project 1

Self assessment- project 1

Henry Bernstein

Self Assessment


    This project was probably my most ambitious so far in my college art career. It involved something that I've never done before. But I've ventured into uncharted waters before in digital media- that wasn't the issue. The project was so daunting because I was doing something that I really didn't know how to do, that being animating over live action video. I didn't have any previous instruction and all I really had was inspiration from an X-Games commercial that pulled the concept off nicely. So I had to figure out each step on my own.
    The first step was really to plan everything out. I knew I would be using mostly photoshop and a lot of flash because those are the two correlating programs that I'm most familiar with. I didn't realize until the end that I would have to use a third program to bring it all together, and that would end up being final cut, which I'll get to later. The second step was to take screen shots of the video from youtube. Difficult in this part was deciding which screen shots to take. I didn't want to do stop motion so I didn't want to have to take a shot of every frame in the video. In order to make sure the animation matched up with the video I figured I would need to take a screen shot of the first frame and the last frame in each shot to determine where the animation would start and where it would end up on the screen. It turns out that this worked only for some of the shots. A couple didn't work, for instance the shot of his feet leaving the ground, because the path for the animation didn't follow a straight line. His feet went upwards in a corkscrew pattern.
    The third step was to draw the actual animation. For this I drew over the screenshots on photoshop. This part wasn't difficult, just time consuming because I had to get the positions right so I was continually erasing and redrawing. I always enjoy drawing though so it wasn't bad. Then I moved everything to Flash where I put them in the right sequence stop motion style. From there I realized that I would need a third vehicle to put everything together with. That ended up being Final Cut, because it needed to be something that used layers. I had used Final Cut before but didn't like it as much as Flash. But for this project it was perfect. The more I used it the more I got used to the motion tools and by the end I was very happy with my finished product.
    If there is a message in my work I would say its kind of a tongue in cheek response to the prototypical sports-motivational commercial/media outlet. But I don't mean for it to be in direct opposition to that genre, it's more of a playful take on it. When I saw the X-Games commercial I really liked it because of its craftsmanship and its loose style. Not every shot has animation in it and most of the animation is very subtle. I could see myself doing something like that as a career down the line. I would be very interested to see what their process is and what kind of software/equipment they use etc.
    Looking back on my project I think that I handled everything really well. I used my time wisely, which has often been a problem for me. I planned everything out from the beginning so that I was organized and knew what I had to do at each step. I'm also happy with how I expanded my software repertoire and figured out Final Cut. That could be a very important tool in the future. A few things that I wasn't satisfied with were two of the animation sequences: the feet blasting off and the can flying through the air on fire. Had I more time I could have probably fixed it by drawing more frames and using stop motion but I didn't and I didn't. So for the next project that's something to expand on maybe. I would like to continue with this video because I only did about half of the actual commercial, or maybe by the time we start the next project I'll have something else in mind.

Paul Glabicki

Paul Glabicki

    Paul Glabicki is a multimedia artist who works in animation, drawing, painting, filmmaking and photography among many others and many combinations of the aforementioned. He received a BFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University and 2 MFAs in painting and filmmaking from Ohio State University. He's been a part of multiple film festivals, museum and gallery exhibitions, and has also taught art at Pitt for 26 years.
    Much of Glabicki's work focuses on the concept of time and motion. It also plays on the issues of juxtaposition and transformation, and pays particular attention to basic elements such as shape and line. His video "Five Improvisations" (1979) works with all of these issues masterfully. In it he takes apart five different short animations by their shapes and puts them back together all in accordance to music. The result is a pulsing orchestration of construction and deconstruction in repeat, offering quick glances at his drawings but not fully allowing the viewer to comprehend what he's seeing.
    His 1984 piece "Object Conversations" has a similar tempo to "Five Improvisations". It is fast paced and only allows the viewer to catch a quick glimpse of his drawings. To me this is interesting because his drawings are so neat and cleanly done. The lines are perfectly straight and the colors are neatly colored in, but you barely get to appreciate them because they are moving so fast. Also another important part of his piece is the music. The transition between frames is timed to classical music which gives it another layer of direction than if there were no music or maybe a different song playing.
    Glabicki's work relates to my own in a couple of different ways. First is his medium. I've been working in animation for a little over a year now. I've done hand drawn frame-by-frame, and I've also used software which he didn't have the luxury of using so I can appreciate the time and effort that he must have put into his work. But his work is also similar to mine in the both the composition and the transition timing. I've done pieces that have no particular focal point and have multiple things happening at once creating the illusion of chaos. His pieces all seem to have this in common. Also his hand can be seen in all of his pieces, some more than others. In some of videos I try and leave stray lines and eraser marks to convey a certain hand drawn feel similar to the kind that Glabicki went for in "Five Improvisations".
    I like Glabicki's work overall at first glance. He has a steady hand and is a talented drawer. Also like I said before, I appreciate the fact that he's doing everything without the help of a computer. His animation is very smooth and straight. For what he's trying to accomplish he does a good job. Even with his transitions being so quick he still takes time to make detailed drawings that might not be seen all the way by the viewer. If there's one weak point of his work I would say his audio could be a little better. Especially in "Five Improvisations", it doesn't really sync up all the way at some points and it's not very high quality. Also there are times in his other works where I'm not sure as a viewer what his message is. Maybe that's his goal, but it could be a little bit clearer.

"Paul Glabicki: Biographical Summary". Paul Glabicki Official Site. Red Fence 1999. Full Moon 2001. http://www.stillshot.net/pages/Glab_bio.html

Work from summer internship

This summer I interned for a marketing firm called TSL Marketing that is based in Columbia, MD. A lot of my work involved designing templates that would later be turned into HTML format to be used for web-based marketing. It had nothing to do with animation or anything that I've been doing at St. Mary's but it was a great experience because I have never worked in an office setting and I got to work with professional graphic designers to see what kind of tools they use and how they go about doing their work, and I gained a lot of insight into how a marketing firm operates. Here are a few of my templates.

Paul Glabicki

http://www.ubu.com/film/glabicki.html

Paul Glabicki is an animator whose work is pretty similar to what I want to do for the first project. I've actually done stuff like this before in my contemporary art class last semester. He takes videos and then animates on top of them or re-purposes the images as animation. Some of his stuff is pretty basic and doesn't look that complicated but it makes for a nice effect. Then again, you have to take into account that he did this video below in 1979 so that was without computers which makes it a lot more impressive.

Alex Dukal

http://www.circografico.com.ar/

This is Alex Dukal. He's an illustrator form Argentina. I was actually introduced to his work by my boss this summer. She emailed us with artists who she thought would be inspirational for us and she hit the nail on the head with this one. The whimsical style of his work reminds me of a number of different books that I read as a little kid so it has an element of nostalgia for me. But it can also get kind of disturbing and he really lets his imagination out which I also appreciate.

From avant-garde to the future

[306-307] This portion of the reading interested me because it discusses the evolution of the computer based on principles that are already fixtures in avant-garde media culture. This can be expanded to just media culture in general. The more computers become a part of our lives the more they will be adapted to coincide with our lives. The author cites the "cut-and-paste" feature of data editing as a principle adopted directly from avant-garde, which is obviously the technique that was used to edit film before computers. This is just one example of the generation connect between avant-garde and the technology boom of the 21st century. The irony in this connection is that the technology that is created to replace the old technology is in effect keeping the old techniques alive through the user's need for familiarity. I wonder, then, what will happen in 100 years when everyone who ever had to physically cut and paste film is no longer around. At that point, everyone will have grown up with a computer and the internet, so in what capacity will the past be preserved?