Stillness Exercise (Illusion of Life: Week 8 Class Task & Homework)

Chosen Task: Revisit one piece of work from either your project or your weekly exercises and re-iterate it around the ideas of creating stillness or pause in the work to effect a moment of interest. In pairs collaborate with each other to conceptualise and ideate.

I chose to revisit last week's exercise on duality, in particular focusing on the animation I did for 'flowing', as I really liked the fluidity of the line and thought it could be adapted for various forms of stillness. I partnered with Ben to conceptualise and discuss some ideas around how to add stillness to the work:

• Have the flowing line pause for a moment in the middle of the screen
• Imagine the flowing line as wind, and have something flow along this path as a reaction to the wind
• Have an object breathing in and out, visualising the air moving
• Consider still particles floating in the air, similar to the forest levels in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Music / Sound Credits: YouTube Audio Library, Adobe Audition Sound Effects Library and various audio bundles and samples.

Long Road Ahead by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100588
Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Homework Reflection:

I wasn't quite happy with the results of this exercise. I had trouble animating some of the things that I can visualise in my head, but my baby skills in Toon Boom just left me frustrated. As I wanted to finish this exercise on the same day of class (feeling really stressed with my workload and I had a massive headache), I felt like I had rushed the end result, and heavily relied on the sound design to get across the concept of stillness in the work.

In saying that, there were moments in the animations which I liked, such as: the flowing line transforming into the floating ball; the ending of the leaf animation gently falling down; and the lines indicating the breath being blown out. What could've been better: the middle part of the animation of the leaf being blown by the wind looked weird and unrealistic; the movement of the shape breathing in and out could've been exaggerated more to look like it was taking a big breath in; the stars and comets look pretty bad (I originally wanted to animate particles floating in the wind, but ran out of time).

In terms of how might my project use stillness within movement, the music I'm visualising is pretty busy, and there aren't many moments of stillness. However, there are temporary pauses in between musical phrases that could act as moments of transition between different timbres. I can also consider using stillness to reduce the movement of other timbres when the main instrument is playing a melody, so the focus is on this solo instrument. Stillness can be used to dial down any distractions from the main timbre's spotlight. For example, when the xylophone is playing the main melody, maybe not all the notes of the strings that are harmonising need to be visualised. Simplicity is key. Stillness can also be used in the soft piano sections of the music, to show contrast with the loud forte sections.