Week 9
THEME: Nature
Full video available at:
https://youtu.be/KxWTyqfBipI
CONTEXT:
The film Amber and I created was based on influences from Aardman Studio's Creature Comforts and Jan Svankmajer's Flora and Dialogue shorts, which themselves are based on the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
The aesthetic choice of sliced real life dialogue over ambient noise came from Creature Comforts. This also inspired the TV set framing device. The randomness we honed in on in the short, in terms of shape usage and also choice of words, was inspired more by Arcimboldo. The whimsical comedic theme of anthropomorphic non-humans can be found in all 3 text sets.
METHOD:
Travel to a public park and find bark/ pinecones/ fallen leaves (or the occasional stolen leaf) in a broad variety of colours and shapes to be assembled into unique faces.
Pull a Series of quotes from a random quote generator and pick our favorite/most intriguing ones.
Tape a selfie stick to a camera stand to make a downward facing camera
Use a stop motion app to take the images.
Read a quote out loud and decide on a face for it.
Replay the footage to make sure we have everything.
Realise that a stop motion app was only semi-helpful for onion skinning and break the videos back into frames in after effects.
Record and distort audio using a website.
Arrange the frames against the sound.
Send off to amber to be recoloured, have background audio added and the TV set and effects added.
RESPONSE:
The final response is a 30 second compilation of all the plant made characters talking, implying tv quotes that have been taken out of context. The effect is that you're looking briefly into the stories of these people and their strange lives. There's a sense of documentary implied in the audio style of the work, which I quite like. For contrast, the faces themselves are quite cartoon-ey and non-realistic, but ideally the viewer is focused enough on the actions and dialogue that the style of each face is a charming feature rather than a dominating theme, much like how a good puppeteer fades completely into the background. The effect of a talking plant person contrasts the realism of the quotes for a hopefully charming effect.
REFLECTION:
Overall, the work encourages creation/fantasy play in the viewer. Theres a certain creativeness one undertakes when interacting with stop motion work, especially one at such a low frame rate. You're being asked to consistently fill in gaps visually. This effect is added to by the need to assemble the plant matter into faces and imagine the implied pupils and shoulders and hair etc of eat character. And finally the viewer also has to imagine the context the character is standing in from the noise cues and the situation they're in from the dialogue.
The process of making incorporated these same kinds of play in animating and assembling the work, but also the playful acts of discovery and creation. Step one of the process was to discover the materials and discover the word choices via work generator, then out of these elements we built. In some ways the leaf colours and shapes were limiting,
but this was helpful in a lot of ways and pushed us to be more creative.
A theme incorporated throughout was uniqueness via randomness. Uniqueness was one of Arcimboldo's original purposes in creating portraits out of food, plants and books. It made him unique in a cluttered portrait market and it added a playfulness to the artwork that the viewer was invited to participate in. The randomness Amber and I intentionally incorporated, naturally lead into a totally unique set of sounds, colours, textures, faces, words, characters and locations, that couldn't be recreated through the same process. Creating the work was playful in a similar way to how gambling is playful, planning up to a point and then letting chance take over.
Jan Svenkmajer's Dialogue Part 2
Jan Svankmajer's Flora
Creature Comforts
About This Work
By Holland Kerr
Email Holland Kerr
Published On: 14/05/2021