Finding The Bear

here is my final product!

https://vimeo.com/40331100
the quality on vimeo is 320498324 times better than on youtube.

i fixed the music problems i was having, and i'm super glad i did. much better now.
i'm really happy with how it all turned out. and despite how much i complained about flash throughout the process, i've learned to love it, and who knows! maybe i'll make some more flash animations next year. i'm glad that door is opened for me now. I learned so much this semester, especially about flash animation, and even animation in general. it took a LOT of work, but it was definitely worth it.

and thus concludes the 2011/2012 school year. i've learned a bunch, and developed ideas to new levels in this course and others. i'm really looking forward to everything to come.

  peace out third year, its been great.

Any Space Whatever

New Philosophy for New Media, an article by Mark B. N Hansen, discusses an idea about the way in which new media is beginning to transform in the way people can interact with it... i think. to be honest i kept getting very lost in the reading and had to read every sentence several times over again to try and decipher what he was trying to argue, which made it very difficult to get through. everytime i thought i was beginning to grasp what he was saying, a incredibly long and convoluted sentence would through me off and i'd have to back track several sentences to try and get my brain back in order. to be entirely honest, the difficulties i had in reading it caused me to heavily procrastinate in writing on the subject. my mind was struggling to connect the dots, but at the same time, it was influencing the way i considered my surroundings as well as my digital work and artwork in general. something about the reading really hit deep, which caused me to both think about it obsessively, and try to ignore it completely simultaneously. i still don't really know how i feel about it.

but, he did bring up some interesting ideas. the most important one he seemed to focus on was Deluze's Any Space Whatever theory, which i took rather literally in interperating it. Deluze defines it briefly as follows:
Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination…

now, to be honest, that didn't really clear it up for me. especially when Hanson was insisting that this space could be found digitally. i found it hard enough trying to apply it to the cinema aspect, then the comparison from that to digital really just tossed me into the abyss with regards to understanding this concept.

I did find the artwork he was referencing very interesting, and thinking about it in such a way as is discussed really opened doors for me with regards to possibilities of interactions with artwork including physically causing someone to manipulate their body and point of view to try and connect with your piece. i've been thinking about that very much since  reading the article, and it has caused me to consider the way i want people to interact with my own work eventually. I've never really thought about how people will interact with my work on a physical level, only ever visual or emotional.

TARBOY

i've been thinking about doing the majority of my animation in Flash. i still can't tell if its going to make my life easier or frustrate me beyond belief. I was curious as to the types of things that can effectively be done in flash, so i started looking around to give myself hope, and i found TARBOY.

obviously, i am not expecting my first flash animation to be this refined, but it did give me ideas of how i could use similar effects to my own benefit. seeing how they used things like transparencies in a way that is similar to what i wish to accomplish within my animation was relieving and helpful. i also recognized some other effects such as shape tweens and various other tweens and filters (and a tasteful use of gradients, too) which seeing used within a context helped me to fully understand how they can properly be executed.

i don't usually find looking at other artists work helpful for me, but in the case of animation, watching videos and animated shorts has helped me develop my ideas into images which are actually possible for me to realize.

Photoshop has quit unexpectedly.

sooooooooooo i decided to try to use my laptop and a 7 or 8 year old photoshop elements to get some of the backgrounds digitized, because my tablet is pressure sensitive and that is essential to get the look im trying to accomplish.. yep, the tablet drivers are still yet to be installed on the computers in the mac lab (not impressed) so this seemed like a good option. or at least a half decent one. as long as i keep the layers right, all i'd have to do is transfer it to the maclab and animate it there. anyways, the selection tools on this version obviously are not up to par with that of CS5, so i decided to hand draw some new backgrounds and cut out the middle man. i found a pressure sensitive brush that works really well, and i was really excited with the results i was getting. so i went to add the colour and SURPRISE photoshop froze. i think my version is too early to actually have the "photoshop has quit unexpectedly" notification, so i just sat infront of my laptop for a half hour praying for that little blue circle to stop spinning and for photoshop to come back to life. but alas, it did not.

i just hope CS5 is better for it than CS3 was last year, i was on the verge of putting my face through the montior by the end of it. you'd think i would have learned to save excessively by now.

i'm thinking about doing an animation for my independent project, and i'm pretty excited about it. i've always been interested in animation, when i was about 11 i made my first sort-of animation set to the song "wouldn't it be nice" by the beach boys. I made it by creating drawings in ms paint, and placing them in succession into windows movie maker, making the clips as short as i could, kind of like the different frames in photoshop animation but not as convenient. i'd really like to find the video and watch it, i think my parents still have it somewhere. I've made several other videos in the same way since then but unfortunately i haven't kept track of them so they're lost within the files of my parents computers. a bit before that i used to play around with power point using hyperlinks, transitions and the default shapes to create little games or just little digital spaces to explore. i remember one i made was a haunted house with an elevator, and each number in the elevator was a hyperlink button going to a different floor, and every floor was some kind of spooky room with a vampire or a ghost or a witch, etc. i'd actually like to find that too, because as i think about i remember how strangely intricate i was actually making it with what was available on the program.

anyways, i've been researching 2D animation a little and i've found some really cool animators and a really helpful blog about 2D and hand drawn animation. animators seem to be really fighting to keep the 2D aesthetic alive. one animator i heard about about a year or so ago is anthony francisco schepperd, and he's fantastic. the first animation of his that i saw was a music video he made for a song called "the music scene". it's pretty much everything i want in an animation. so cool.

the other dude who's work i saw recently is nelson boles. i only came across him the other day, and i was super interested in his style of animation. both of these dudes use after effects to perfect the look of the animation, which is kinda cool. i'd really like to try after effects out.

i'm pretty much decided on the whole animation thing, i'm really glad we have the whole semester for this.

new year, new semester, new ideas

i kind of cant believe its january again already. but alas, it is, and although i really enjoyed the break i'm excited to see what will come of this semester. i have a few ideas of directions in which i want to start taking my work, ideas i want to explore, and limits i'd like to experiment with and exceed. i feel like i've been building towards taking huge steps towards where i really want to be with my art eventually, and i'm really looking forward to continuing that exploration and gaining more and more momentum.

i feel like i'm onto something, and i'm excited to find out what it is.

video.

FINALLY. I accidently left Youtube on on my account over night, but thankfully it actually completed downloading and no one messed with my account between 1:30 yesterday afternoon and now. 7 attempts later, here is the video.

enjoy, dudes.

the waiting game.

As if waiting for my video to render every time I made any changes during editing wasn't bad enough, now I have to spend even more time waiting for my video to upload onto the internet. My video wouldn't fit on vimeo, so I have resorted to Youtube. Unfortunately, I have been here for about an hour now, and I'm still only at about 29%. Coooool that it's taking so long, and that I have other things to do today. Cool Youtube. Cool and speedy. Speedy and efficient use of my time. Glad.

Whatever, I'll have the video up soon enough hopefully. 

Behhhh. 

no room to live

I've been thinking about using animation and realtime video for this video project, and it reminded me of this super cool video I saw. It's Times New Viking's video for their song No Room to Live.  The band shot the video originally on film, then split up the individual frames and sent bunches of them to a differnt artists telling them to animate them as they wished. Such a great idea. Such a sweet sweet video.

learning

I really enjoy working with video. Over the past Summer I actually had a super sweet job working with making a series of short videos generally about how to live sustainably in St. Johns (it was kind of the best job ever). The videos were for a website that a lady named Kim Todd had been dreaming about creating for years, and had now finally been able to realize. I was working with three other people, we travelled around St. John's and surrounding areas interviewing local businesses, farms, gardens, etc, meeting all kinds of really cool people and learning a tonne about sustainability as well as St. Johns. I also learned a lot about video-making. For each video there would be one or two people assigned to film, one person to record sound, and one or two people to conduct the interview. I learned to use all of the sound and video equipment, how to work with a 'crew' of sorts, and I even got to make a few animations to throw into the videos! I could talk about the whole experience for hours, it was awesome. The website is called thegreenrock.ca , the site isn't fully launched yet, but the videos are scheduled to be released throughout the fall.

Another awesome experience I had working with video was for the video project we had last year in intro. Joe and I collaborated for the project because we had already come up with an idea for a video that we were both super excited about, so when the video project rolled around we decided it was a perfect opportunity to put the idea into action. Joe's friend's band let us use one of their songs as the soundtrack to the video, its actually a really cool song, and I believe it assisted in creating the mood and overall feeling that we were trying to accomplish. We included animation in the process as well, so trying to fit this entire idea into the span of the two weeks we had to work on the project was pretty crazy.

This was our final product:

I really enjoyed making this video, and I'm really glad we worked together on it. Our ideas and views on certain aspects were sometimes completely alligned, often quite different, but always found a way to work together harmoniously. I'm super happy with how it turned out.

Now, to come up with an idea for this video project...

remix

I find the documentary we're watching really interesting. I already listened to Girl Talk quite a bit, and  actually wondered about what the deal was with the copyright. I've had conversations with my friends about how insanely expensive it must be to make his music. His music, as is pointed out in the documentary, would be super expensive if he was paying for all of those samples. The range of music he uses is incredible, nearly all of the songs used are easily recognizable, sampling from all genres, over a large time span. He samples from artists like Jackson 5, Electric Light Orchestra, Fugazi, Lil Wayne, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Black Sabbath, Ramones, N.W.A, The Doors, Ludacris, just to name a few. And by a few I mean thats probably about as many names are in a single song, if not less. I find his music really interesting, and I especially did the first time I heard it. I'd recognize parts of songs that I would never expect to hear in a mash up and get really excited about it, and then he'd introduce another, and another, mixing together artists that you would probably never even consider in the same thought otherwise. The dudes super smart.

One part of the documentary, the part about Disney, reminded me of another artist. He calls himself Pogo, and he started as a youtube sensation. He remixes sounds that he finds in Disney movies into new songs, and new videos. I have no idea what his deal is, I heard he works for Disney, but I can't seem to find anything on it. He must have some affiliation with them, because obviously they would otherwise be preventing him from making this music. Also, on his wikipage, one of the two "controversies" listed was that Disney hadn't yet allowed his Pirates of the Caribbean remix to be released, suggesting that Disney had allowed the rest of his music to be released. Curious. I actually enjoy what music I've heard from him, as well as the videos that he makes by remixing the clips from the movies which he sampled.

Here are links to three of his songs: Alice, Bloom, Expialidocious as well as his website: pogomix.net

Pretty neat.

Thinking About Sound Art

This first project has me super excited. I've never worked with sound art, and to be entirely honest I've haven't really thought about it much as a medium that I could work with. I'm not sure why I haven't, because music and sound have always really interested me, but in my mind music and sound art were always in a separate category than visual arts, so I never really gave it much thought. I am so glad that we're starting the year with this project, because even just learning about sound art, and thinking about the way that I personally am affected by it has opened my eyes to so many possibilities and ideas that I don't think I could have arrived at otherwise.

When we started talking about sound art in class, it reminded me of a few artists who I listen to that use samples and found sounds to create their music. I never considered them to be sound artists but I find that the more I learn about sound art, the harder time I'm having trying to find the line between sound art and music ( if that line even exists). I thought about artists like The Avalanches and The Books, both of which take samples from outside sources to create their music. Although these examples probably lean more to the music side of the spectrum (especially the Avalanches) rather than the sound art side, I think it is still arguable that elements of sound art are definitely exhibited in their work.