Personal Mandala
During the course of this unit, we learned how to create mandalas using Adobe Illustrator. If you think about the cultural significance and artistic value of a mandala hard enough, maybe you can find some abstract way to connect it to the whole purpose of the Reflections unit. Or, you know, you can just say that it’s cool looking and it’s a fun project. That works too.
A mandala is essentially like one of those snowflakes you made back in elementary school by folding up the paper and snipping it (if you didn’t make one of those in elementary school, I pity you). It’s a circular shape divided into a number of sectors, all of which are equal and identical. Well, in reality, it’s a traditional eastern symbol surrounding spirituality. And balance. Like a balance beam.
So we created our own mandalas using Adobe Illustrator. We created special layers in said program to duplicate whatever we drew around the circle perfectly, so we could work with one singular slice of the pie and then have it automatically create the rest as a result. Two of them mirrored each other across each line, and the two as a pair would be replicated across the full mandala— meaning it would have to be an even number of sectors.
On the left is a photo of my black and white mandala. It’s a weird jumble of strange shapes and images that I expected to look much cleaner and smoother than it actually did. I suppose that this is a very honest reflection of my personality though— jagged, strange, smooth yet rough, clumsy yet graceful, and unexpectedly unique in a way that I can’t really write off as “good” or “bad”.
Just to make it all the more unique and personal, I actually tried to include little special images and icons that meant something to me. So, included in various points within the mandala are my personal signature, the logos for the Smashing Pumpkins (my favorite band), Millennium Force (as a roller coaster enthusiast), and GO Transit (as a train enthusiast), a sketch of the album art for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (my favorite album), a sketch of the cover art for The World’s End (my favorite movie), and the word “Mayonaise” (my favorite song). I had fun trying to include those in as best I could.
I actually ended up having a surprising amount of fun creating the reveal video for this mandala. The reveal video was a screen recording of the mandala as layers were revealed individually, eventually showing the mandala in its entirety. I spent much more time doing this than I intended. Then I tacked on some really crappy royalty free stock music that I found online to make it a little less boring and a little more irritating.
Here’s an artist statement I made about this mandala. It’s a pretty terrible video, so feel free to not watch it. It’s unfocused, exposed wrong, shot in my car in the student parking lot, and admittedly done last minute with a script I memorized as quickly as I could before I sweat myself to death in the September year. So, yeah. But here it is. You can pay attention to the headrest if you’d like, since it’s in focus instead of my face.
Anyway, after that, we had said mandalas printed onto a material of our choice (from various selections). I chose to have it printed onto thick bark. Unfortunately, in the laser cutting, it got burnt around the edges in places. But it looks much better than I imagined it would. But on the left is a photo I took of it on a stand, enhanced slightly in Illustrator to have a glow to it.
Finally, after creating the black and white mandala, we were given a large amount of time to create a colored mandala. A lot of time that I, of course, did not use fully to create the mandala. What, you expect me to manage my time well? I wouldn’t be writing this at 11:09 PM if I did.
I may have spent 3 weeks creating my colored mandala. I may have spent less. It might have been 4 hours. But that’s beside the point.
On the right is the colored mandala I ended up creating. I was going for some sort of artistic thing where colder colors and smoother shapes would exist on the exterior of the circle, and as the circle carried inward, the colors would become warmer, and the shapes would be come more jagged and harsh. I created it and was not entirely impressed. And then I remembered that I was encouraged to add shapes overlaying it that weren’t repeating like the mandala itself. So I dropped some rectangles down, messed with the opacity and put them on top in a way that looked interesting.
I’m still not entirely impressed. I suppose it’s pretty cool looking. It’s nothing too remarkable, but I rather like the way the opaque rectangles enhanced it. The overlapping of the colors makes for an interesting contrast, and the asymmetrical pattern of it makes it sort of hypnotizing in a way. To me it still looks like what would happen if you printed a mandala out onto a large piece of paper and then dropped a pile of spotlight gels onto it. Maybe it’s just giving me PTSD from sorting gels in an ungodly pile after striking sets.
Overall, the mandala process was fascinating and very, very enjoyable. It gave me a strange insight into how my mind focused on art projects like this— in how I don’t quite see the big picture, and instead focus on smaller elements that ultimately create a strange and ultimately jarring final product that catches me entirely off-guard. In my mind I design it to look like something it never does. The perfectionist part of me wants to delete it all, but the intelligent part of me remembers it’s due for a grade. And therefore it is revealed to the world. It’s not quite what I was hoping to show everyone, but hey, how often do I really get a say in that matter?
This isn’t who I want to be or who I wish I could be. At least, not necessarily, and not entirely. But this is who I am.
Perspective Piece Video
The perspective piece video was very similar to the video essay in film, to the point where I kind of wondered if I was even supposed to make a separate video. But I did, because I wanted to.
The prompt was to write a piece, about 2 minutes or so, that shared a perspective we have on the world. We were also given the option to do a lyrical essay video or personal essay video, but I decided to do a perspective piece.
I couldn’t decide exactly what to write about. At first it was this weird thing where I was trying to tell everyone that I had the ability to love and wasn’t just the hateful spirit I feared that I’d painted myself as. And yeah, while this is one of my biggest insecurities and certainly a heartfelt piece, I quickly realized how blunt and stupid that was to make a video around. So I instead chose to write about how I like cloudy days. There’s an underlying metaphor there, but I didn’t want to hammer it in and make it excessive or obnoxious. Which it already is— so really, I didn’t want to make it any worse. Therefore, a large amount of the script I wrote is entirely literal.
I created the video in Adobe After Effects, since I’m so accustomed to Adobe Premiere Pro, and it was certainly a challenge. I have to say, I really don’t like After Effects all that much. I have issues with Premiere Pro too, and there are things I like about After Effects. It just feels too convoluted for crafting a simple project sequencing photo and video clips with an audio track. But regardless, you can see two images here that showcase my project composition and bins. It’s very messy, just like all my projects. It’s easier for me to work that way, until I have to go back in and revise it. In a way, it kind of makes me proud, as I get to look at this total mess and say “Yep, I turned that into a video.”
When I initially sat down to begin creating this video from the audio clip I’d recorded earlier in the day, I decided to compile a bunch of images of clouds in my pictures folder on my computer. Believe me, there were a lot. I really do love taking pictures of dark cloudy days.
But I actually found it to be… too much. Overwhelming. And a hell of a lot to edit. And then I remembered that over the summer, in Lake Winnipesaukee (New Hampshire), I’d spent a day consisting of bursts of scattered rain by going out and recording time lapse videos of the clouds rolling in and out. I found that 4 of the 5 I had could be used in this video.
I sped up the time lapse footage to about 350% or so and replaced about 97% of my photos with it instead. I found that it conveyed the message of my piece much better, and I wanted to use this footage somewhere because I haven’t been able to stop watching it ever since I filmed it. Now the world gets to appreciate it, I suppose.
Here’s the final video.
All in all, in reflection on the perspective piece video, I think that it’s got an alright script. It’s certainly been nice for me to create works of art that are very straightforward and direct in what they’re saying, because I’ve been going a little bit more than a little bit insane lately and knowing that I can create something that black-and-white is always nice to remember. There may be some sanity left yet.