spaghetti animations

We are in the penultimate week of our Human condition project and an idea has been slowly forming and coming together. I want to juxtapose video, animation and narration to communicate the human condition. I want to use a visual analogy of spaghetti and thread tapestries to communicate life and the human condition. I want to think of another analogy, though so that I can have a power of three. Or at least more footage. I was thinking of incorporating all of the animations I have made (See previous posts)

These animations were made in my room with the strands of spaghetti on top of a scanner. I had to use water to keep the spaghettis slimy and I moved them with tweezers. The Animation above is flipped half way through so that the strand passes through. That's the rough and ready animation style that I like in lots of films. Some animators are very precise and patient and will do everything perfectly but I honestly don't have the dedication for something like that. I never wanted to be an animator because it it takes too long. Yet here I am!

I wanted this animation to feel like little microbes or sperm. I used a lens correction filter to add a subtle chromatic abberation to look like a microscope almost. The black of the scanner could be interpreted as dirt.
 I ping-ponged the animation so that it was 'seamless' also. Animators have always used little looping tricks to maximise efficiency and save time.

Animations I've made so far.

This week at college (3rd from last) I've been producing digital animations relating to our human condition project. The animators that Greg showed us; Robert Breer and Jeff Sher  reminded me of the great ability that animation has to embed information- motion, emotion and subconscious information through the dimension of time.

This first animation I tried to use different brush sizes, colours and opacity to bring a sprinkle of the zest that entirely makes up Jeff Sher's films. This split head seems to have slightly become the symbol of my project to me.

After starting an animation I eventually scrapped, I decided to zoom in and focus on my ear. Disembodied features are somewhat surrealist and I realised a squiggly ear floating in white space is rather abstract. I then tried adding the hair to provide a different kind of animation. Rather than tracing an image like the ear, the hair is a solid movement kind of animation.

 These animations are rotoscoped from a film I took of myself. It was made using photoshop with a layer for the background, a layer for each video frame, layers for the lines and layers for the yellow face. Lots of layers. Our lesson with Greg this day (yesterday) was all about colour relationships and mixing paints. I decided that I needed to try to incorporate and utilise colour to add to m work. Too often I default to Red, Green, Blue, black, white. This has been stretching me in multiple ways.

In the next two weeks I plan on producing more animations. Possibly longer and pushing these techniques I've been trying out. I have a hand drawn animation of the split head rotating in 3D space in my mind.

Animators and 4D

Robert Breer Very free-moving, loose morphing animations using abstracted colour and every-day objects as well as frame-effects and strobing/flashing.


Jeff Scher Rotoscoped animations of people using various mediums; watercolour, ink, collage to add extra depth and dimensions to simple film footage of people doing things. This adds so much more more meaning in a subliminal message technique.

Artist research - Suture Blue

Suture Blue - http://sutureblue.tumblr.com/



I found this person online and thought that they represented the human condition in a way. The rotoscoping of people combined with glitchy abstract footage represents something beyond the physical realm, something in our subconscious; Dreams, imagination, our perceived surroundings.