APD Week 2 -Time: Redscape [][]

By Carlo Tolentino

Theme: Play and Time (Looped Time)

Context: I wanted to engage with the concept of looped time in an environment, utilizing minimal lines, high contrast, and highlights. I aspire to visually create an animation that gives the same high contrast stimulation as a chiaroscuro painting. Chiaroscuro: https://www.britannica.com/art/chiaroscuro. Despite being artworks void of movement or animation, these artworks portray the dimensionality of its subjects with contrast, lines, and shades. These visual elements also create a sense of movement, obvious or subtle, within the paintings. I wish to experiment with this visual technique in an animated medium. 

A play of contrast to combine authored and looped time. I chose to create a loop within an abstract or alien landscape by moving a single light source. The intention is to draw upon the viewer’s familiarity of a day and night cycle, playing with minimal visual information formed by light and shadow. One effective example of this and a source of inspiration is from the intro sequence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey: http:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QFj59PON4.

In planning the alien landscape, I was influenced by the Alien Landscapes of Mark Garlick: http://www.space-art.co.uk/. Looking at most of his works, I wanted to experiment and play with the concept of looped time by situating the day and night cycle in an alien-like planet’s landscape. A landscape with an unfamiliar ambience of both calm and threat. A self-created or imagined landscape that gives abstraction to the concept of time, and depending on the viewer, subverts or enforce earthly understanding of it.

Method: To play with the concept of time by using the visual contrast and contours created by lights and shadows in Cinema 4D.

Response: A 3D animated loop illuminated by a single Cinema 4D’s light source reminiscent of our sun’s time-lapse on an alien landscape. High contrast rendering of the scene accentuates the creeping intricacy of highlights and shadows as they define the contours of the landscape, and produces just the right amount of visual information to perceive the passing of time.

Reflection: Looped animations is a creative aesthetic I’ve been using when creating and mixing visuals for live music events. I initially wanted to play with this week’s theme by creating fragmentations and deconstructions of Greek statues in a 3D environment. However, I couldn’t effectively situate looped time within the concept I was aiming for.  I will attempt to explore fragmented bodies in a future theme. The response I then chose is rooted in my fascination with relative time, as well as how time may be experienced away from earth, or perhaps an alien planet. Time relativity and cosmic configurations where a 24-hour day for us could be thousands of times faster or slower in parts of the universe lightyears away. In Redscape, it may actually be a fast-forwarded time-lapse of an alien planet and sun, or it could be that days and nights here cycle within our understanding of a single minute. The former would make sense for most viewers, as people are often drawn to familiar and recognizable visual rhythms and what we experience in our own natural landscapes. 

I also found that playing around with a single light source on a high contrast scene, creates visually striking aesthetics, which gives it a treatment similar to projection mapping works I am exploring in my studio project. I am also interested in investigating further in visual communication with minimalism of contrast and contours in Illusion of Life, and further Advanced Play Design themes.

Assets:
Royalty-free BGM Space One from: https://elements.envato.com/