Introduction
[How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?]
In this unit, we were focused on experimenting with different styles and exploring the all the tools we have available at Freestyle. It’s like an introduction unit so that we can get a basic understanding of how to best use our equipment and the kind of art we want to create. Although there’s a lot of rigour in the classes because of the software and ‘technical terms’ you need to learn, it’s super important to set up a foundation for the kind of projects we work on.
Haiku
For our first official project in both English and Digital Media, we had to write a haiku and create a video of us reading it out in Premiere Pro to learn the software and how to use our recording devices to get the clip of ourselves reading it. It originally started with the class receiving a prompt that we would base our poems off of– mine was ‘I am exploring the feeling of optimism through meeting with an old friend’.
I liked writing the poem, and I think the amount of time we were given to work on it reflected the fast-paced projects we would be assigned in our other classes. The unit was short, but we were able to converse a lot with other people and learn more about them through the project, since it’s introspective and reflective of ourselves.
Why Art?
Our next unit in English was to make an essay and a slide presentation on an artist and author of our choosing. The main question we were trying to answer is “What is art and why do we make it?”
The unit tackles a lot of figuratives— at least for my artist, Jean Fautrier. I’m glad I got to write more about philosophical movements and ideologies in his art rather than the art itself, since it was incredibly abstract.
We got to learn about the basics of art in order to properly analyse the pieces we chose. Even though most of us already knew all of it (being artists and all), it was good to go over the principles to know what we were expected to write about. And plus, I ended up learning a lot about the significance of art and design principles in works prior to the 19th century.
Overall, the Why Art unit has been my favourite in English so far because of the subjective and open-ended main question. Our opinions were all respected (if you even wrote about the main topic), and we got to have a couple discussions at our tables about our thoughts.
Praxinoscope
In animation, our first (real) project was to create praxinoscopes, because we were going to go through a couple historical forms of animation before we got into more serious projects. For this one, we had about a week (3 days in class) to work.
I wanted to do something simple for my first animation, since I’d never tried animating on paper before. I thought the cartoony cat I kept drawing on my math homework was a good idea, because it would be easy to make move. I like how it turned out, and was really impressed with my classmates’ animations, too.
During the time working on this, there was more emphasis placed on learning the basics of animation rather than the medium, since it was an archaic form of animating, anyway. However, compared to the other classes, I found that we spent a lot less time learning the basics and instead spent it just learning it through trial and error. I think the reasoning is because animation takes so long that there’s no room to learn new things and test them out before applying them to our projects.
Phenakistoscope
We had another week in class to make these. The Phenakistoscope is another form of animation from the 19th century, and the last ‘archaic’ kind of animation we would be practising. After we were done, we learned how to make an animated gif out of it in Photoshop.
I’m not a big fan of how mine turned out— I think it’s a little plain, and the movement isn’t big enough to notice. If I could redo it, I would make the transformation more prominent, and add more little things to the background (like props). I do like the colours I used, though; I stuck to a warmer pallette / an analogous scheme. I think the character is kinda cute, too. I like the blush and eye makeup.
I think it was also a good way to be introduced to frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop. Still, though, I have no idea how the program works as a whole for digital animation, but hopefully we’ll learn that later.
Flipbooks
The first flipbook we made was to introduce us to that kind of animation; lightboxes, and taking pictures of each individual frame using a software called Dragonframe. We had about a week and a half to make 90 frames.
The second one was the ‘Exquisite Corpse Flipbook’, in which each student in both the A.M. and P.M. classes combined all of our flipbooks to make one long, continuous one.
I wanted to try and tell a story using the flipbook, but I forgot that it moved at 12 frames per second, so I made mine too fast to see the story going on. Basically, this one cat buys his girlfriend a bow to match his bowtie. I wish I had focused on making movement instead of making a story, though, because I ended up just having to redraw so many of the same frames.
I don’t think we had nearly enough time to work on this as it would’ve taken to make a polished product. But I think that the first semester of Animation is meant to be testing out mediums and trying to figure out what works best for us. I ended up needing to colour everything at home, because we had little time in class (well, maybe I’m just slow).
I was absent for the two days that the class was working on the flipbook, so I had to catch up quickly. I decided to experiment more with this one, and not mind how it looked when it was done. Overall, I’m just happy I got it done in a couple of hours.
I was a little confused as to why we had to make another flipbook if all of our previous projects were meant to be explorations of different mediums. If it were up to be, I’d choose quality over quantity, and cut the second flipbook out entirely. That way, we could have a longer time to work on other projects that would take longer, like the puppet later down the line, or the previous flipbook.
Paper Cutout Animation
For this project, the class had to make cutouts of anything on coloured paper and move them around to make a stopmotion animation. We had two or three days to make 90 frames.
I’m not sure what I was going for at the beginning (maybe I was tweakin out a little bit), but I like the ending. At this point, I was kind of running out of ideas, but I was coming to terms with my chronic lack of artistic creativity.
I know I keep complaining about having little time, but to be honest, I think that there’s just enough time to make something good, but not enough time to brainstorm and think about what you want to create. I found myself pushing past the thought I had that things I make need to be good just to turn the assignments in on time, which ended up being a good thing. The constant fast-paced environment in Animation made it so that you had to go with your first idea, whether it was good or not, and learn to accept the outcome and just try your hardest.
Object Stop Motion
The assignment was to take an object (or playdough), and make an animation in the software DragonFrame. We had about 2 days to complete it.
I was absent for one of the days that we were working on it, so I only had one day to get it done. I still think it turned out pretty well, though. At first, I was only planning on making a blooming flower, but then I realised that I only had about half the frames I needed, so I threw the cat in there to fill some time.
I know the flower without any petals looks a little… you know, a little strange, a little funky-looking. But just ignore that, you know it’s meant to be a flower, anyway.