Presentation and Initial Designs and Ideas

Now that we're finally finished with the workshop stuff, I can at last show you my initial drawings and designs then later on in this post tell you how my presentation went.

Also I'm extremely sorry for the delay in posts! Things have been VERY hectic getting MEDI 262 (Experimental Animation) and MEDI 236 (the Documentary project) finished in time and so now things have quietened down a bit so I can continue with this blog and crack on at a gentler pace with my next two modules.

So to get straight back into things, firstly we have my presentation slides as photos, which also includes my original drawings and designs. We had to present our ideas to the rest of our Workshop Strand A groups and the presentation itself went really well, it was great to see what people are up to and I look forward to the exhibit at the end of the year even more and I was really pleased with the enthusiasm everyone had at seeing my piece, so let's just hope I can deliver haha!

Firstly we have the title slide and the second explaining my initial ideas.

I don't think I've explained my first ideas yet but basically I was going to create a "real time" machine which interacted and played an animation, (e.g. dominoes would release a flip book by a chain reaction knocking over something holding them down. Then when the weight is taken off the flip book flips through showing the animation).
This as you can already tell is a massive project as technically it would be making two pieces!
So instead of animation a story or journey will be told via chain reaction effects and certain objects making music.

The research and inspiration for this project comes from loads of sources (as I've had this idea since I was about 10/11!) but the main ones would be things like clockwork, marbles runs, cog and gears, machinery etc. etc.

And below I've also added some more artist based inspirations as there are many pieces in the same style as I want to make but here are 3 listed which have influenced my work: Tim Hunkin, Eric Staller and the band Ok Go!

These artists have created really interesting and exciting work in this field/medium and so from looking at their work I have moved on to actually start making my own mini experiments into this line of work.

Here is the link to my Vimeo page where you can see the first video:

http://vimeo.com/20246720

Which was a quick experiment to show how a project like this could be done. This piece had a marble come down the run, hit the motor on and land in a bowl of water. The motor then turns the elevator which lifts another marble up to the top of the marble run and drops it down to turn on the CD player, before I add a second to pause it again.

I used the Canon EOS 5D for this experiment and it was also an experiment into using that camera too. Unfortunately, the 5D when in video mode has to be manually focused so trying to keep u[ with the marbles and focus at the same time was incredibly hard, so this next video is my experiment into using the JVC 100 camera to film instead.

Here is the link to this video which shows the same marble run but filmed with a JVC 100:

http://vimeo.com/20250542

This video shows how the focus is perfect throughout, but the colours and depth of field are no way near as vibrant and impressive.

So to test the two properly, I have created third video which compares the two:

http://vimeo.com/20259292

As you can see, I haven't figured out the colour correction for the 5D, but still the overall focus of the JVC 100 is what impresses me most (plus colours can be edited in post-production) so I am going to film my final film with the JVC.

The next few slides are my original designs and the notes on how I will hopefully accomplish such a piece. As you can see these designs are pretty complex but fingers crossed I can pull them off or find a simpler way to do it!

Below are some close ups of these designs again so I hope you can read what it says but overall they're just instructions on what's what and how it will be affected. :)

That's it for this post but check back soon to see how things have progressed since this presentation.

Take care,

Joe.