5: Screening and exhibitions


Part Five looks at ways of getting animation out into the world and thinking about audience and implications for the type of event, scale and duration.

Assignment 5:
Home Videos

For Assignment 5 I chose to focus on an on-line ‘Home Movies’ gallery on my Zemni Images SMUGMUG bringing together a number of updated animations produced during this Moving Image module. This is still very much an ongoing project, the final version of which will form part of my final Visual Communications Sustaining Your Practice degree portfolio.

Home Movies is a series of animations and creative video narratives about the experiences of everyday life in my home, garden and the street where I live. They experiment with different moving images approaches:

Love, Life and Death in Stop Motion is a series of stop motion animations of kitchen and household items, sometimes humorous but also depicting violence and feelings of frustration at the powerlessness of much of everyday life.

Wildlife Experiments use video of different animals in my garden, using After Effects and Creation Effects templates to mimic family videos, but also convey different moods – nostalgia for hedgehogs that seem no longer to come to the garden, cartoon cats.

Walking in Fragments explores different fragmentary experiences of walking down my ‘Anywhere Street’ based on hyperlapse and SloMo iPhone footage and photographs at different times of the year.

For this particular Moving Image assignment I focused on further developing two of my Assignment 1 stop motion experiments, using skills subsequently developed in Adobe Premiere animation and Adobe Audition sound.

For all the videos please see the link to the left to access the full resolution versions – these cannot be uploaded within the WordPress file size limits. The final videos will be reformatted for viewing on the Zemni Images You Tube channel I will be setting up in early 2023, and they can then be embedded in this WordPress page.

Red Pepper: A Love Story in 5 Acts Click Here

Other contributory research

This involved going through the other projects in the Course Guide – though I do not have the skills to do the project on Making an Optical device, nor do I currently have the resources to invest in equipment for offline screening of my animations.

I therefore focused on research relevant to online viewing, but drawing on some of the ideas for more immersive experiences. These are not possible on SMUGMUG with my current coding knowledge, but I am hoping that at some future point I can be more experimental with the on-line gallery experience.

 

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Future visual concept animation projects:
research on After Effects and Creation effects techniques

My initial intention with this assignment was to work further with concept animation in After Effects as part of my overall SYP conceptualisation of ‘Edges’, taking forward earlier iPad work on ‘Edges in Time’. However because of issues with RSI and the very steep learning curve involved, this is now a longer term body of work. This research did however open up new ideas on how to approach other forms of animation in other software and will be taken further in the wildlife video animations and ‘Walking in Fragments’ project.

 

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On-line Presentation and Social Media Platforms

My main current visual communications work aims to produce engaging material on contemporary issues to reach a global audience. I want to produce moving image work that brings together my creative documentary work in video, photography, printmaking and/or illustration is a way that can be downloaded to reach a range of different global audiences. I also need to be able to monetise this in some way over time to enable me to free up the necessary time to produce the work I want to produce – both personal work under Zemni Images and work related to my professional consultancy.

This final assignment therefore focuses on on-line presentation, continuing some initial research I had started for the Visual Essay in Assignment 4 looking at:

What cross-platform strategies would be most useful for me in developing a successful moving image social network audience?

This research look started to look at the work and lessons from other video and animation artists who have been successful on different platforms, and the strategies they use and recommend that would be relevant for my own work. This is includes:

  • content selection and what has proved popular, including different visual techniques like compositing, morphing and erasure
  • audience research and communication
  • technical considerations on different platforms, including equipment and image quality and accessibility
  • use of found visuals and audio resources and collaboration/networking with other social network artists
  • overall cross platform strategy to grow the audience

These are issues I will continue to research going forward beyond this module.

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