After researching into stop motion I've decided to attempt some of my own. I was inspired by Dave The Chimp's (He doesn't state his real name) stop motion that I posted in my previous blog entry. Most of the way through the video he used one continous line. I decided to do something in the same vein. The result...
Magic Shoelaces from Gareth Smith on Vimeo.
Here are some tests that I did:
Magic Shoelaces Test from Gareth Smith on Vimeo.
Magic Shoelaces Test 2 from Gareth Smith on Vimeo.
I want to try and combine the pixel-stretching method I've been looking at and combine it with stop-motion somehow. Unfortunately I can't find any animations on the internet that have used pixel-stretching in such a way so I've looked at stop-motions that have explored the concept of a 'line' in other ways. I might not end up using the pixel-stretching method at all, but its good to have the knowledge of how it works under my belt.
I have already explored stop motion a bit, I created a few short films over Christmas when researching the 100 brief.
Anyway...
This stop motion illustration was created by painting tiny segments on paper with black paint at a time and then going over it again in white paint using the same method (I think). I really like how most of it is created from one continous line. Its so simple yet so effective, the imagery and music is so soothing and reflecting.
"Streaming Gradient" by Jen Stark from Jen Stark on Vimeo.
This is a stop-motion by Jen Stark using only paper, not very environmentally friendly... but very creative nonetheless:
I know this doesn't have much to do with what I've been looking at so far but I think this is very worthy of a post. As soon as I found out these 'drawing tops' were available to buy, I went straight to the online store to get one. I could have so much fun creating artworks using one of these in response to the 'What is a Line' brief... but alas, they were sold out.
Thomas Forsyth - Drawing Tops from Thomas Forsyth on Vimeo.
Top from Thomas Forsyth on Vimeo.
I think this is a great example of using already existing imagery created for a completely diffirent purpose and using it to create something new and interesting. A company named Grid24 has taken a map of the underground and carefully studied it to find lines which connect together to form outlines of animals, much like star consetellations. It has a kind of pixelated look that I've been exploring so far.
Bat
Fish
Flamingo
Polar Bear
Rhino
I was trying to find something that involved pixel stretching and animation but found nothing. I did however find this which I think is pretty amazing. You may be wondering how this at all answers 'what is a line'... well from my research into pixel stretching so far I could argue that any pixel has the potential of being a line if stretched/duplicated. Any isolated pixel could be the start of a chain of pixels that could make up a line? Also, many pixels within this animation have been duplicated... perhaps stretched depending on the tecnique they used. Either way... this video is awesome. You can check out the rest of their stuff here
DOT MATRIX REVOLUTION* from superbrothers on Vimeo.
The above two images were taken from this tutorial which shows how to create architecture illustrations using the pixel stretching technique. I really like the overall effect of the images, I think it encapsulates the look of the modern metropolis with their massive bright lights and advertisments, especially in places such as Times Square. In the last crit I was critised for not editing my own images and unfortunately I don't live in a city with massive skyscrapers to take pictures of... so I made do with second best, Liberty Park!
Seriously though, I actually used Liberty Park because I thought the vibrant colours its walls are painted with would make really interesting image when a single row of pixels were stretched.
This is what I ended up with...
I'm quite happy with what I achieved. I've compared the original (left) to my image (right) which was created by stretching a single row of pixels from each section vertically, horizontally and even diagonally here and there. I did brighten the overall image to make it seem a little less dull.
I think its incredible how with such a tiny bit of information (just a single row of pixels multiplied however many times) can create something that still says almost as much as an image comprised of hundreds of thousands of pixels and colours. If you looked at the second image without it being compared to the original it would be instantly recognisable.
For this image I dramatically resized the original photo before doing the pixel stretching thus the lines are a lot thicker.
Notice anything diffirent from the image before? No? The diffirence is that this image has been livetraced in Illustrator. The beauty of pixel stretching is that you can livetrace it with only a tiny, hardly noticable diffirence, you can then blow the image up as large as you like without any loss to quality. Seeing as this is an exploration of 'what is a line' I thought I'd look at the defition of the word 'vector':
"a straight line segment whose length is magnitude and whose orientation in space is direction" - its a line, yay!
This is another image of liberty park which I recreated using pixel-stretching. It was taken from a lower angle highlighting the 3rd dimension of the building. This added a lot to the overall image after I stretched the pixels as I was able to darken certain faces of the building to show where the light was hitting it, it made it look a lot more like an object rathen than a two dimensional flat image consisting of parallel lines.
What was very challenging was changing the perspective of the windows to match the direction of the lines within the building as they got further away. It took me a while to find the right tools to use in photoshop and I had to do each one seperately... it took a while!
Apart from some tutorials on how to create really cheesy forum banners, I really havn't found that much on the web on the 'pixel-stretching' technique... it really doesn't seem to be all that popular. Although this does make it difficult for doing research, it has great potential as an unexplored area and hopefully I'll be able to create something new and diffirent.
Out of everything I've researched so far, this is probably the most interesting, a tutorial that shows how to use pixel stretching to create 3D Shapes. I found the technique used to change the perspective and distort the shapes very useful as its easy to stretch the pixels horizontally and vertically, but not diagonally - this very much helped with that. I still need to tackle the problem of curving the lines.
This was the final image outcome from the tutorial. The tutorial can be found here.
Someone who was inspired by the tutorial adapted the technique in after effects and created this short video:
Pixel Stretch in after effects from vjhoming on Vimeo.
This video is the conclusion of most of the work I've done for the book of 100 project. The aim was, using the 'word assosiation game' to say a random word to someone and they would then have to reply with the first thing that came into their head. I would then interpret the word through film somehow, hopefully creatively. Some are good, some not so much... especially the plant one *shudders*. Also, I was quite ill during the filming of this... and look a mess, please excuse this!
Word Assosciation Experiment - Book of 100 from Gareth Smith on Vimeo.
1. What practical skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
I think the greatest thing I've developed during this module is my approach to research. I've always been the type of person to take a systematic linear approach to work and don't bother researching things that I can't picture having clear relevance and impact on my work, but through collecting and collating data from numerous sources I've learnt how taking a more scattered stimulated approach to work can aid idea development.
As stated before, I'd taken a more stimulated approach to my work... not on a huge level but much more than I've ever done before and I found it very beneficial and somewhat liberating as it opened up my mind to other ways of thinking. Overall I went through about 4 different concept ideas and various book-design ideas all which had numerous variations.
Over Christmas my original idea was to do 100 stop-motion videos consisting of 100 frames each, I started doing a few but after some thought I came to the conclusion that if it would be very difficult to translate into a book (and I admit it was very time consuming and I wanted my break!) so I looked at picture frames instead... and I went with this idea for about 2 weeks into the module. The main reaction I got from peers and during crits was, 'its boring', I completely agreed, I wanted to change my idea... but what do I do and how do I keep to the theme of frames?
The answer came during a seminar with Fred a couple days after when we saw previous students work, someone had done a video which was quite impressive and he explained how the packaging fit into the criteria of what a book should be. Thus it led me back to the idea of doing videos consisting of 100 frames. I was back to square one.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
The main strength is my final piece and the originality of the idea. I think that the concept was interesting and from reactions I got from people viewing the video was very positive. I was very pleased with the design of the book, even though the video screenshots were not the highest quality print I think the aesthetics of the design and the way it feels in the hand is very unique. The craftsmanship was very strong, definitely a step-up from my mock-up!
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?
One of the things we discussed in the final crit with Fred was that a lot of us found that most of us took about 3-4 weeks to filter through our ideas and decide the direction in which we were going and that included me, by that time I still had a very large chunk of work to do - my plan was originally very ambitious and involved a lot of filming - I wanted to do 100 videos!
Fred gave us some good advice which was to generate ideas and explore ideas quickly towards the beginning of the module so we have more time to get on with our work... this will be especially helpful in shorter briefs.
What made my work very difficult (and life very stressful) is that technology just seemed to be against me. I hired out a camera from the video department and originally planned to do all the editing at home on my own software during the last week of the module. After obtaining the software and plugging the camera into my computer, the camera just wouldn't be read... I think my fire wire port must be broken. It sunk in that I'd have to edit it all in college on the very buggy macs on software I wasn't very familiar with. Overall I had to call a technician in 3 times, the programme crashed about 15 times and often wouldn't capture certain bits of film (which meant I had to re-film it), I also had to save all the files to a USB stick as we only have 1gig of file space on our user names - transferring of files would normally take about 10 minutes and somewhere during the process I lost half of my work. Not fun at all. This meant staying in college till 8pm for three nights capturing and editing when I could be getting on with other work.
What I learnt from this is, always have a plan B! Also, make sure you have everything you need before attempting to do something very ambitious!
Due to time constraints and problems arising which were out of my control my research was lacking a bit, I would have liked to do a lot more. Most of the research I have is primary and it needed more secondary backup work.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
1. Have a plan B if things go wrong, don't count your chickens before they hatch because they might not. Have some duck eggs too and look after them with an equal amount of love!
2. Being ambitious is good, but a realistic goal is a better idea. This will save a lot of stress and I might have a final product with time to spare to be more ambitious and make improvements.
3. Once again time management, this includes making sure that you have everything you need in order to achieve your goal i.e. a fire wire port that works! I found the time management sessions very beneficial as I've found myself doing more things than ever. Being in a new relationship, looking for a house and being an active member of the Christian Union can cause a lot of pressure.
4. Use blog more, I've made more entried than I did during the last module but theres a lot more room for improvement.
5. Come to a conclusion of your idea early with lots of time to develop the one idea.
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance 4
Punctuality 4
Motivation 3
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 2
Quality of work produced 3
Contribution to the group 4
I've done stop-motion in the past and I've really enjoyed it, heres some examples of the stop-motion work I did over Christmas. I'd love to continue exploring it on a larger scale. The great thing about stop-motion is its a lot easier to add things to images digitally. I've already explored pixel stretching shown in the previous blog entry and I want to try and use incorporate this into the stop-motion videos. One way I could do this is to animate something using a digital camera and take shots of something moving at a rapid pace, maybe 3 shots/second if possible. I'll then import the images into photoshop and make it look like the moving object is leaving a trail of pixels behind it, which could morph into shapes/type/change direction or interact with another moving object. Definitely something to try!
This is the layout with a few examples of the interpretations of some of the words I've gathered from people so far. The top left image will be the shape and size of the book. The images ont he right will be pasted onto each page. Possibly more than one per page for the final but for the mock I'm just leaving it as one. The circle at the bottom left will be cut out and a spindle will go there and the pages will rotate around it.
As the video I'm doing for the book project is based on the visual interpretation of words I've had a look at other examples of how others have translated words into visuals through video.
I found this awesome motion-graphic animation which interprets the words of a song in a very creative way through typography. The person who made the video calls it kinetic(moving) typography:
Wolf Am I (And Shadow)- Kinetic Typography from Justin Lawes on Vimeo.
I searched for 'kinetic typography' in vimeo... and found loads of results. This was one of my favourites:
Kinetic Typography from Stephen West on Vimeo.
I also liked this one, it doesn't interpret words however but I think it interprets the overall mood excellently.
Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.
What inspired me to do the image above was this:
Although the image is just a series of vertical lines, I find it very striking. Theres something beautifully organic about it, I think this is because its pretty much a completely natural colour pallete, the lines are single pixels stretched out from a digital photograph which was taken of something that exists in the natural physical world and thus the colours seem to compliment each other perfectly.
It also got me thinking about the question, 'what is a line?' - in a bitmap image, could every pixel be classified as a line because like in the two images above, single pixels were used as the beggings of a much longer line, thus making each pixel very short lines? They are square... but does a line have to be have equal sides? A vector is considered a line no matter what shape it is.
This is an image I manipulated of the iconic Barack Obama 'Hope' poster Shepard Fairey. I was using this image as a practice ground to see what diffirent effects I could come up with by starting the 'pixel stretching' (for a lack of a better way of describing it) at diffirent points in the image. I did this and really liked it - becaues it starts by his eyes it reminds me of a veil. In the Middle-East many women wears veils, including the countries that the George Bush regime invaded over the past 8 years. This poster could communicate that there is hope that Obama might help sort out the mess in those countries.
Onto something diffirent, I came across this during my research into lines. At first this may seem like rows of diagonal pink and white lines, nothing special... now take a few steps back, and look at it again...