Visualising the Bassoon (Illusion of Life: Week 10 Practice & Homework)

Practice:

For this week's IOL class, I focused on visualising the bassoon from Peter and the Wolf through small iterative experiments.

Homework Reflection:

What was the main intention/focus of this week's practice for you?

The main intention was to continue my iterative experiments in animating different musical timbres from the orchestra piece, Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. This week, I decided to animate the bassoon.

Were there any specific technical/narrative/visual/movement or design problems guiding your practice?

The musical clip of the bassoon I was animating to had some very long, elongated notes that would trail off, which means more time leading in and out of each element. I ran into a few issues especially with the third and fourth experiment when I was trying to visualise this (I needed to give each element more time to "fade off"). I also didn't understand how cycles and symbols worked - but after chatting with Nick, he gave me a quick rundown. I was able to use cycles to repeat certain elements, and duplicate drawings if I wanted to just alter one specific cycle's drawings. 

How did you go about your making endeavour relating to this intention?

After revisiting the experimental results I conducted with other students, I had some initial ideas of what I wanted to do with the bassoon visualisation - in particular, foreboding rectangular forms that emerged from the ground, and big concentric circles. This was my process:

1. Rectangular forms
   Rectangular forms emerging from the ground. The animation itself was okay, nothing spectacular, but somehow reminded of objects protruding from a big belly.
2. Curves
   Exploring the belly idea, I decided to round off the rectangles to be more like curves. I felt like this was much more effective as the sounds of the bassoon are quite rounded and smooth.
3. Spirals
   Didn't work as well as I wanted it, and I felt like it didn't quite match the timings well enough (especially the decay of each bassoon note). But I feel like the texture of the spiral suited the timbre of the basson.
4. Concentric circles
   This didn't turn out very well, maybe because the transitions felt very 'hard' to me.
5. Belly
   Going back to the belly idea, I decided to make a curved base and animate the bulges coming out better after my learnings from Experiment #2. I was really happy with this outcome, and felt like it was the most successful out of the five experiments.

How successful were you with this practice? How do you know?

I was quite happy with my final experiment, even though it wasn't one of my visualised ideas from the start. The idea emerged through my tests and wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't gone through this process. Therefore, I do think this iterative and modular approach to tackling my inquiry to be successful.

Have you come across any new related works that inform your larger IOL project for the semester?

Nick suggested I look at "The Aroma of Tea" by Michael Dudok de Wit. I really liked the colour palette, patterns and textures used in the piece, and gave me some possible ideas on how to tie my various visualisations together into a cohesive piece of work.

Ben also sent me a chapter from this book he was reading called 'Drawn to Life'. The chapter was about gestures, and it showcased some mark-making and patterns which I thought were great starting points for idea generation and freeing myself from constraints. 

What do you need to iterate further or reiterate in terms of your past practice in coming weeks?

Go back to the experiments I've done and do one more iteration as Nick suggested, but after I've gone through my initial iterations for each one. This last experiment should focus on resolving the colour/texture/final polished look for each response that would fit cohesively into the larger visualisation.

Describe one insight you have had about your practice this week?

I might be being too harsh on myself. I'm constantly getting frustrated with my slow progress using Toon Boom, but I recognise that it requires time to master a piece of software. I should also stop rushing my experiments and try and enjoy the process and outcomes.