Category: Visual Narrative

Wednesday was the last in-class day we had to work on our monochrome pieces. I wanted to work on the sound first so then I could do my scans fully according to the piece. I wanted this film to be very process-led so I was just letting the materials guide me. Unfortunately my cassette recorder guided me into a ditch, as it broke. After trying to fix it a few times I gave up and spent the rest of the day in the stopmotion room scanning pages I had previously copied for my tests. I wanted to stick with the idea of subverting linear narratives so I reused the comic-book scans as I didn’t want to waste more paper than needed. I scanned many, many textures to give mysef options as well as playing with the light to get inverted colors, as I had done in my tests. I also really enjoyed the newspaper cut-out tests we had done, so I scanned text I had as well, in order to make a vague “story”. When I finished scanning, I went home to attempt to fix the tape recorder, since I had work on Thursday and I needed to get as much done as possible. I ended up taking the recorder apart and replacing the record button with the pause button so I would be able to record. I recorded a bunch of sound from different sources (eg. bar ambience, droning noise, music, and the trains passing my house), then I took apart the tape, cut it up, taped it back together and scratched it. Finally, I recorded the audio back into my computer. It came out very static and jarring, which wasn’t what I thought would happen but because I liked it, and in the spirit of the project, I decided to roll with it.

On Thursday after work I spent the night putting together as much as I could for the screening on Friday. I managed to get about halfway however the frames were still dropping so I had to use a pre-render to help playback, as resetting preferences and clearing the cache didn’t help. The pre-render wasn’t a perfect solution as I had to re-render any changes I made which took some time, but it definitely helped. Below is what I finished for Friday.

On Friday we screened and I got some feedback. Firstly, I realized I had forgotten to add more frames with the text “again” between the “once” and “a dream”. It was important to the narrative I had come up with during scanning that this is a recurrent loop. People commented that it gave ‘horror movie vibes’ which was unintentional but I absolutely agree. I was quite please it happened organically, because I am really interested in using animation to create horror movies and it’s is definitely a genre I want to explore. Chris asked me to consider how the film would end as it wasn’t finished. I wasn’t quite sure at the time, however because the audio ends so apruptly I like the idea of the film turning primarily white and then cutting off, just to loop again. This came from Chris also asking me to consider the context of the film as in where it would ideally be experienced. He gave me a wonderful quote “I would like to be blasted with it for 5 minutes, and come out changed.” which is also why I want to stick with the looping narrative.

Below are the 4 themes/processes I wanted to highlight in my work:

• process-led
• cutout sentences
• scanning
• narrative subversion

Over the weekend I began to create a little mock up of the hand cranked viewfinder, however I began to think creating a Zoetrope may be easier.

I later tested putting together some of the scans I had, joining the wavey ribbons of black or white, but again it just looked less like animation and more just filming across a big sheet of patterns.

We also explored cut-up and automatic writing. Using these methods I wanted to look at the text in my scans to see if any narratives could naturally form. I often used to do automatic writing when I was waiting to be dismissed from exams and I would just write down every thought that entered my head, so this was a very familiar activity.

We were then prompted to create a ‘wrong’ film, making it either lazy, ugly, boring and/or pretentious. However we were to avoid sarcasm. We also had to use text we generated from the automatic writing prompts so I went with “my feet don’t fucking work”.

https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/a_dennehyvazquez0220221_arts_ac_uk/EUnW1hFQEaVMnLMoMc0_BCMBVDUrtUo_ZJUlVCQ2yM5QBw

My concept was that instead of animating frame by frame I would just film things being drawn on a paper. Just anything that came to mind while exploring this crude phrase. I also did not edit out any of the audio, but I did film it as low quality as possible to make it look ugly. I also liked how crude some of the things me and my friend were saying were and I think it added to to concept of the film. I think I was only semi-successful at avoiding sarcasm, but the task made me realize how much effort needs to be put in to intentionally make something ‘low-effort’.

On Wednesday I tried some stuff with smaller frames and put them in a make shift reel and I will try to zoetrope them.

At home I messed around with the scanner, using smaller cutouts like Chris suggested. I realized that changing the ambient light combined with he shadow of my arms could make very interesting possible frames on one scan. I need to talk to Chris to see if there is a scanner in a room that I can have full control of the lights.

Then I decided to try abandoning the paper scans as a whole and to see if moving shadows around would produce anything. This also produced some interesting textures, but I felt like having something to scan gave more variety.

With the scans I made, I tried some tests to see if they would animate, and it looked very interesting

As we approached the last week, I also realized building a zoetrope and creating a physical reel was simply too ambitious for the time I had on this project, so I went back to digital compositing, but still using analog sound recording.

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.

On Monday we finished our frame sequences and I have attached my results below.

We then looked at ‘materiality’ and explored the physical properties of paper to create animated effects. We looked back at other experimental pieces and not much stood out to me other than materials creating interesting textures. It is not something I am considering looking too in depth into. However I also don’t want to actively remove materiality. As I have been looking into scans and photocopies as a medium, I would like to take advantage of textures caused by chance when using paper.

We spent Wednesday doing tests based on everything we had done so far. To be honest I got quite frustrated as I was struggling for ideas and the few things I did try were not working out. I printed out some scans I made as I had not been able to collect many scraps from the printers at university. First I took pictures of pages I liked in series, and looked for patterns to follow, but everything felt disjointed and it wasn’t inspiring anything for me.

Then I looked at the waves created by the negative space in the scans and thought that could animate well.

I decided to cut the pages up up to make the images even more abstract and I noticed several prints had sweeping black lines that crossed the pages like brushstrokes. I started taping the pieces together to make waves out of those patterns and tried photographing them in sequence but it still wasn’t animating the way I wanted.

Unfortuntely, these photographed more like a live action, frame-y film, rather than distonct frames that animated.

On Friday we started off looking at sound in experimental animation. I missed the beginning of the class, however when watching Stuart Hilton’s Six Weeks in June, I started thinking about analog audio manipulation, inspired by the lines and shapes I was focusing on during my tests on Wednesday. I wanted to record audio on a cassette and then physically scratch lines onto the tape. We then went out to record a minute each of ‘ambient sound’sounds of silence’.

I recorded from the inside of a locker on the underground floor of the media building. I really liked the echo-y ambient noise.

After that we spent the session doing some housekeeping and making sure our tests so far have been put together, and I also wrote this post.

On Monday we spend the beginning of the class going over the specific brief for the Monochrome project and revising UAL learning outcomes. We looked at Martha Colburn and her practices in the context of the learning outcomes, such as the process of research and gathering themes.

In our sketchbooks we wrote a page of all our initial thoughts for the prompt monochrome. I really enjoy experimental and mixed media styles but I often find conceptualizing difficult. A medium I use often is datamoshing and glitch art, however this project has to be fully analog. This got me thinking about analogue glitching and I thought I could look into methods of using the camera to edit. I noted down Bennet Pimpinella as I had recently discovered his animation using film scratching, and I thought it could be something interesting to try. I also discovered a YouTube channel called YOVOZOL, a video artist focusing on analog glitching and effects. I got really interested in camera feedback as a method to try, however I am still waiting

We also looked at Alison Schulnik, who’s films resonated with me a lot. I’m not sure if it serves what I’m thinking abot for this project, but I found out she was featured in Laura Heit’s Animation Sketchbooks which I have at home so it prompted me to look through again. I marked some artists I’d like to revisit next week.

Chris also showed me Stephen Irwin’s The Black Dog’s Progress and I really liked the collgaged style of the piece.

Finally, we got to doing our own mark making and looked at pattern animation. Chris showed us Chase (2017) by Páraic McGloughlin and I really loved the look of it. Primarily the clip with the oscillating doors, as the textures change but the shape remained consistent. I also enjoyed Max Hattler’s Serial Parallels, I was in awe at how there was not compositing done on the shots, the way the buildings were captured were just that dense and uniform. We did some blind contour drawing with limitations, ie. only ‘seeing’ by touch, lengthening the drawing implement or using our non dominant hand. I tend to use a multicolored lead for sketches and activities like this so I don’t become to precious with my lines, so I did the same for this.

We also did some rubbings and created our own pattern animations from them. I really liked how my first one came out. Due to the paper moving as I was doing the rubbings, I got an offset which when photographed in succession made for very smooth movement. We were also tasked to create a pattern animation for Friday. I didn’t have much time for this, but I focused on photographing the number 6 and seeing the way it morphed as I made my journey to and from work.

On Wednesday we looked at the subject of the Media Landscape. We cut out small squares of newspaper and magazine scans and tried to reinterpret the images. First we wrote down words we associated with each image.

Then we were given 3 different prompts for sorting them. First, we picked five images based on intuition. I picked images that had traces of overlapping paper and misprined textures. Things that highlighted the physicality of the original medium through the scan. The next prompt was to select five tiles to form a random narrative. I gravitated towards abstract textures without text. The first one felt like a progression of darkness to a flash of light back to darkness. The second focused on transversal lines and I imagined almost a traveling line glitch you see on old tapes. The final prompt was to come up with our own method. I decided to sort all my tiles in a snaking pattern from light to dark. This was done by eye and I rearranged them until they felt right.

After messing with the printouts a lot, I remembered how I used to use scanners to make funky images and I really liked the idea of warping things on a scanner. I plan to try something with this approach in my tests next week.

Friday we looked at hand-drawn animation and spent most of the session drawing our own. After looking at some examples of hand-drawn animation and discussing the materiality and effect of textures and inconsistency in lines, leaving the human element of the art within the piece, we were each given a square to trace and animate from there. My mind was still on the topic of scanners so I decided to create something abstractly reminiscent. Since we were to finish these animations next week, my final test for this will be attached on the next post.