APD Week 10 - Play & Stillness

Theme:

Play & Stillness - to explore the ways stillness and play can be connected, contrasted and blended through our works. 

Method:

I will investigate the intersection of play and stillness, looking towards ideas of life, improvisation and disruption and their mixture with ambience, anticipation and pause to see what they create.

Context:

My mind focused on the open world-map in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where the player is rewarded with remaining still and admiring the scenery at any given moment. Breath of the Wild often presents these rewards through hidden items or stunning visuals. I will take this atmospheric experience and inject elements of play to create a playful hybrid of stillness.

This, in turn, reminded me of Evan McInnes’ Studio 1 short film “Huh.” (https://vimeo.com/293930463), which takes a normal scenery and provides unexpected interactions such as a volcano shooting confetti. His use of subverted expectations gives the work an air of playfulness and comedy.

Response: 

In order to generate my own ideas, Helen suggested I use an online random item generator to see if unexpected items could help inform my response. After creating a list of sceneries and pairing them with randomly generated items, my favourite idea was a billiard ball rolling down a grassy hill.

I created the scene in Toon Boom Harmony, creating loops for the gently swaying grass and a slow scale node for the clouds to give the scene a sense of life despite being still. I then introduced the billiard ball, giving it time to sit at the top of the hill, creating anticipation before rolling down and revealing its front face.

My second response was the great wall of china which hiccups and jumps, causing a ripple effect in its masonry. I created the two main building sections and 7 connecting sections of the brick wall, animating the squash and stretch of the main buildings and the jump in the wall segments. I then offset the animations to ripple along the wall between the building sections and composited royalty-free found effects over the top.

Reflection:

After creating my first response I wasn’t happy with the overall feeling in the piece. While it did use an unexpected object to create improvisation and disruption to the location, I didn’t get a feeling of ‘playfulness’ or ‘fun’. I wondered whether this was due to the object having no real reason to exist in the space.

I was then determined to make a better attempt, with my second response exploring an unexpected action in the location rather than the presence of an unexpected object. The idea of a Mexican wave along the Great Wall of China was entertaining and created a disruption that suggests the wall itself already has life despite its stillness.