Atrocity Exhibition: WE ARE SO DONE!

We have finished all the scenes and have done all the necessary post-production for the film. I am really pleased seeing everything comes together nicely!

Tom and I have a brilliant idea of having a mini exhibition for the animation at Hyde Park Book Club, LS6 cafe or any other exhibition space in LS6 area. Hopefully we could find a space to have an exhibition for our animation. After all, it is an art to be celebrated and incite discussion.

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary 30 April-6 May

Climax scene:

• War landscapes (Vietnam, cuba): 'new alphabet of sensation and violence'
• Black and white brutal contrast
• Ending: loops back to the beginning cloud scene

Crit 3:

• sound rupture for climax; audio visual assault, make B&W and colour image blinks slightly out of sync
• get the frames to be printed on 16mm film and played on film projector for exhibition? costly and needs to be outsourced! (http://www.videofilmsolutions.com/digital-intermediates--printing)

we've thought about a more lengthy, cheaper, but feasible alternative: Project film with a HQ projector, record it with film camera (Tom's got a film reel and he is thinking of buying a Bolex, around £50 on eBay), process the film.

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary 23-29 April

Doomsday machine:

• swift action sequence about chemicals, scientific procedures and vehicles assemblage
• transition from car crashes into WW3 conspiracy
• media: acrylic paint on film reel with digital editing
• found out that acrylic paint sets on the film surface
• The painted films are scanned using a negative scanner

learning points:

• visually communication through montage editing
• manipulate transition between frames (read a bit of analysis of Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera)
• criss crossing between shapes of the moving images.
• effective pacing: straightforward shots > quicker; more detailed shots > longer

Process: painting on film

sexual fetish: stroking pelvis / operating a machinery

setting the scene for car chase scene

setting up the act for a car chase

(race)car chase

Launch: jumpcut transition to Tom's moon-landing scene

Audio & Exhibition Plan

Tom has created the audio for crit 2, and it is well received by the class. Ben complimented the audio for giving coherence to the animation and suggested that we should really think of how we are going to exhibit the animation as well. We had a thought about setting up a CRT TV set which will play the animation on loop in a secluded room.

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary 16-22 April

Girl and Hills 2:

• Continuation of Tom's Girl and hills scene
• Transition from body and landscape into media saturation
• Introducing some TV aspect into the visual

Dealey Plaza (Theme: politicians and celebrity culture)

• Long panning shot main character probing on the image of Jackie O, famous female politicians and celebrities to investigate Dealey Plaza's motorcade where JFK is shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Crit 1 went well, we need to show audio for next crit. Ben recommended us to get a CRT TV which can play our animation for the end of year show.

Walter from LCOM has finally got back to us, he gave Tom the samples of music which we thought is not done up to the standard that we wanted. So, to avoid hassle, we decided to say no to him and make our own music.

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary Easter

My easter plan working from Jakarta:

• Download all assets before the flight
• Find more images of celebrities and research on their respective personal background, relevant newspaper headlines and diagrams for the foreground in the animation.
• Communicate long distance (shouldn't be a problem since we are doing each of the scenes separately, haven't had a plan but we sent each other recordings after we finished a scene.)

Tom and I have done a handful of animating while keeping on testing and gathering collage materials along the way. We had quite a setback as Tom's hard drive got stolen at a pub. Fortunately, we managed work at a faster pace and caught up with the progress over the last week of easter break.

Here are some shots of the scenes I did over easter:

Motorcade

An interpretation of the character's obsession on investigating the conspiracies surrounding the assassination of president JFK. 

monos and acrylic paint:

Playing with Photoshop's layer blending effects:

Pool

Transition from media saturation and car crashes to apocalyptic ending.

• Probing around cityscapes
• plasticity of image: obscuring boundaries between what is real and unreal

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary 19-25 March

Monoprints

This week I have compiled a looping animated texture with the abstract movement of mono printed textures. In mono print, the printed outcomes would have grains reminds me of the TV static. I could imagine the mono print aesthetic will work well with the overarching theme of media saturation.

Some samples of the prints:

stencil samples

animated textures

circle from scraping

wheels print from scraping

grains and scratches

pool water from scraping

Atrocity Exhibition: Production Diary 12-18 March

We did some experiment with the materials we have found so far before starting production. Some experimentations which I have tried this week include editing video montage and rotoscoping on found footages. Overall, I am not pleased with the outcome of the different experiments because I still could not find a way to connect these unrelated moving images to my interpretation of the book content.

Aside of looking for a better way to incorporate found footages, I am going to incorporate the film scratching techniques - which I have learnt from a direct-on-film animation workshop from my COP 3- for the texture library. Textures are based on the impression of driving a car; and conveys the sensation of speed. During the process, I accidentally melted the film reel by putting it on top of my radiator at home. Therefore, the film reel were stuck together and when pulled out, parts of the film are ripped and damaged. Thankfully the damage is not that big of a deal and I can still use parts of the film which are still in good condition after being pulled apart.

Film Textures

Film Textures

YCN Brief: Art Fund - Submission

Pitch summary

• social media video campaign with a dark comedic twist
• narrative takes inspiration from the humble daily struggle of drawing
• tagline: 'Just £5 with more felines to watch'
• Low-budget medium: ink, collage and paper cutouts
• Gibberish sounds enhance the attention-grabbing surreal aesthetic
• Postcard designs to be given out to university students during freshers week from individual frames of our cat illustrations.

Password to access video: feline

ArtFund: So Much Feline, So Little Time from Brenda Christie Muliawan on Vimeo.

Screenshot of our YCN submission

Strength:
Galuh and I are able to stay passionate throughout the process due to our approach to this brief is to work loosely based on themes proposed by ArtFund instead of being too fixated with the brief. We successfully took a simple concept, and achieved a unique and more polished aesthetic in the animation. I feel that this is the strongest collaboration piece I have done so far.

Weakness:
Advertising message could be more clearly presented: The parodic scene in the end is jarring.

Atrocity Exhibition: Artbook Illustrations

Tom and I set ourselves to do 5-pages illustrations each for the screen-printed zines. Below is our rationale:

• to explore key themes
• to set the style - consider composition of the illustrations and experimenting with different media for the animation
• to collect collage materials - scans of old postcards, magazines and collectibles from Tom's dad and archiving free copyright images from the internet

My illustrations:

Landscape, posture and geometry

(double page) political figure as sex icon

Landscape, car and sexual psychopathology

advertising billboard and saigon execution

Screenprinted outcome:

Atrocity Exhibition: Key Themes for Music

We hasn't set a style for the animation yet as we just started making the zine illustrations. However, we've got our rough idea for the music which will be a bed of industrial ambient music to with overlap of sound from newsreels, documentaries and instructional videos we found from archive.org within the themes of:

• 1960s celebrity culture and politicians 
• sexual fetish
• machines
• landscapes
• auto-disasters
• war
• space race 

Tom has kept in touch with Walter from LCOM whom we met last Monday. He said he is keen to compose our music because he enjoyed making experimental tracks. We agreed to send Walter some samples of the sound from footages we have been collating to make his work easier.

YCN Brief: Art Fund - Pre Production

Initially, I took the Muybridge's cat walking sequence as a placeholder to test out the flashing frame animation. It came across my mind that to make the animating process more efficient for us, we can use the walking sequence and render them as image sequence so that it can be rotoscoped.

Muybridge cat animation test:

Our main focus is to create different cat illustrations based on 6 iconic art movements:

1. renaissance

2. impressionist

3. cubism

4. constructivism

5. surrealism

6. pop art

We drew straws based on these list, and I've got 2, 3 and 6.

My cat illustrations:

impressionist cat

picasso (cubism) cat

keith harring (pop art) cat

YCN Brief: Art Fund - Idea Generation

I asked Galuh to jump on board with me again in this project because we get things done swiftly. The project will be a quick one as I need to allocate time on my short film project. Below are some visual brainstorming I did during the idea generation process. My main consideration is the exploring concept of leisure and finding inspiration through common activities in museums and galleries.


First concept:

taking shelter in galleries on rainy days (weak!)

Second concept development:

Reactions when looking at pantings

Looking at interpretation of objects in different art movements and painting styles

create a witty poem about gallery experience that runs sequentially in 6 frames series of A4 collage

drawing objects

Galuh liked my doodle of the people doing figure drawing of cats for a shallow reason that we have been sending cat videos to one another recently. I immediately agreed because the idea is simple, humble and people are addicted to watching cats videos, therefore attention grabbing! We stitched up the other doodle pages into a logical narrative sequence.

Animation title: So Much Feline, So Little Time

The narrative follows a guy who went to an art gallery to draw cats. He came in during the opening hours to study the wide array of cat paintings the gallery has from different art movements. He got engrossed observing them that the paintings of cats starts to walk through the historical timeline of visual art. The sequence is interrupted by the security guard who told him that the museum is about to close. He walked out of the gallery obsessed, and craving for more. The final shot advertises that he can sees more feline for a whole year long with just £5 showing a page of his sketchbook with badly-drawn cats.