I did to much of the animating and that if the students had been given more time they could have completed the animation on their own. One of our students was absent for two weeks, which took a real toll on his creative input in the piece. When he came back he was ready to work on the piece and did everything we asked, scene wise, and brought his own ideas to the table. Our other student was a hard worker and completed all of the characters in one night with time to spare. Because of the absences she had to work even harder to get twice as much done.
Overall I think the students had a good time and got a lot out of the experience. I know that I enjoyed teaching digital techniques.

Digital Workshop Day 5:

Today we worked in iMovie and Garageband. We added all the .jpg and .mov files, including backgrounds and scene breaks for the students and then helped them build a story out of the elements that they had already created. We supervised the making of the movie file and then had the students try and finish one song to be used as the theme music throughout the whole movie. Neither of our students were familiar with the programs and so it was a new and interesting challenge for them to work with these mediums. I have never used Garageband before myself so this was an excellent learning experience for me. I have the beginnings of an amazing song for my version of the animation.

Digital Workshop Day 4:

We worked on animating the different scenes so they would be ready for piecing together in the next and final class. Here are just a few examples of what we are teaching the youth to do. These are simple, cutout/stop motion animation effects in photoshop and exported to quicktime

Digital Workshop Day 3

Paint on light table animation through stop motion.

This is the piece of our story we are animating that illustrates the transformation of a horse to a man. Done by one middle school student under the guidance of two college Art Education Majors, Lorena and Elise.

"Every project is a small failure, this is why we continue with another one."

-Luis Gonzáles Palma

I attended an artist lecture given by Luis Gonzáles Palma which occurs in conjunction with his exhibition in The Tweed Museum of Art, A Silent Unity of Gazes. Palma is a native of Guatemala, born in 1957. He studied architecture and cinematography at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. Palma reflects on social constructs, such as couples and families and the violence that invades these relationships. He also comes from a Catholic tradition, though he expresses his break with a system based, as he sees it, on guilt. His exhibition includes mostly photographs, some hand painted or chemically altered. He stated that he begins with black and white photos and then uses chemical tones to produce the sepia effect. Palma uses gold leaf in a good portion of the work on display. He uses Kodaliths embedded in resin with the metal which gives the work a mystical shine and the illusion of inner light. Palma uses the phrase "impossibility of love" to describe the central issue in his work. However, he admits that now that he has had children his outlook has softened and he views love with more hopefulness and possibility though the intense difficulty is still impressed on his thinking.

1.     Merchant on a journey to get gifts for his daughters and he gets lost in the forest.

2.     Follows the light in the woods to a castle with a stable for his horse and dinner waiting out for someone. So he sits down to eat. He tries to take a flower from the table for Beauty.

3.     A horse comes galloping up to him and says: "You thoughtless man; I was good to you last night, I gave you shelter and provisions, and now you would even take with you the most beautiful flowers from my table." The merchant promises to send his daughter Beauty back to make up for stealing the flowers.

4.     When the merchant goes him he tells Beauty she has to go back the castle. Beauty at once said, "I am willing to follow you, father, and am always glad to help you."

5.     Beauty made her way through the woods and found the castle with dinner set out for her. Soon the horse comes and welcomes her to the castle.

6.     Beauty has a large mirror in which she can see home, she sees her father sick and getting sicker.

7.     She begs the horse to go back for 3 days to nurse her father

8.     Even though her father is getting better she stays later. Finally she looks in the mirror and sees the horse in the garden dying in the roses.

9.     Hurrying back to the castle she finds the horse into the garden she found the horse so very sick that he could not stand on his legs. Beauty knelt down and asked him to forgive her for staying away longer than she had promised. The horse asked her if she would marry him and stay with him at the castle forever. The poor animal now sighed so deeply that she took pity on him and said, fearing that he might die then and there, that she would always stay with him and never leave him.

10.  As soon as she had made this promise, the horse vanished, and a beautiful young prince stood before her.

11.  So they sent for her father to take up his residence with them, and now the marriage was performed and celebrated in a splendid manner. They lived long and happily together, the prince and his Beauty.

 

My second experience with animation was an older animation technique: cutout animation. Cutout animation is related to stop motion but it specifically uses cutout elements made of paper, cardstock, fabric, or collage elements and photographs. We chose paper to make our pose-able dinosaur figures out of. During our twenty-minute presentation, the class created the motion.

I thought our figures were very successful but the support we used for the animation was reflective and not ideal for our use. We could have used more time to make the animation smoother and fuller but overall it went very well.

The work animate has its origin in the Latin word animātus which means 'filled with breath or air, quickened, animated'. This idea of 'giving life' and 'filling with breath' are excellent starting points for understanding the reasons we animate images and stories.

This project was my first experience with animation in general. I enjoyed working in photoshop layers for the animation frames. I liked the animal and the background I made so it was fun to work with. I spent several hours with the images and was pleased with the results.
My disappointment with this project is threefold. First, I did it in only twenty minutes in class. I wish I had more time. Second, I couldn't figure out how to add music before class ended. Thirdly and finally, when I went back to edit it again all the layers wouldn't show up so I couldn't work further with the project.

For my first animation I think it was very successful project.