Carousel workshop strand A: The Image: Still/Moving

To help us develop our initial ideas, we had to choose two Carousel Workshop strands in which to work.
These workshops were on certain styles and mediums of media and art, and really helped me to focus and hone my original idea into what I'm working on right now.

I chose Carousel Strands "A" and "C", Starting with Carousel workshop strand A: "The Image: Still/Moving".
Here for the first weeks of this module along with the monday lectures we looked deeper into how we could use animation and certain software and practices (such as Adobe After Effects and editing skills like the ones used in "Tango" by Zbigniew Rybczyński) for our experiments.

I really enjoyed the hands-on approach with this module and having already had a large passion for animation and been familiar with some of the influences (such as Eadweard Muybridge and Zbigniew Rybczyński) from previous work, I found that this was definitely the area in which I wanted and needed to work.
These workshops also really helped me form ideas for my MEDI 262 work into Experimental Animation as the topics overlapped a lot which was very helpful and productive indeed. :)

Here are some links to my Vimeo page where I've uploaded the work we created during these workshops:

Sofa Stop Motion: http://vimeo.com/15843278

Rotoscoping Riot: http://vimeo.com/15843609

Moon Madness!: http://vimeo.com/16056784

Craig's Crazy Crustacean Carry on!: http://vimeo.com/16056791

Each of these videos were great fun to work on and really helped me to understand the power of moving image to convey emotion and entertainment and also how important team work is. As I progressed through these workshops the quality of my work became that much better when I worked in a team, which was a big eye opener for this project because for me to be able to complete my own experiments, there was no way I could do this on my own.

However, I didn't see this as a curse, but instead saw it as a blessing as now I could fashion a partnership with some of my fellow students and friends and together we could help each other make our projects the very best that they could be.

That's it for this week, tune in next week for my Strand "C" work and my initial notes and ideas I made at the beginning on how I'm going to make my "Mechanical Instrument" or "Marble Run Music" as it's now being fondly called! They're working titles so bear with me on that one! Haha!

Take care and Merry Christmas,
Joe.