Artsvis 54

I’m doing a stop motion video with origami animals using a pentax optio m40 for the first scene and a Cannon digital IXUS 90  IS for the 2nd and 3rd scenes.

location: my dresser

os=ostrich, ra=rabbit, sq=squirrel

this is the general outline of the story:

“*playing
sq: Hey, I’m bored. All we do is play with this dull yellow ball. Everyday is the same
ra: I know God has this place called Heaven, I hear it’s out of this world.
os: Hm, then let’s ask God how to get there.

all: Dear God, how do you get to Heaven? Please tell us. Amen.

God:     Are you sure? There’s no turning back if you go.

Heaven =/= Earth =/= Hell

Heaven is the direct opposite of Hell,
and Earth is in between

Heaven is over the cliffs and through the woods. –>
(so is hell)

*jumps
all: let’s go.
*walk off scene

—-scene shift—–

*walking over the cliffs (fireplace mantle)

sq: God, this sucks, I’m tired. I don’t want to go to heaven anymore.
God: Oh, really? You can go somewhere else, then.

*falls into hell (paper fire in fireplace.)

ra/os: O_O omfg.
God: Well, Heaven is that way   –>
if you still want to go

—-scene shift—–

*walking along side kitchen sink with a running faucet with a sign “HEAVEN (arrow down)”

os: Although we lost sq, and the journey was hard,
ra: We made it! It certainly wasn’t boring. Let’s go in.

*both fall over edge

both: O_x!!!”

My first set up of the first scene was a bit smaller than the one I  ended up going with.

After a few shots of this scene and trying to move my characters around, I found it to be a little to crowded to show actions easily. So then I added another row to the sky and another row of ground to have more depth to the scene.

I also thought about putting strings on the characters and maneuvering them like marionettes, but since I was working on the project by myself, I didn’t have enough hands to hold all the string and take pictures. In addition, the strings and shadows of my hands would show up in the pictures which I didn’t want.

So instead of showing that a character is speaking by rocking them back and forth with a string, I decided to move them side to side.

I also had to play around and with camera angles so that the characters could be properly seen and be an appropriate size in relation to the screen.

This picture’s background was too bright making the characters darker and thus harder to see.

This picture make the characters too small and has a bad angle. When the characters turn at the corner, they will be looking at the camera straight on and will be difficult to make out (since they are not very 3D).

2nd scene locations Few FF 1st floor commons :

3rd scene location: one of the few 2nd floor kitchens either in HH or GG

Instead of voice acting or using a song with lyrics, I typed out what the characters were speaking sort of like a comic book using photoshop.

And for the background music I used music from the games of Pokemon, Final Fantasy 7, and Super Mario Bros. which I edited together using Audacity and the later put into iMovie.

storyboard:

video

For the maya part of the project, I am in the process of making the Eiffel Tower. So far i have 2 layers of cans for one leg, and the outline of one of the 4 base arches.

For the physical sculpture, I first played around with the idea of making something like a mass of pinwheels put together in the shape of a butterfly against the wall, but  came up with the windmill idea instead I am planning on making a windmill in which the walls will be made out of sheets of aluminum from the cans sewn together with wire. The blades of the windmill’s fans will be first be made out of thicker wire as scaffolding and then mounted with pinwheel. So far, I have made a few pinwheels. 2 pinwheels can be made out of the flat sheet of can minus the top and bottom, and one “brick” from one can. I have yet to decide if I will use the tops and bottoms of the cans.

After cutting 50+ cans into strips like so:

I poked holes along the sides in each one using my chair and a push pin. 4 along the top and bottom, and 2 on both sides. then I cut wire into pieces of about 2″ long, and bent them into rings to hold the different can strips together.

First I laid out the strips in the order that I would put them together.

This is all the strips put together with the wire. This is the “walls” of the windmill. It isn’t a full cylinder so that it would lean against the wall.

After I finished the walls, I started on the windmill blades. I cut wire into 8 pieces of 5′ each and folded them in half and twisted all 8 together so that each of the 4 blades would have 4 strands of 2.5′ each. then for each blade I wove the 4 strands together (basically braided them except with 4 strands), and then cut 4 more strands 2.5′ long and hooked them onto each of the main strands so that the blades would have a width of about 4″.

It’s a little difficult to see, but the blades are resting on the door knob. The blades are a little floppy, but it is of no matter because they are to be held up with pins and thin wires.

The roof was to be finished and put together with the bottoms of the cans in a shingle sort of way, but since my project is missing, I am unable to do so.

For the virtual part of the project, I attempted to make the Eiffel tower by just eyeballing pictures and making it.

but I when I tried putting down the first platform(the large square),  the legs did not match up to the corners in height or spacing

so then I tried using the square platform as a basis and building off it.

But I had trouble angling the legs. If I had continued going upwards in a smooth fashion, the tower would have been impossibly tall.

Then I decided to scrap all that I had done and look at the actual dimensions of the Eiffel tower.

So I used the numbers to make proportions and also found how many units wide (diameter) and tall the can was (.412x.712).

Calculations in my drawing notebook.

After determining the size of the base (44×44 cans) I calculated the height (61 cans), and then continued to calculate the sizes of the other 2  platforms. I also calculated the positions of the cans in one of the legs using basic math and Pythagorean theorem (for the semicircular arch), and duplicated it 4 times.

The long stack of cans in the middle is merely used for a reference point to look at. For actual placement of the cans, instead of moving the cans by hand and not being exact, I type in coordinates.

The basic plan I have for my collage is a normal 17″ x 22″ rectangle of poster paper covered in pre-fall Berlin Wall pictures. After everything is pasted I will spray paint “Berliner Mauer” in black in the middle. Then I will partially rip the poster down the middle with the top left corner curling down. On the back side of the side that’s curling down, I have planned to put pictures of the Berlin Wall coming down and reunited pictures.  To the background of that I want to put profiles of a North and South Korean soldiers facing each other, each in front of their flag and between then written “Next?”

So far, I have collected several pictures.  I need to figure out how I want to resize them and find more.

update 2

I changed my idea over the weekend, and came up with this so far. In the blank part of the middle, I want to put in pictures of the Berlin wall, in a way comparing the split between East and West Berlin with the separation between North and South Korea.  I will make the gap between the flags and the soldiers bigger so that there will be more room to see wall pictures. Eventually, I will also have to change the color scheme to black and white. Another issue I have to deal with is that for this image to fill most of the collage canvas of 17×22, the resolution is too small. I may stretch the images some and center it and in the background have different pictures of the wall.

Title and statement

Repitition

by Caroline Lee

My piece’s focus is on the split between North and South Korea which can be seen with the North and South Korean soldiers facing each other again their respective flags. I thought this was appropriate in this project because the division of the Koreas parallels the division of Germany.  The Berlin Wall that was erected over night split families and the nation, just like how the divvying of Korea between the Soviet Union and the United States made the messy split Korean families and the Korean nation which is symbolized by the picture being torn in two and the ripped edges. The parallelism is shown by Berlin Wall pictures in the background which I extended and presented the question whether or not the Korean split would follow even the demise of the German split and the ultimate reunification of the nation. The 4 Berlin Wall pictures on top of the larger wall pictures were put there to show various ways that people tried to stand against the wall while edge pictures focus on the dividing aspect of the wall.

I think the collage is really interesting with vintage magazine clippings. This picture makes me think of American materialism. The wrench appears to indicate that this is a collage of the inner workings of “The Beautiful Girl’s” mind. To me, it seems that “The Beautiful Girl” thinks of mostly just cars especially expensive cars such as BMWs. Another person in the background has an enlarged right eye seeming as if The Beautiful Girl feels like people are watching her maybe in envy, admiration or whatnot. And just like a car runs on wheels, guys seem to be an important part of her life and mind, something she also runs on. Looking at the size of her styled hair, looks are very important to her. The lack of a face makes it seen as if she has no personality, or that her face is empty so that different masks can be more easily put on. The timepiece could be interpreted as the time that “the Beautiful Girl” sparingly gives to things she believes are worth it. And finally, the light bulb is The Beautiful Girl’s thoughts that she believes are so wonderful and illuminates the world.

I found this picture rather amusing because the tree was outlined with nodes and lines just like a visual representation of the “tree” commonly found in computer science lectures and textbooks. The computer science tree also has nodes containing data, that link to other nodes (branches) that also contain data or an end node (leaves). A small binary tree-like structure is also found in the corner!  But in addition to the “tree,”  the way the photograph’s boarder was jagged and uneven made the piece as a whole more  interesting the way it almost gave the impression of looking through a dirty window or an old dirty picture in a picture frame with a small section wiped to see through more clearly while the rest remains covered in dust (the white). To me the large imposing tree in the black and white in front of building with the golf cart gives the picture a feel of the magnolia South at the same time juxtaposed against that feeling, the outlined computer “tree” and the small binary tree-like figure in the corner makes the picture seem modern and high tech. So the overall feeling is at the same time old and new.