Sketch Ideas

These won't make sense, im just making bullet point ideas to re-jog my memory.

• T-rex wacom glove
• Chicken crimes
• Balloon Face
• Disney Deforestation
• Angry Short Batman
• Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
• Thirsty - Elephant
• Crunchy - Squirrel
• Mr Milligan - Hedgehog
• Cowboy Bully
• News
• Gibberish Talk
• Information Swapping
• Multi-View
• Static TV Show
• University petting zoo
• Pig-pen
• Inanimate War

Structure:

1. Disney Deforestation
2. Static TV Show
3. T-rex wacom glove
4. Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
5. University petting zoo - (Thirsty, Crunchy, Mr Milligan)

1. Cowboy Bully
2. Chicken crimes
3. Balloon Face

1. Pig-pen
2. News
3. Gibberish Talk
4. Information Swapping
5. Multi-View
6. Inanimate War

Restructure:

1. Disney Deforestation
2. Static TV Show
3. T-rex wacom glove
4. Chicken crimes
5. Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
6. University petting zoo - (Thirsty, Crunchy, Mr Milligan)

1. Cowboy Bully
2. Balloon Face

1. Pig-pen
2. News
3. Gibberish Talk
4. Information Swapping
5. Multi-View
6. Inanimate War

Miscommunication and Meaninglessness

All information has to go through a medium. That could be a number of things, from the very obvious like sound travels through air in waves or relative high density to the ambient air around it. To information being coded into a human cypher for emotions and experience, much like what you are looking at now. The written word in all its forms is a substitute for something else humans can experience. Like love, pain, caring or even just the colour blue. The medium of language is a lot more complex a medium then something like sound. Its a hybrid medium, it will go through a lot of physical mediums as well as conceptual ones.


Experience > Thought > Movement > Sound > Electrical Conversion > Interpretation > Reaction.


This on a very basic level is communication using voice from one person to another.

Experience; drawing upon things that have happened in the past, how to communicate as well as how not to, this makes more sense when you have things you should not say in context.

Thought: Converting this into words that best suit what you are trying to say and then converting that into muscle movement such as the jaw, vocal cords and diaphragm.

Movement: Literally the movement of those muscles to push air past the vocal cords to create vibrations of low and high pressure that are then tweaked by the mouth and jaw.

Sound: The finished product of the person sending the speech. Sound passing out the mouth, nose and body towards the person it is spoken to.

Electrical Conversion: Sound converted into electrical signals that are then interpreted by the brain.

Interpretation: The brain interprets this information and lays it upon experiences of language and life to understand what the other is saying.

Reaction: The cycle continues.


Its quite a complex way to communicate and yet we can even do it using written words as well as sounds, which are even abstracted from the spoken noises.

(Note to self: Get to the point.)

Mosaic Inspiration

One of my friends showed me this site and it got me thinking about how video is displayed to an audience. the traditional manner is similar but not the same as how we experience time, one event after the other in a constant flow. Some people such as Quentin Tarantino have experimented with this by creating pockets of narrative and sewing them together in a non linear fashion.

This site takes any youtube or vimeo video and streams it in a number of different ways. The way displayed below is mosaic, it divides the video into about three second clips and places them into a grid in the window randomly. Once the grid is filled it divides each three second window into a further four windows. The audio of the clip is streamed as a single ongoing track over the top.

This adds something else to the animation, it takes away from the narrative where you cannot see what is happening at that point in time and dulls any audio cues to the visual but you can view the entire video as a whole in three second clips.

Music by - Cilla Jane                                                                                                               Animaion by - Adam Philips

Video Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiWnWtl8070&feature=channel_video_title

Mosaic Video Link

http://yooouuutuuube.com/m/?yt=wiWnWtl8070

Ideas so Far?

My ideas can be split into three different types on animation.

Abstracted - Such as changing information around and feeding them to different senses. The input sound to output colour idea for instance. Maybe as a live interactive installation. This will highlight how much of the information that we absorb is actually meaningless without human interpretation weather it be conscious or unconscious. In reality this information is as meaningless as the next without a couscous brain to interpret it. Hence the title 'An Animation About Nothing'.

Sketch - Shorter sketches making up roughly a total of three minutes of animation. Breaking the fourth wall by being aware of its medium, on screen viewing and its process of creation. Maybe repeated scenes but with edit cuts so the scene has different meanings too? A script will have to be written up to include all of the ideas i have gone over in this blog which may be difficult but i would like its underlining message to be: ceci n'est pas une pipe, or rarther; ceci n'est pas une animation.. ..de rien.

(Note to self: Remember the third idea before i forget it completely - Something to do with editing scenes from an animation that makes sense and an easy to follow narrative to something else.. not unlike Tarinitino come to think of it)

Audio Visual Information Swapping

With the idea of information interpretation in mind, and the idea of different senses that interpret infomation within different mediums, what would it be like to swap over this information but still have it relative to the visual spectrum or the human audio bandwidth. I get the feeling i may just end up with static and high pitched screeching.

Although if i make if a full screen visualisation to an audio track it may not be so harsh on the senses. All i would have to do is make it a little more relitive and have a single input (such as sound) into a single output (such as colour). Such as this;

(100 Hz = 380 nm) (1,000 Hz = 740 nm) or vice versa. Then simplified into colours within flash. 


(After making this table based on the parameters of human hearing and visible light, i think it may be better to tone down the sound input to just something like the scale of an 88 key piano. The human hearing is a lot broader then the human eye in this sense.) 


EDIT - I've made the scale of the audio input to the rough scale of the human voice (male and female) this is a smaller scale then a piano (4kHz~ - 25Hz~) and of course the human adult ear (20kHz~ - 20Hz~) but should be adequate for the user.

It may even be possible to have a live feed input using a mic into a flash file with a bit of actionscript to make the audio input variable to something like a colour on screen. It may be like a synaesthesia simulator.


Im sure it would be possible to mix in a visual to audio converter as long as you changed the visual to something like a black and white image, but even then you would only be able to take a horizontal strip of that image to convert into audio, and when idol, if the screen is picking up a static/constant amount of light it would just emit the same frequency noise and would most likely be irritating. The audio to visual colour idea i much more peaceful.

Information Editing

We are beings that really think in movement, we always live in anticipation of what the very near future holds. We even read words in that way, i bet you already know most of these words before you even have to read through the whole thing, that way you can make a prediction and move onto the next.

We weave narrative into pretty much everything.

Information editing we come across this all the time, most of the time we are unaware of it because it comes within a medium we can already read and, if we are unable to read it, it will usually have some relevance or link to the real life experience of it. (This is why language and the written word is so difficult to learn).

For instance; Film editing from shot to shot in a conversation scene.


(note to self: finish this..)