Theme
Play and Body
Context
In Matt’s lecture this work caught my eyes- Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/shadow-monsters/ . The interactive game allows players to use the shadow of their body to create different creatures. Those creatures can interect with each other. In terms of using shadow of body postures, it reminded me of a game when I was a kid, using shadow of hand and create animals like a bird or a dog: How to make Shadow Animals with your Hands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv-MdaBfk8U . With our hands and imagination, the silhouettes of hand shadow could be any kind of animals. I also found an artist actually using hands and body parts as canvas: Guido Daniele http://www.guidodaniele.com/index.php/hand-painting/hand-painting-art , the artist create these ‘handimals’ series with a realistic style, drawing on hands and make them look like real animals.
In the later two works, I saw them both using hands as antlers of a deer. I thought it would be interesting to see if the antlers could move like hands and express feeling of a deer, as hands play an important role in body languages. We use different hand gestures/signs to let others know what we are trying to say. (All The Hand Signs And Gestures You Need To Express Exactly How You Feel
Method
Taking video reference in my phone and animating in TV Paint.
Response
I tried to shoot some movements that seems interesting, such as flower blossoming and anger. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RW4CH3OvXKj3YDU0I9PQCRZdXMBD1FN3
Then I choose some gestures and movements that can express emotions well: clapping, making a heart, thumbs up and rock and roll hand sign.
Reflection
I had fun doing the animation! The first three hand gesture are not so challenging for me, however, the last one with rock and roll gesture took me a while to figure out the timing. If I am going to develop more animations, I think I have to be aware of the gestures that they should communicate the idea well as well as being careful that different culture may have different meanings for hand signs.