Masking Environments

This project is a precursor for my final project. The intention of this piece is to combine two environments and have them work as one. The point of this is to give the viewer a sense of being out of place, causing them to wonder what environment is the right environment to be in.

Street_Collage

This movie is an experiment in video collage mixed with simple graphic shapes that express the mood of the environment. The environment that is captured consists of alley way scenes that are the center of activity for service workers and business people alike. The mood that I want to capture is the constant and methodical system that that continues on within the city. Although the people may become hectic the system of interweaving business is slow and methodical, progress as a whole across society is slow. This is the reasoning for the meditative movement of the graphic shapes. This work is what I am interested in doing as I see these as moving paintings, compositions that can convey the mood of the environment through color, composition, and movement.

young_dog

The dog is a metaphor for the young man. In his youth the dog is in search for a way to grow up, the journey and destination are symbolized by the map to the "me booth". The "me booth" is a magical booth that turns you into the self that you wish to be. Along the way to the booth the young dog visits with a friend who is drinking and this is part of the challenge of getting to his goal. He must be persistant to get to his final destination, and continue on despite distractions. This project does not conclude as it should, the man would appear from the "me booth" at the end of the movie, see his old friend, and then blast off into the sky.
The short movie as it is now ends with the dog going into the "me booth".

state of my project

My final project deals with environments that are mixed together. Originally I was going to use just the figure in motion, placed in an environment that would be made of simple shapes in motion, a graphics environment.
The trouble with doing this is time and available participants for video shoots and the fact that I don't have extensive experience with shooting with lights. I have chosen to use footage from from downtown that was shot in the daylight and consists of alleyway shots and the movement of peple through these corridors. I'm using the shapes of the building to create interesting patterns as the videos have been masked and layered on top of eachother. I think that I have plenty of footage and I believe I have a good start on the project. I really need feedback from other viewers so that I know what is working and what is not. I have a tendancey to like things that are out of place so I need feedback to compromise with. Right now my video is at 2 minutes and it feels a little packed with info. My gosl is to stretch it to three minutes, depending on what the class says.

Final_Comp

In the vein of Oskar Fischenger, I wanted to create an atmosphere of graphic shapes that interacted with each other and created a space that is made with two dimensional shapes, eventually these shapes will be moving with a soundtrack. The twist to my final is that I will add cut out figures from movie clips to add in with my shapes. My hope is that these cut out figures will fit in with the two dimensional scheme, as they represent a collage feel and although they move in a three dimensional space, there cut out shape will tend to flatten there appearance.

text ani

I chose to use the monologue of HAL from the "2001 Space Odyssey." I wanted to show a continuous flow of text. I need to work on my timing still.

Final Project

I want to use actual video footage combined with an abstract environment that I create myself. The footage that I use will be of a doorway, like the front doors of the school, showing people going in and out of the doors. But the people will be cut out of there environment and put into a graphic environment. The "doors" will show the transition between two graphic environments.

Oskar Fischenger

The work of Oskar Fischenger consist of using light in simole shapes over lapped in order to create a psychadelic effect and the movement of the shapes are very much integrated with the musical composition that accompanies the film.

This is how Fischenger found himself making graphic art:

“To write about my work in the absolute film is rather difficult. The only thing to do is to write why I made these films.

When I was 19 years old I had to talk about a certain work by William Shakespeare in our Literary club. In preparing for this speech I began to analyze the work in a graphic way. One large sheets of drawing paper, along a horizontal line, I put down all the feelings and happenings, scene after scene, in graphic lines and curves. The lines and curves showed the dramatic development of the whole work and the emotional moods very clearly.

It was quite an interesting beginning, but not many could understand this graphic, absolute expression.

To make it more convincing, more easily understood, the drawings needed movement, the same speed and tempo as the feeling originally possessed. The cinematic element had to be added.”

In 1921 Fischenger worked in Frankfurt where he invented a a wax slicing machine that created film titled “Wax Experiments”. He also worked Munich and then Berlin, leaving Munich to escape financial trouble he decided to walk to Berlin. There is a short film that includes these stills: “Walkling from Munich to Berlin.” In Berlin he worked doing special effects in his own studio. He also produced a series of abstract Studies that were synchronized to popular and classical music. A few of the early Studies were synchronized to new record releases by Electrola, and screened at first-run theatres with a tail credit advertising the record, thus making them, in a sense, the very first music videos.

In 1933 the Nazis took over Germany and Fischinger was soon to arrive in Hollywood in 1936.
He worked for MGM, Paramount. Frustrated in his filmmaking, Fischinger turned increasingly to oil painting as a creative outlet. Although the Guggenheim Foundation specifically required a cel animation film, Fischinger made his Bach film Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke -- and the multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization. Although he never again received funding for a film, the breathtaking Motion Painting No. 1 won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1949.

His work is fluid and relies on pure shape and movement to reflect his emotions and ideas, proveing that you don’t always need fancy special effects to get a reaction out of people but good ideas.

The simple approach to graphics is relevantr ot our class because it is a good example of what can be accomplished with our knowledge of After Effects.



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5095385112130615024&q=Oscar+Fischinger&total=38&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5095385112130615024&q=Oscar+Fischinger&total=38&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3