For the first session of the week we continued testing. I continued my trials of following lines in each scan and puzzling them together. Last week I had set up some bins by the printers in the library and on the animation floor for people to leave misprints and bad scans, however I haven’t gained many images I find interesting. I will go home and try rescanning the images I have collected, to see if I can get anything interesting.
Back in class, my mind went back to comicbook scans and I started thinking about thematic links to the things I had been trying. In my sketchbook I had been gathering series of words.
My oscillating lines in the tests remind me of a winding path, in the same way narratives are described. I like the idea of subverting comicbooks, which have the purpose of conveying a traditional narrative with images, and repurposing it to read between the lines of the panels (with the added bonus that comicbook prints have great visual textures).
On Wednesday we went on a walk in London to explore Psychogeography. We walked without looking at our phones, however it was an area of London (Waterloo) that I am very familiar with. This would be interesting to try somewhere I have never been. Having just written that, it reminds me of what my friend and I did in Bruges and Ghent a few years ago. We were visiting for the first time and we just walked around with no phone data, and found some very cool little nooks of the cities (also got chased out of some private property, but alas).
During the London walk we read some excerpts chosen by Chris and then we were tasked to create a psychogeographic map based on the walk.
I took a paint pen and just drew as I recounted the walk in my mind. I held it down and let ink flow out in the spots we stopped and the cruves and zig-zags represent my perceived changes in levels as we traversed Waterloo. Chris asked me if the map had turned out the way I imagined, and if I wanted to edit it, but to me this was exactly what the map should look like for the moment it was created. If I had done it while we were walking it may look more geographically accurate, but I would have missed being in the moment. If I had done it much later I would have forgotten much of the walk and it would look very different. i think this sort of illustration is very dependent on the exact moments it is created in.
On Friday we continued our tests and presented our psychogeograpic maps. I had a sort of epiphany about what I wanted to do, taking the brief to a new level. The imagery and animation was only going to be one part of my response. I decided I wanted to completely forego any digital output for my animation. The images I scan and paste together will be presented on either a Zoetrope or some sort of reel projection, depending on what I can build. In order to adhere to the 30 second restraint I will also be recording sound in an analog format (tape) and modifying it (scratching) for 30 seconds, which will serve as my film’s bounds.
In order to avoid any digital compositing needed in order to get the scans I have in my tests to a smaller scale, Chris offered the advice of simply cutting the original scans much smaller initially and sticking them together in a makeshift video reel.