Draft 1
Process
I started learning Adobe After Effects from scratch for the Methods of Iterating Project, focusing on motion graphics. It’s a bit tricky, with a learning curve that felt overwhelming at first, even after I got comfortable with the interface. Unlike Photoshop or Illustrator, After Effects needs a deeper understanding of animation principles and video editing, including considering basic physics for specific motions. Overall, motion graphics is a dynamic tool, showing real-life movements and tricky physics that are tough to explain with words or still images.
Unexpected Insights
I used to work mainly with still images and illustrations, loving how a single frame could tell a story at your own pace. But in motion graphics, it’s like dealing with moving pictures, where you follow the flow and match the speed of the piece. Here, artists guide where people look and illustrate complex ideas visually in a short time. What surprised me in my first week of motion graphics was that, while I thought I’d draw every scene, I realized you can tell a longer story in a very short time, which I find exciting. With motion graphics, you can make people look where you want and control the feelings you want to convey.
Proposal
When we make regular pictures, we focus on two-dimensional things like shapes and colors. Motion graphics build on this by adding time, needing skills in motion expression. To make things more interesting, I plan to use a still image, like a photograph, and add motion to some parts or to the whole image. I have some ideas like adding a new dimension, applying some odd phsics to it and hacking the physics of motion.
Draft 2
In Martin Lister’s essay, “The digital image in photographic culture: algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation,” the author contends that the networked age and technological progress reshape images, allowing them to exist in a state of both formation and formlessness, finiteness and infiniteness, rationality, and irrationality. Lister underscores the significance of an algorithmic image functioning in the realm of intensity, departing from conventional representation by deriving meaning from self-replicating images. These images embrace a logic of instant multiplicity, capable of simultaneous existence across the network.
In alignment with the essay’s exploration of the network’s impact on images, my project introduces motion to typically static elements. This choice reflects the essay’s emphasis on images being both formed and formless, and the motion graphics disrupt traditional static representation, echoing the concept that an image can embody both rationality and irrationality.
The essay’s examination of the digital image as a paradoxical object, encapsulating both linear representational logic and the recursivity of algorithms, serves as a foundation for my project. Through the incorporation of motion graphics, I aim to delve into the “paradoxical nature of digital images” as outlined in the essay. Motion graphics, in essence, extend beyond mere graphic content, requiring thoughtful consideration of spatial and temporal elements. The inclusion of logic, transformation, transition, and soundtrack becomes crucial in crafting a compelling visual narrative, enriching the viewer’s experience and deepening the project’s exploration of algorithmic imagination.
Draft 3
The inclusion of logic, transformation, transition, and soundtrack becomes crucial in crafting a compelling visual narrative.