Process Book: Static/Dynamic

Static/Dynamic

FORM & FUNCTION Project 2 1

Fall 2018 Maggie Chuang

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Static/Dynamic This project is a motion animation for a segment of “Kids,� an instrumental song by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein from the Stranger Things soundtrack.

The video is entirely still images I created around three adjectives: cosmic, mysterious, and bright.

In this video, I aim to create an immersive, cosmic world supplemented with a digital, neon feeling that implies the nostalgic atmosphere of the song.

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Static The opening stage of the process, with the end goal of generating over 100 images to use in the motion animation.

Research What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influence—directly or indirectly—what you made?

Discovery What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

Refinement How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

Criticism

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What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

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Goal: Create a collection of images based on adjectives that describe the song clip “Kids” Adjectives: Bright, Cosmic, Mysterious I began by creating a map of related words while I listened to the song, and then passed it on to friends to tell me what they heard, to see what other associations I wasn’t picking up on. Soon I arrived at three words that encompassed the song best: bright, cosmic and mysterious. The next step was to create images using several different methods, all trying to represent the adjectives in different ways.

At this point I had no idea what the next phase would be, so this generative process was a little challenging—at times it felt a bit directionless. Looking back at my process now, I think I would approach this kind of prompt more abstractly.

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Research

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What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influence—directly or indirectly— what you made?

Since this was a new medium for me, I watched tons of examples of motion animations to wrap my mind about what was happening on a technical level. I felt my song had a cinematic quality to it, so I focused in on movie and TV title sequences to get a sense of pacing and tonality. After I gained a better sense for the context of video-making, I went back to my many images and looked at them through a form-based lens.

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Stills of videos that I found for inspiration during this process. Many of them tended to be title sequences, like The Jinx and an episode from Abstract. It was helpful to see a wide variety of image making and image treatments at this stage to help expand my own brainstorming.

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1 Slice 2 The Jinx 3 Begone Dull Care 4 Psycho 5 It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards 6 Dr. No

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Discovery

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What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

Once I had gained some inspiration and tested After Effects to figure out what was available, I went straight into storyboarding; although I came back to this process at every phase, most of my efforts in figuring out the starting concepts. Toward the beginning, I found it useful to ignore organizing specific images and just focus on larger forms; it allowed me to see the bigger picture of each motion, instead of getting dulled down in details too early.

I progressed from sketches to drawn formal storyboards, eventually ending up in full-image digital storyboards. In terms of generation, I tried to be broad in my experimentation of forms and motion. I did narrow in on a concept early on—although my project could have changed if I had explored this more, I was happy with how the cosmic style complemented the music in the end.

Before diving into motion, I took the images created in the static phase and worked by hand to create a storyboard. Although transitions/collaging wasn’t an option, the goal was to create a sequence that told some kind of color/formal narrative.

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Before diving into motion, I took the images created in the static phase and worked by hand to create a storyboard. Although transitions/collaging wasn’t an option, the goal was to create a sequence that told some kind of color/formal narrative.

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ROTATING IMAGES

Note: all storyborads read left-to-right Early digital storyboarding. I moved back and forth between forms and direct images to see my compositions through several lenses. I was focused on creating a color story (i.e. clear moments of color that would indicate shifts in the song) and finding moments for emphasis.

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Refinement

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How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

My project worked in several phases at once, with some parts being finished earlier than others. As pieces became more refined, I was able to focus on honing in the overall goal of the animation and identify specific actions that could elevate my idea. Overall, my edits at this stage were in the transitions and pacing of the animation. The song has rhythmic, driving beats in it, but is also broken up by slower waves of sound and bright melodies; I played with how my video aligned to these many parts in order to create better points of emphasis as well as points of visual relief.

My process was primarily just experimenting to see what would happen, which involved a lot of tests and going back to storyboarding. This meandering style led me to have a lot of types of motion without a lot of repetition, which create interesting surprises I hadn’t originally envisioned.

ROTATING IMAGES

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ROTATING IMAGES

My goals with storyboarding during this stage was to look for patterns and repetition in my motion on a higher level. Several parts of my video felt very similar, without adding anything new, so I used the storyboard view to find places that could offer a new element.

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ROTATING IMAGES

One of my final storyboard drafts.

Notably, I did pretty much ignore my storyboards toward the end and just let myself experiment.

It let me learn more about After Effects and discover better / more effective compositions all at once.

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A major edit was the pacing in the end of the video. In one draft, I had the images change precisely with the beat. Since it felt a little too on the nose, I played with adding more images / complicating the collages to create a more fluid experience.

The other major focus in refinement was with the type treatments.

The changes I made were meant to make the words more textural, and push them into the immersive space I was already creating.

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Criticism In Situ

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What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

I had lots of appreciation for the critique of my project at the end of this process. The cohesiveness of the images were successful in creating the immersive cosmic space that I was going for. The creation of different spaces with the motion was also something I was happy with, especially considering my inexperience with After Effects. Something that came up was a hand-drawn image I included in the last few seconds, which was a rare point of contrast with the others. We discussed how it took away from the immersion of space—if the drawing had been at a different scale or more refined it could have been more successful, which I hope to revisit later on.

Moving forward, I am thrilled that I have experience in motion animation now and am interested in continuing to practice. Working on this project helped me understand sequencing with a different lens, and I’m interested to see how it will apply to my printed / editorial work later on. I’m also curious about trying different styles of motion animation, particularly a more abstract-based one like Mozart in the Jungle or Begone Dull Care.

Final Storyboard

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