Character Place Simulation: Folio 1
Theme: Observation
Animation is an act of inspiration, an act of breathing life into an object, this week was a calming observation of breath and attempting to give a sense of a jellyfish-ish character, Blobbo, moving with the rhythm of a calm breath.
This week was spent observing the rhythm of my breath when relaxed, watching the jellyfish scene in Miyazaki's Ponyo, as well as investigating the mathematical description of jellyfish expanding and contracting. Exploring the links between the movement of my character, Blobbo, and the rhythm and pace of a slow breathing pattern has been satisfying. Unity and C# lend themselves to representing motion with a simple mathematical function and, fortuitously, the default skybox environment in Unity helped give me the sense of a sea creature moving through air, fitting with my inspiration from Shaun Tan's story of catching a moonfish atop a tall building.
It gives me a direction for my planned VR experience, this is a way that the experience could help the player regulate their breath to aid concentration. This is used so effectively in the Headspace meditation app. My goal is to encourage the user to project their pain onto an amorphous character, a slow moving blob that becomes light enough to float on air. This is a useful beginning iteration to examine movement, it needs development for the aesthetics, for movement and interactions in relation to the viewer, to other blobbos, other characters and its envionment.
Observation theme: my method, context and response.
Theme: Tinkering
Tinkering has the pleasure of making as the target for the activity rather than an end state for what is made. It could be considered as an activity that iterates through making, reflecting on what's made then branches into making some more.
This week was spent tinkering, my character Blobbo was taken through iterations of adaptations to its look. Each adaptation was documented as a binary decision tree, a tool that yielded invaluable insights: I realised my creative process is rushed, if I'm not happy with a change I'm rushing to undo it and do something else. This tendency was tempered with a visual traceback of the things I've tried ... not just the things I liked. Treating the process as a progression of binary decisions worked well with an iterative approach, I started with the character created last week and iterated through changes to its appearance.
Unity was less tractable (for my level of experience) with features that affect appearance, so this was partly an exploration of how light and translucency can play in an object with this tool. Flattening the depth of the environment to a deep blue helped me focus on the object's appearance rather than its movement through the space. A generative approach from that solid starting point worked well for iterative refinement. The iterations were a useful play but there are further explorations needed on my technical roadmap, to play more with processing pipeline, shaders and materials in Unity and then to revisit the moodboard to marry what I can do with what I want to do.
This tinkering approach to making, this way of following the fun pathways was both rewarding and surprisingly productive. There is much from the maker movement that is challenging my GenX beliefs about work and influencing my identity as a maker. There is meaning and value in pursuing work that aligns with personal passion, and this meaning is realised not just by making but also by helping others make.
Tinkering theme: my method, context and response.
Theme: Found Object
This week was spent grappling with the potential in found objects, and the way different environments can dramatically affect it's meaning.
As I searched for inspiration, possibly influenced by a craving for caffeine, I landed on the stash of teabags in my uni backpack. The tea bags have an open weave casing that lets water to move around the leaves. This fluid movement of the leaves gives me a feeling like watching smoke from a campfire, it's calming but always moving. The strong scent of bergamot evokes the role a cup of tea plays in my daily life: it fuels me to do the things I want and need to do. There's even an element of found objects in the construction of the stop motion. The video was made from the photos taken using some old scripts I had written for after effects. The result could be stronger if I started with a representation that plays more with the object's intended use, a drinkable cup of tea, against its representation as rocket propulsion. There are glorious possibilities in the malleability of placticine that would be fun to play if I do further iterations. If I compare the iterative approach of this medium to last week's, each iteration took much longer but the result was a more playful, engaging communication of my concept.
This week's response was a chance to explore a different toolset to the unity technology being used until now. Playing with stop motion made it feel natural to be playful. The handmade, lumpy look of the plasticine, the limited palette of bright colours and the movements of a stop motion approach have given me a wider view of possible representations that could help viewers project their own perspectives onto a meditation experience.
Found Object theme: my method, context and response.
Theme: Place
This week was spent exploring and thinking about places in virtual worlds. The ways that the setting can tell the whole story and provide fertile ground for characters and their interactions.
The inspiration for my proposed environment is Albert Park Lake at sunrise. This setting holds the promise of a new start as the light slowly but perceptibly grows, as the distant hum of traffic grows louder and deeper, and the morning birdsongs announce each turning moment. I've tried to capture the moment when the flat-silhouetted swans become three dimensional as the nightsky lifts and daylight washes over the world.
I wanted to create this in photoshop to see how the adobe tools influenced the 360 degree created environment. Once I worked out a workflow, it's something that is quick to create and encouraged a less literal representation than my first attempts. My goal for the created space, as it develops from here, is to give a sense of peaceful acceptance using physical distancing as a metaphor for the adaptive distancing of a non-judgemental approach. This hopefully sets my experience apart from the plethora of 360 live-action videos accompanying a meditation soudn track. For future iterations I want to play with moving layers of spheres (with transparency) to give a sense of depth and a bokeh look to distant lights.
Place theme: my method, context and response.
Theme: Objects are not exhausted
This week was spent exploring the secret life of an object and its interrelationships with other objects. This pushed me to consider an unexplored world that doesn't have me at its centre.
I chose a very personal object, my spectacles, the challenge to understand a spectacle-centric world without referring to my own experience of them. Taking photos and videos helped me explore how my spectacles interact other objects, and led me to think about their interactions with light; reflecting and refracting. Through my camera I could observe objects as a whole and as a bundle of details with an element of objectivity, the camera lens becoming my spectacles for viewing my spectacles. Researching focal lengths of the oculus go and glass making helped me flesh out my concepts. Reviewing the images helped me translate my concepts into visual representations. I suspect I overdid the drama, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm far, far outside my comfort zone. When I changed the music to something more fitting to this interpretation object, the dramatics took on a life of their own. The text is difficult to read, even after ruthless editing, and this could work better if I played more with focus and unfocused views. It feels good to have stretched more creative muscles by taking inspiration from great writers like Keats and Eco.
Generating ideas while taking photos and videos, then iteratively and selectively building them into a looping slideshow gave me a sense that I'm developing my process. A process of generating many ideas, iterating through a process of refining them until I'm ready to discard, without fear or favour, those that don't work well enough. I feel I'm building an intuition for that moment when thinking shifts from divergent to convergent, from exploring openly to producing critically.
Objects are Not Exhausted theme: my method, context and response.