APD Week5_Play and Forces

By Yung Yu Ho

Theme 

Play and Forces 

Context

“The world was full of forces you couldn’t fight against which suddenly loomed up and aimed a crushing blow at you.” Tarjei Vesaas, “The Birds”

I have been inspired by the way Fabian Oefner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAs6ILaXSPM used of the speed to spread out the inks to make his creation, Fabian also using another kind of forces to created irregular inks drops. He works give me any idea of using the wind to create an artwork.

Animating Ernest & Celestine 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILpNlfO6qMg

Benjamin Renner is a French cartoonist. In the video, from 5:13 to 5:34 he uses the soft and bright color water animation. This kind of art reminds me of straw blown paintings from my childhood. I start to have this idea of creating a blindfold straw blown paintings stop motion, asking people to blow the straw with the rhythm then I’ll recode the inks to make a video of it. 

At the same time, I also want to create something such as Fabian’s artwork. Spread the ink by using something such as a fan. When I start to cooperate with Wayne, I came up with the ideas of Dutch Windmills. Using the design of Dutch Windmills to create animation on the windmill blown by the force of the wind. I think Wayne come up with these ideas form the Phenakistoscope, a past project of using record disc to create animations. 

Method

Handmade a mini windmill with animation on it. 

Response

One day, I saw Wayne first testing of his ideas, I want to share my ideas with him then I end up cooperate with him. I start with making this prototype making the windmill with cardboard, natural wind couldn’t spin it. Then secondly we used the thinner paper to created our windmill make it easier to spin. After building the third prototype we have tested out with others if the animation is viewable, the result is hard to view and not clear. Then we also try to add color for the character, hope that would easier to view and contrast the focus point. We also went out for test with the natural wind, but it’s 8 frames and it’s hard to manage the wind for the spinning time. In the end, we try with stop motion and edit it in Adobe Premiere. 

Reflection

Our purpose for this exercise was starting with trying to make the animation with the wind, we end up testing the force in different ways and different kinds of outcomes. This was a great experiment especially have the chance to do handmade stuff. The forces blow us to different kinds of directions.