APD Week 5 - Play & Forces

Theme:

Play & Forces - to consider how forces, external or internal, could help shape, structure or produce our work

Method:

I will walk around the Melbourne CBD while recording audio, then select a small, interesting snippet that I will animate. The external force will be sound, via the recorded audio snippets, as well as the system of recording audio, selecting audio snippets and animating one of the selected snippets.

Context:

“You, Me & The City” - http://www.uyenng.com/you-me-the-city#/you-me-thecity/

I was captivated by Week 5’s Guest Lecturer Uyen Nguyen’s “Yomeci” short series due to its playful approach to recontextualising found sound, and its child-like joy and delight present in each animation. I will experiment with her simple rules system in order to try and approach animation production in a more playful manner that I am used to exploring.

Man, Play & Games - Roger Caillois

Caillois discusses his definitions of play characteristics that serve to help define the nature of games, with criticism towards those suggested by Johan Huizinga. The production of this week’s exercise should touch upon Caillois’ play characteristics of; governing rules, being constrained to animating only what I am able to record in the Melbourne CBD; the uncertain, being unable to plan my animation beforehand;  the make-believe, recontextualising the audio clips in ways that aren’t bound by reality.

The Ambiguity of Play - Brian Sutton-Smith

According to Sutton-Smith’s seven rhetorics of play theory, the production of this week’s exercise should also touch upon rhetorics of; fate, leaving the subject of my animation response up to unpredictability; the imaginary, playful improvisation of the selected audio snippet; the frivolous, creating something spontaneous and whimsical.

Response:

After capturing an interesting conversation between Emmett and Yao in the MAGI Studio, I clipped the audio down to 20 seconds and scripted the recording so that I knew what I was working with. I then imported the audio clip into TV paint and began thumbnailing to the audio, depicting Yao as Dracula and Emmett as a wolf/werewolf antithesis. Before cleaning up the animation, I found a royalty-free guitar clip and shortened it down to 10 seconds, scripting a three-line poem in the essence of Nguyen’s from the ”Yomeci” series.

Reflection:

Recording audio in the CBD proved difficult in that I had to be close to any subjects for an extended amount of time in order to gain something usable. I found myself seeking out confined areas such as elevators and trams, but was able to get the best recordings in more intimate locations where conversations are more relaxed and free-flowing, such as the MAGI Studio.

I began the exercise looking for ways to simplify the animation, via minimalistic visual style and simple pose-to-pose animation but ended up putting in a lot more effort into Yao’s lip-sync and movements the longer I spend on the animation. This likely happened as I became more invested in the piece the longer I worked on it.

The only thing I would change in the future would be to have the ending poem sung by someone else or substitute it with something else so that my audience isn’t subjected to my off-putting singing capabilities.