'New Aesthetics' Animations

Hello! This Blog is a continuation of the previous one where I made some art using only tools provided within Photoshop. About five days ago, I decided to try extending the challenge to video and this time using Adobe AfterEffects.
This first animation is once again inspired by 'New Aesthetic' with a focus on the glitches of old VHS. The sky was originally sideways by accident but I decided that I liked the oddness of that.
The original video of this looks much cleaner, the Gif making process lowers the animation quality considerably. You can really change the way a Gif looks depending on the way you export it- I have messed around with this a bit before and now try to use it to help convey the style of my animation.
Maybe I should exploit and explore the Gif compression process.

As you can see, the next animation I made is much, much smoother- in its visual qualities as well as animation. You have to limit the size of a Gif considerably (below 2-3mb usually) so I have to make tradeoffs. In this animation I chose to keep more frames so that the movement wasn't more jerky but I had to use a smaller colour palette and 'flat' shading. This animation went through a lot of iterations to get to this stage. I have over 20 different versions, each experimenting with or developing the Animation:

The process is kinda simple (this isn't the only way I make animations.. this is one example!) to execute but hard to make something that looks good and not too overproduced. Sometimes you come out with something that looks a little bit shitty and some animations never get finished but inspire another three. I find this Process really quite experimental; it's about moving layers around and blending or pushing pixels and just seeing how that affects the way something looks. The process is quite instant and due to being digital I can make infinite copies to modify further.

Then things got Blobby! I found a group of effects for simulating and generating and ended up spending a lot of time fiddling with the physics variables and enjoyed myself a lot. 

Now we're exploding things! we're exploding patterns into other patterns!

I think each of these ones show how my animations can become iterative- inspiration comes from the previous animation and then I push other aspects to explore the possibilities and keep things fresh.

I never seem to ever really settle on a style. Maybe because I get bored, maybe because I feel some artists are lazy and unadventurous and don't push their style more vigorously.

This animation looks more controlled- Like someone got involved and restored some order to the chaos of the flying shapes. That's because someone did.
It was me!      Oh... you're not surprised.

More polishing! Things become square for Gif format and Instagram. I crop the eye-buzzing shapes into an organised group of eye-buzzing shapes. But most importantly: we have a loop!!
The animation ends where it begins....  isn't that such a beautiful thing?
It is to me! The video is seamless (hopefully...*), hypnotically repeating in a way that seems to draw our eyes in and grab our attention.

*there's a twitch in the one above and possibly in the one below too... kinda infuriating, I know.

And here, finally, is something that looks really quite nice! It might still not be complete though, the evolution continues...  What if it all slowly span around? or the background was a gradient or we put some other small effect on it to finish it off.

And then after that explore through After Effects, I decided to trace my steps back to the original task and style- some 'Ironic internet art'.
Utilising the transparent background texture itself as the meat of the image but also the frame. It's a bit like a painting in my mind, one that moves. The excited wobbling lightning is a bright, sharp focus for our eye. The lightning is a built in effect as well, of course.

I feel like I've written plenty here already so I'm afraid you're getting no final conclusion... I'll probably continue this anyway. I projected some of these animations on my face two nights ago and the footage is quite funny...
To be Continued! -as always

'New aesthetic'

This week I decided to make some 'New Aesthetic' images in Photoshop. This was the result of a few inspirations and a challenge I set upon myself. I wanted to try and generate art entirely within Photoshop, not based on any other images or drawings. Instead I used gradients, patterns, textures and effects to make this series.

I like the pixellated, cheesy graphics and I think they look really quite digital in that slightly shit-over-produced kinda way. pastel gradients, drop shadows and lo rez textures.

'New Aesthetic' borrows from a lot of styles but there is quite a big influence from 90s and 80s. I'll write another blog post about it. This one is smoother and less gritty.

Detail.. if you zoom in you can see the pixels. Andy was talking to me about printing things out massive on multiple sheets of paper and sticking them together... possibly collaging it!

'Oil'

And to top it off, some typography!
I've continued doing these and have been enjoying it. I consider these images somewhat like digital sketches. Or maybe painting or collages...  or something else?
I have been trying this challenge of art generated purely within a program with Adobe After effects, a popular video effects software. I will also post these here on the blog and also show how I save them online.

'Mixed Reality Contiuum'

An interesting short video about technologies with different levels of digital immersion. They look at windows within our reality into the digital world and vice versa.
Could I make some kind of art that digitizes real things or realises things from digital?

Unit 11 Progression

I have rounded up all of the files that are relevant to my Progression unit.
Included in this folder are:
Crit presentation documents, My CV, A document about progression options and choices, an old rejected personal statement and an application letter to the Erasmus+ Scheme.

Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B7oE2DlPL6jZV3NfUjRabmF4VHM&usp=sharing

Thanks

Connoisseur - Norman Rockwell 1961

Very first research into Internet art.

 So I think that I am going to make my final major project about what comes between digital and physicall. That is my idea in very very simple terms but this blog post is about where I started.
College has three or four books on 'Internet Art' & 'New Media Art', all of which I have taken out. The most recently published book was from 2007 which is already 9 years ago!
But where do we go when we want to learn about something instantly and up to date information?


Artists:

http://www.newrafael.com/

Human condition/ Spaghetti final crit.

I wrote this to partially read from for my Crit presentation but everyone was tired as my presentation was the last of the day. I decided to skim over a lot of my self evaluation and show what I'd produced instead. Even though it is not properly formatted or the best written I felt that I evaluated myself well in this so I am submitting it anyway.

Greg films

'all my life' -one shot and music analogous to life = relates to my spaghetti film idea

Film of people ascending =

My idea to make a short film following people about the shortness of life.

Other film ideas I wish I'd produced: unboxing the human condition- we unbox a human and analyse its features, statistics and flaws.

Human condition T-shirt design.

Hotseating the human condition- the human condition is sat on a chair and asked questions. The person in the chair has to try to embody the human condition and questioners get to ask some deep questions. I wish I had made these films but I was trying to plough on to a finished peice. Not enough time for both.( In hindsight, maybe I should have made these and then a few animated things but then my project wouldn't be very clear) In the future maybe I should ask Nabeel for help on my script. I still could make these but my final film isn't even finished.

Them two animators - inspired characteristics and animation style. Encouraged me to experiment more. Evaluation: I would like to carry on pushing animation. If I had pulled my idea for this film + narration earlier I would have tied the animations to that more. As it stands, the animations don't really flow together. In the future I could do with less short bits and a longer, more coherent peice. I think that I did push myself and managed to experiment with different aspects of the animations such as overlapping lines, opacity, colour of areas, echo and movement. I also experimented with digital and drawn, rotoscoped, free hand or stop motion. Three different types of animation! (Like printmaking) ⁴

Jan svank majer- has a dark, grotesque and physical feeling to his stop frame animations. Inspired my head motif and I tried the scanned spaghetti inspired my him.

Final film idea= video + animations of spaghetti + narration. It is about the very human feeling of insignificance told trough spaghetti.

Evaluation ~~

I think I researched well- documenting them on either my book or blog. Greg is very useful of course (I'm not sure I'd be anywhere without these recommendations) managed to find lots of artists who stimulated me characteristically and contextually!

I developed ideas inspired by artists but also my thoughts which go round in my head every day which I put down as much as I could to my sketchbook which I have gotten better at!

Been evidencing better and using my blog a bit more casually but more frequently and freely.

These two animations were made in Adobe Flash.