Illustration Update Part 2

I have completed my 'Art' animations and decided to keep to my idea of black and white with hints of colour. I decided to use rainbow colours following her along the walls next to her which built up and up until the final scene where other imaginative things happen such as plants growing and flowers appearing etc.

Illustration Update

I have been spending most of the time since the last post working on my illustrations. I have completed all of the drawings for the 'Everyday' scenes and have now started work on the 'Art' scenes. I have begun to think about changing my initial idea to have full colour in my 'Art' scene and instead, I might use a mixture of Black and White with hints of colour as I feel the animation looks more effective in black and white but the surreal parts could be done in colour.
Some stills from my work:

Technique

I have begun to draw my frames for my animation and have followed this process:

-I filmed some video footage on my camera of all of the needed scenes

-Using a converting software called 'Pazera free MOV to AVI converter' and 'Virtual Dub' I changed the video from footage to a sequence of still images

-I load the images into photoshop and using a wacom tablet, I've traced one copy of each 5 backgrounds then I paste each new image with character movement on top and rub out the lines of the background and re-draw the character onto the background and repeat for each image.

I've found it has been a lengthy process so far but it has still been effective because I am getting results which I had hoped for.

The Backgrounds:

Search for Locations

I have taken a few photos of locations which I will use in my animation, I have used local streets which will all look similar for continuity throughout the animation and have lots of potential walls and surfaces to animate on for the surreal scenes.

Pablo Picasso

While I was researching Michel de Certeau's work on everyday life, I came across a quote from Pablo Picasso which I felt summed up the message of my work well. It was:'Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life'
I have decided to place this quote at the beginning of my work with 2 buttons underneath saying 'dust' and 'art' and the dust button will lead the viewer to the everyday clip and the art button will lead the viewer to the dream like clip. I thought this would be the most logical and neat way to lay out my work instead of just letting it play through twice with no explanation. Instead it now gives the viewer a quote to think about and once they watch the two videos it will help to suggest what Picasso and de Certeau were trying to say about the everyday.

Visualising Data

I looked at various examples of how people have visualised data in creative ways. I picked out some which I thought were the most effective and inspiring and used them to influence my own attempt at visualising a statistic.

 

Some of the examples I came across reminded me of Radiohead's music video for 'House of Cards'. On a website exploring the making of the video it says:

'No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.'
(http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/#the-making-of)

I found the technique fascinating and I really like the look and style of the results. Even though I am unable to re-create the actual technique, I can use the style the technique produced to help influence my own examples of visualising data.

I looked for random but interesting statistics online and chose to represent 'The typical person breathes 370,000 cubic metres of air in their lifetime'

For this first statistic I decided to keep it quite simple by using solid shapes and colours to represent the data. I chose a cube to represent the cubic metres and the colour blue to represent air. I also aimed to space them out in a random sort of style to represent the nature of air as a gas rather than as a lump of something solid.