what are your insights and ideas? 

I want this to be quite an informal video, showing some of the thoughts I have during my creative process. I understand this is not the usual approach of a personal manifesto, but it serves the same purpose as it shows what I value as an artist. I won’t have a list of phrases starting with “I believe” because it’s not reflective of myself, in fact, creating a personal manifesto almost goes against my personal manifesto. A very important element of my work is improvisation and chaos, I never plan what I’m going to do, I just allow my ideas to flow naturally and take my time. This usually means that I go back and forth, editing and reediting – this might be more time consuming, but it provides me with more opportunities to learn and adapt, as well as being more fun. 

how did you solve the problem? 

My initial problem was deciding the format of my work. I knew that I wouldn’t be using live footage, as this demanded a camera and I have very little professional knowledge in filming and don’t own a good enough camera. I considered frame by frame animation made with individual illustrations, as I recently upgraded to a touchscreen laptop, however this wasn’t something very reflective of my work. Although I intend to do this in the future, I would be taking a big risk working in a way I am not used to and that is also extremely time consuming. For that reason, I opted to do collage, which is what I identify the most with. Stop motion is something I’ve always wanted to experiment with, I love the unique and crafty aesthetic of collage stop motion. However, this also would be very time consuming and the result would be dependent of various factors like the quality of camera and the lighting, for example. Finally, I decide to create a frame by frame collage animation as I felt more comfortable using Photoshop, where I could be a perfectionist regarding every aspect of the video making. 

what did you find out? 

A personal manifesto is an expression of what you stand by. I remember first encountering this reality in my art history class, when studying Almada Negreiros – a Portuguese artist who contributed to the modernist movement throughout the mid 20s until the late 50s. Unlike the university manifesto, which is concise and formal, Negreiros’ is increasingly aggressive, repetitive and full of interjections – as if poured directly out of his brain onto the book. This is one way a manifesto may look like. Comparatively, the LLC manifesto was created to appeal to its wide organization; when hundreds of people are involved, there are most opinions to take in account. As this would be my personal manifesto and representative of my beliefs only, I would be doing something less formal.  

Animation workshop

In today’s workshop we worked on creating 24 key frames for our 240 total frame animation. These key frames would be the most important frames in terms of transition and movement, the frames in between would create the illustrious of progression from one key frame to the next.

In my 24 frames I began by drawing a different fruit at the end of each row of 6, having 4 fruits in the end: an apple, orange, banana and pear. With my 4 main style frames, I could now add the keyframes. For me it was easiest to start with the middle frame and then fill in the frames before and after, this way I could control the speed in which my fruit was morphing because I already knew what I was drawing towards.

After this, I talked with our tutors about the creative direction I was going with for my animation. For something as simple as mine, there were a lot of paths I could take, one I was very interested in was Clay Motion. I had envisioned a transition between fruits using plasticine, It would look really interesting if i marbled the colours together and juxtaposed a collage background with the morphing fruit.

AR: augmentation workshop

Today we had our AR workshop, this was really great because I was worried about not being able to complete so many seconds of animation and AR gave me the chance to shorten my animation but make something interactive.

Collage Animation

As my initial clay motion experiments didn’t work as planned, I began to use digital softwares like Photoshop to create my animation. After the fruit experiment yesterday, today I was determined to attempt a new style of animation, Collage.

The collage animation I wanted to do would be in digital format because I found it had to photograph to a standard I was happy with and this was also much more time consuming. I had an idea in my head of using vintage images for my animation because I really liked this aesthetic -Artist Anna Malina uses these images a lot. At first I was inspired by an image of a hand mirror to do a simple animation, I found a good image online and used it as the centre piece for my gif.

This gif was just a test to see if I liked this type of composition and I really did! The next step was to create something more complex in the mirror reflection. I decided to have a woman putting on Lipstick as the image in the mirror.

I started with a simple loop but then realised that I could progress this a little further but adding layers to the lipstick, I also added more sparkle.

What was unnatural about this was that the eyes were constantly open, the next step was to animate them and make them open and close at a naturally speed but without aligning them to the lipstick timeline, as having two separate timelines at their own pace would make the image more interesting.

After our guided studio session, I bought some plasticine from the UAL shop to experiment with clay motion. When I got home i began to mix the colours together to get an idea of how i could make the colour transitions between the fruit. After working with the plasticine for a while and trying to photograph it, I realised that this process was very time consuming. This made me worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete the minimum of 240 frames in time. For this reason, I decided to leave the plasticine idea and to do some digital experiments instead, so I could finally try to illustrate the ideas I had in my head of colour transition.

My gif is fairly simple but it allowed me to view the animation in real motion. However, I was now questioning how I’d reach the 20 second mark with such a simple idea, I had to expand on this or consider AR which I wasn’t very inclined to do.

Through a Lens Briefing

This briefing was a lot of fun and very interesting to me. I am so excited to be working with animation because it really connects to what we did in Hand and Eye. During the briefing we were asked to consider time, as it is the 4th dimension. Our tutors suggested movies like Inception (2010) – which I really love – to make us think about the progression of time, parallel universes, deja-vu, flashbacks and visions.

We were also introduced to some of the digital space technicians, who teach programs like Cinema 4D and Blender. I had already been to a couple of sessions and really enjoyed using these softwares but I wasn’t sure I wanted to use them for my final animation because they are extremely time consuming and as a beginner, making a small mistake could jeopardise my whole project. I also didn’t have much time to sign up to more classes to refresh what I learnt last time, so using these softwares was out of question.

Hybrid Forms Final Critique

For this critique, we were asked to make a pdf presentation that would aid us in explaining our work to other students and our tutors. This pdf was useful because it helped me keep track of the time I take to present my work, it also helped me organise myself and the different links I needed to show my progress (as I had a 2 videos that helped illustrate my work).

I received positive feedback from my peers and also my tutor, however, I think a lot of them questioned how I would be able to actually make my final piece. One of the suggestions I got from my tutor was to try screen-printing each layer onto acetate plastic sheets – this would help me obtain a result similar to the one I illustrated in photoshop. I wasn’t very concerned at this stage with making the object in 3D because the prototype had already allowed me to establish that it worked and I could create the final in digital, which would make it easier for me to make it exactly how I wanted it.

Taste and Style

In this CTS session, we reflected on Taste and how it varies in the social class spectrum. To establish these differences, we engaged in an activity where we were asked to define working, middle and upper class taste. During this discussion, we commented on the increasing popularity of retro and vintage. It’s interesting to see how old second-hand items are repurposed and sold at staggering prices, something that once belonged to a member of working class can now be seen worn by or displayed in the home of an upper class individual. In this period of retro and vintage revival, we find wealthy people buying clothes that mimic those you would find in a thrift-store or in a 80’s Sears catalog.

Fashion trends like boho and hobo-chic are especially present at music festivals like, for example, Coachella, which is hosted in Indio, California and is inspired by the 1969 Woodstock festival. Ironically, these trends are inspired by marginalised groups, gypsies and the homeless, but worn by extremely rich people paying over $500 to attend this festival. What we are beginning to see is the homogenisation of taste: the working, middle and upper class becoming indistinguishable in terms of style. Evidently, working class wont be spending $1000 on the latest Gucci Flashtreck sneakers, but they will be able to attain a similar look by investing in dupes or second-hand. The point is, with the globalisation of the internet anyone can access the latest fashion tendencies, read about trending cultural events and learn about upcoming art movements in a way that was impossible before the World Wide Web.

In conclusion, I believe that the stereotypes that once allowed us to determine the social hierarchy of an individual are now fallible. Although to some extent they’re still accurate, there has been a unquestionable shift from seeking the unattainable sophistication and grandeur to acclaiming the vulgar and repurposed.

Image References:

fig. 1:

https://www.metv.com/stories/20-totally-tubular-pages-from-the-1983-sears-catalog

The Juicy Couture Tracksuit (Made Famous by Paris Hilton) Will Be in a Museum Exhibit

https://www.elle.com/uk/fashion/trends/articles/g29204/the-14-most-iconic-tracksuit-moments/?slide=12

fig. 2:

https://www.farfetch.com/uk/shopping/women/gucci-flashtrek-sneakers-with-removable-crystals-item-13258810.aspx?storeid=10524&size=23&utm_source=billiger.de&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=google&utm_term=UK&pid=billiger.de&af_channel=affiliate&is_retargeting=true

https://www.keenfootwear.com/en-gb/p/W-TARGHEE-II-WP.html?dwvar_W-TARGHEE-II-WP_color=1013181&cgid=womens_footwear_shoes