The Hand that Walks the Earth Retrospect

So last semester as many of you may or may not already know, I did a clay animated film called "The Hand that Walks the Earth"( as seen above) Part of the goal of this film was for it to show an emotion thought out the film as a theme. I chose a creepy-is theme with some weird and creepy characters.The theme behind the film was a skeletal hand rising from the grave and wandering the the graveyard until it finds a grey-ish blob. The blob then goes on to the hand and it become it's zombie skin(sort of reminicent of the Venom symbiote from Spider-man)

Conceptually, I did like my idea. It was different and lots of time was put into it was as a whole, whether it was set design or character creation, lots of time and effort was put into it. There was a few technical difficulties through-out the projest though. A big technical difficulty was that originally, I had wanted to have the film set in the middle of a rain storm, however since trying to use the same rain effect on over 100 pictures, it proved to be too much for the computer. So after switching computers several times trying to use the same effect, eventually I settled for the black fog effect. The creepy mood wasn't conveyed by just by just the characters alone. I think the mood was successfully conveyed well with the help of the effects and the background music backing up the accual animation. Other small difficulties I experienced during the animation was one of my characters( green eye-snake *cough*) was starting to droop. It was constantly falling over. The only reason I knew where to put it back was because I was made of plasticine. Plasticine does contain patrolium oil based products in it leaving the sheet of constuction paper marked with a few oil stains. Anyway, I digress. Enjoy the show. Feel free to comment on it. Also, message me if anyone saw Supernatural last night.

Artistic Inspiration....

I have a few inspirations that spark ideas for artwork or for stories. A few big inspirations of mine are music (or tv, movies, books) people and from my dreams.

It's probably the same with a lot of people but I don't always get good iedas by thinking really hard about it. There have been many instances if I just listen to music, my mind will wander. Sometimes I think of tv shows or movies or something then right out of the blue, I get an idea. It's effective because I'm not stressing myself out trying to come up with an idea..it just happens on it's own.

People can also give me ideas. When I have conversations with my friends sometimes it's something that one of my friends had that would make me think of an idea. The odd thing is, sometimes the idea has nothing to do with the conversation that sparked. I could be something totally random or just unrelated to the topic of the conversation. This method is a little touch and go because this method doesn't always work.

Lastly, my dreams do give me some ideas. If I'm planing to take ideas from my dreams the chances are I'm looking for kind of a weird-ish feel to whatever I'm trying to create. Lots of weird dreams I've had are that time I dreampt that I was mugged by a cow, or the time I took a leap of faith off of a waterfall. Now depending on what you plan to do with your dream and what kind of medium you're using(ie paint, pastel ect) your dream piece may not come out the way you want it to, especially if you're wanting to paint it and you can't paint. That is probably a big draw-back this this method is that if you're choosing a complicated dream sequence, it's just going to make it harder for you to execute your piece of work.

Anyway, these are some of the ways I come up with ideas for my art work. Explaining some of my process may or may not help some of the people who take the time to read my blog entries, if so give it a try..your results may vary..... :)

Sprockets Film Fest

So yesterday, almost all of the CyberARTS students went to the Sprockets Film fest. It's a film festival that featured several short films, some by film school graduates others by film students in their 3rd or 4th year of school as well as a feature length french film called "U"

Now, knowing my bad memory, I had a feeling I would forget some of the films featured at the film festival, however the ones I do remember were the animated films "Animal" and "The Art of Drowning","On the Bus","Forget Myself","The Freshwater Plague" and "Toxic Ingedients". Now some of these films I didn't like such as Toxic Ingerdients. It was essentually a comentary on the toxic ingredients in makeup that could cause many health issues down the line. It's not that I didn't understand it..I just didn't like it much. Two films that I liked for different reasons were The Art of Drowing and Animal amoung others. I liked Animal because even though there is no speech, I liked it because there was a small organism that was eaten at least twice and everytime the preditor dies. At the end of the film, a frog eats the organism but dies almost immediatly after eating it. Soon after, a flower grows out of the frog and re-creates the same organism. This could probably be a represention of the food cycle. With the flower growing out of the frog could mean there is life where there is death. Another film I liked was The Art of Drowning. I liked this film not just because of its depressing nature and overtones(assuming that makes sense) but I did like the idea behind it and the art style. The plot of the film in a nutshell is a man narriating his final thoughts as he is drowning as well as the nature of the whole "life flashing before his eyes" thing that happens just before you die. It was dark but it was a good film.

There was also a french movie call "U". It was about a unicorn named U that appears to a rabbit princess named Mona(I could be wrong about her name) when she was young. Years later Mona falls in love with a guitar-playing cat from the traveling family, the Yeah Yeahs(I forget his name :P) while U falls in love with Lizare who is in the same family as the cat. By the end of the film, The Cat and Mona plan to get married while U and Lizare tell eachother that they love each other. Now I'll admit that I'm bias toward this film because it's in french and that is something I can't overlook, however, the film did have exellent character development and the film did have more than one character focal point as it turned it's attention to other characters besides Mona. Now, watching this film, there are differences between North American style cartoons and Cartoons from other countries like U. In France, it is very likely that there standerds for what appropriate for young children are different than North America. Even though it is definately out of the norm compared to other childrens shows in North America, I can't imagin a network like Treehouse or YTV editing or censoring it because of a descriptive kiss compared anime that shows lots of blood.