Student Originated Studies: Media

Here is a test of the technique I talked about at my last screening. I took a bunch of the stills from a pixelation project I did last year, inverted, desaturated, boosted the contrast, and made grids of them in photoshop. Then I printed them out with a laser printer onto transparencies, and used those transparencies to make contact prints from multiple light sources. Then I scanned the prints and resequenced them in After Effects. I accidentally printed the transparencies onto 8 1/2 x 11s, so the end got cutoff, so every fourth frame has some part of the image missing. The idea is to do this again, but with stills exported from a progressive video source, instead of pixelation.

So, I'm healthy again. That's a small victory. Here are some prints I made, scanned, and photofutzed with. I'm going to be making animation from these and others instead of actually on film, at least until I can figure out how to do this on film. Let me know what you think of the images.

I'm sick of being sick. This is the second time I've gotten sick this year...   so what's up with that? I haven't been sick more than once a year since I was a little kid. But I digress, my goals for this spring go as follows:

1 - Rotoscope, Rotoscope, Rotoscope - finish the rough rotoscoping for my installation. By rough, I mean simply the penciling, no watercoloring or anything that I can do at home. 

2 - Darkroom Work - Without any success with attempts at direct animation with light on film, I am going to try to simulate the aesthetic with photopaper, a scanner, and After Effects. I would like to have created a lot of prints (from     which to continue working) and a sample of the animation by the end of the quarter. Also, I am going to try to figure out if anyone has had more success than I have on animation forums.

3 - Jitter Work - I will continue to experiment with jitter, hopefully completing my patch before my student license runs out.

4 - Music Video - I really would like to make a music video. This means finding a new musician/group to work with, and animating. The ideas that I want to explore for this are storytelling through still images, a la La Jetee, with polaroids, timelapse, and paint-on-glass animation. I will also write and post a treatment for this as soon as I find my damn musician.

5 - Prepare an entry application for festivals for my installation. 

6 -  Graduate.

Hey gang. Not much new for week 2. The puppetry class is going crazy in the design lab which has cut down on my productivity at the roto-lunchbox up there. I think that if I want to be more productive I'm going to have to exercise my late night access instead of trying to use the space in the afternoon. I met with the artist I was hoping to collaborate with on a music video project this morning. She's moving to San Francisco any minute now, so it looks like I'm back to square one looking for another artist to work with. Here's a copy of my spring Syllabus exported from Outlook.

Towards the end of Winter quarter I came to the realization that it is very unlikely that I'm going to finish the project that I've been working on within the course of SOS media. As a graduating senior, this made me think about what I wanted to get out of this last quarter. As I have been pretty focused on one big project for a while I think that it'll do me good to break away and do some smaller scale projects while I still have access to campus equipment, as well as finishing the aspects of my installation that I can't do at home. That means that I'll be doing a lot more rotoscoping and a lot less watercoloring (which was kind of a focus last quarter, although I don't think that was that evident to most of you as it was mostly experiments and didn't yield anything that I showed the class), also I'm going to take the advice that was given at my last WIP (I think from Morgan?) and start work in the darkroom with photopaper instead of film. (Why use film to recreate an aesthetic I liked that was made with photo-paper? Why not just use photopaper and then scan it? I don't know why I didn't start out with that in mind... anyway)