Freaking amazing...

Video by animator/street muralist Blu I suspect. I stumbled across this whilst rumaging thru youtube and was amazed that I had not seen it before being an avid fan of this artist. What's really interesting is that it has been on the web for 4 years and has only had 700ish views. Compare this to Blu's massively popular Muto with over six and a half million views in just 2 years on youtube alone. hmmm....i wonder why its posted on youtube without a connection to blublu's profile. I'm sure its his work. Wierd. Awesome. Freakin Amazing.

Back to the drawing board...

Hmmm, my head has not been in a solid conceptual space this semester and I've been struggling to come up with a sound and interesting artistic concept for my major project. I think this attributes a little to the other 4 courses I'm currently doing that are all teaching practice & theory core courses. The little creative monster in my head has been neglected and is now a little shy. What do I do?

My concepts/narratives are all crap. This will be limiting if I take the same approach as my last 2 animations. Without a story I think it will be boring/trivial/pointless. I don't wanna make another pointless animation. What to do?

Flash: frustration?? naahhh....

Over the last few weeks the class has been dealing primarily with flash. At first I felt a little overwhelmed, and had doubts that I really understood what was going on. It's really just one of those things you need to pay attention in demo's and spend some time familiarizing with the functions. Today I was able to program a little interactivity into my animation. Using flash, I've created a basic swf. that when opened automatically goes to fullscreen, and has a few funky little buttons. The buttons allow you to play, stop/pause and exit and were each designed by me. Its simple but works so I am happy. Feeling like I'm some very basic but fundamental flash things understanding things :)

2nd animation: first visit in a little while..

Hey nobody thats actually reading.

I haven't been on in a couple of weeks to contribute to my onlineblog/journal for AART3462. I'm updating it with my 2nd stop motion animation attempt. I was fairly happy with the result. Its super simple which made it a bit more successful than my last one...i think???



I kept it very simple for this one. I did this because I found with my last experience the more moving detail I tried to create the more frustrating and arduous the whole thing became. In this animation you can see that movements are very simple. blinking, isolated elements popping up etc. I also made a deliberate choice not to colour/fill the space in black. This took ages with the last animation (even though it only goes for ten seconds!!) and I wasted alot of texta.

Presenting to the class

As part of one of my teaching courses students were asked to give a 10 minute presentation. The criteria was broad. We simply had to present on anything that would be useful to preservice visual arts teachers. I chose to give a brief tutorial on stop motion animation in the classroom. We talked about the ways animation could be linked into the syllabus and curriculum, the relevance this medium had to students' lives and the positive effects on motivation and student engagement. I was able to get some samples of student work from a year 8 class at Newcastle High. In the space of six weeks they were able to create relatively successful claymation vids (about 2 minutes in length) with original sets, characters and narratives. To finish the presentation I gave a quick demo of how to edit in Windows Movie Maker. This is super freakin easy. I feel that demonstrating in this program showed just how achievable 4D can be in the highschool classroom.

FIRST STOP MOTION!! ... sorry if the caps made it sound exciting..it's not :)

My first stop motion experience. I set up a cam in front of a whiteboard and simply started to draw and let things evolve. No story line or plot... just mucking around getting a feel for this shiz. This one was pieced together using windows movie maker..real simple like.



Doing this gave me a headache and the final result did nothing to alleviate the pain... nevertheless you gotta start somewhere.

Stuff I've been looking at (continued)

I would have attached this to the last post but the post editor is being a little bit of a pain. So this post just follows from the last...

I went to see artexpress on the weekend at the gallerty of NSW. I also saw the archibald prize and its side shows. It was all very good, but as usual artexpress blew my mind!!
I saw heaps more 4D stuff this year than I have in the past. In the show I saw there were nine 4D works! Of the nine, one was a stopmotion animation using paper, pens, pencils and a desk as a site for animation. It was quite cool and from memory was titled 'homework'. Another stop motion I saw was done with lights, shot at night.. on youtube this approach is being labelled as 'light graffiti'... its pretty cool. check this out..



Another I saw the other day was done with salt. This could be replicated with sand, dirt, flour, etc.



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