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For this final project, I knew I wanted to do something with video animation of some kind. I also knew that I wanted to do something that would be useful outside of the class. With the time that is going into this project, I felt it would be best served if this time and effort went towards something that could be used for something. Thus, the idea of a music video for my band.

Initially I was going to attempt to do claymation, but realized for the length of one of my bands songs it was going to be a lot more work and take more time than this project is supposed to, so I scratched that.

The next thing I tried was using the adobe Character Animator. That program is wild, and using a template I created a puppet version of myself (i’m an idiot and have no proof of this b/c I deleted it to make space on my laptop, which is relevant later). This took me a couple hours as the first time I made it, I did so in a way that it didn’t respond to movement when transferred back to the program from an .ai file. So I had to re-create myself twice in order to have the puppet respond to the movements I was making. I ended up choosing not to do this for the project because I felt the mouth movement wasn’t expressive enough for something like singing and trying to coordinate puppets playing instruments again, felt like too big a task. So, once again, I was at square two.

I knew I wanted to do something for my band in regards to animation and that’s when the idea to rotoscope popped into my mind.

I had a video of us playing a song in my friends living room, so I decided to use that as the base. Initially when I began doing this I was going to have the background be the part that I was altering and drawing on. I did this through photoshop, splitting the video up into sections so that the file wouldn’t overload in photoshop.

Every 20 seconds is about 155 frames.

Here’s what I tried first:

This was a very poor and quickly given up attempt at this project. I realized I didn’t like how we looked especially with the lighting against an altered background.

My next idea was to have the instruments be drawn over like this: 

I got a couple frames in and gave up on this because it was going to take way way too long. That’s been the biggest hurdle I have hit. Time commitment with this.

So finally, I decided to do something of the opposite and have us (the band/humans) be color blobs playing the instruments like this:

This was the project I was happy with attempting to complete. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to finish all four minutes by the final project but I had hoped to complete at least a minute, but again, every 20 seconds is about 155 frames.

I was doing this still using photoshop and mainly through the quick select/fill and paintbrush tools.

At first it felt like I was getting a lot done in a short amount of time but when it came down to it, I wasn’t. There are so many frames and three figures in each frame which made for a lot of work.

I spent one afternoon, who knows how many hours straight just working on it, and ended up with four seconds of one figure looking really good: (I took a video on my phone and turned that video into a .gif for you)

Finally I felt like I was going somewhere and doing something with this project. & then my laptop hated me.

After having a decent amount done and like on a good track, while quick-selecting a figure, photoshop suddenly stopped working and popped up with this error message:

After pressing “ok” the program crashed and of course, I had not saved in a while! When I opened it back up almost all of my progress was lost. This meant that after learning what a scratch disk is, and deleting a ton from my laptop because even though I was using an external to store the file that didn’t mean my laptop itself was okay.
So I deleted programs and files in order to make sure that no other issues occurred. (One of which was character animator, leaving me with no trace of the puppet self I had originally made).

After spending hours re-working I have about 100 frames of one figure completed. It wasn’t as much as I had hoped, but at the same time I have spent more than the 16 hours on this project as a whole.

I then took the 100 frames and saved them as a video. I then synced it to the music in iMovie to create the piece that will be shown in critique.

To me, digital art is anything that involves artistic effort and has any hint of digital aspects in it’s creation. I see the definition is extremely broad, because it could be a painting that a photo is taken of and then digitally manipulated or it could be something that is created wholly through digital means like photoshop. Although, I am sitting here thinking about it and the argument could be made that photos themselves are digital art, because you are using a piece of technology to capture it? So for example it’s a digital camera. If you use a digital camera, inherently maybe then it’s digital art? I don’t think there are strict parameters on what could be defined as digital art.

The limitations I think are the platforms that most of them exist on. You can print out images large scale to display similar to paintings, but some of the other forms of digital art such as videos and gifs exist on a plane that while easily shareable in our every internet centric world, they cannot be displayed or valued in the same way as traditional fine art. Compared to looking at a painting in an art museum from my observations, people are less likely to sit down and watch a whole 15 minute digital art piece.
But also the possibilities are endless. It breaks down so many different traditional capabilities that art has and brings in new things that artists can do. As we mentioned in class, you can use the tools how they’re supposed to be used but when you misuse it, you can create even more amazing things.

Personal aesthetic-
I really appreciate glitch art. This is by my friend Ivona Moro. 

Glitch art appeals to me because it is, it’s taking something that is considered a defect or error and focusing on it, and altering it deliberately in a way that is interesting or aesthetically pleasing.

The next thing that came to mind when thinking about digital art that I enjoy is animated stills. They’re gifs, but the juxtaposition between the still image and the moving image is something that I find really great. Here’s one example that I found while researching for this assignment:

This can also take other forms though, which creates more of a 3D gif effect… I don’t actually know how these are created but this one is by my friend Jingyu Lin.  (I can’t imbed the image for some reason)

http://www.jingyulin.com/3d-gifs/4m11w84d7ik8fzh93m3ik3r2xbrl48

In my head it’s like a photo taken from different angles which would cause it to be considered an animated still? But also maybe it’s a video then turned into a gif. I don’t know. But I find them great. The movement in a lot of ways is jarring and eery because it appears as a photo initially but the moving aspect is kind of out of place.

Hmmm, i don’t know if that counts as three because while the two are so different they’re both gifs, so I’ll include one more.

I enjoy images like this which is two images edited to emulate the effect of double exposure. It’s just two images integrated together most likely using photoshop. This is one I found while researching for this assignment, by Dan Mountford

I like these because they’re a reference to the past practice of double exposure with film, which created some super cool and surreal images in a much more authentic and organic way. (Not that using digital tools makes it less credible? I don’t think that, it’s just different.) This ability to build on this technique, and perfect it through digital means really appeals to me.