Research
The goal of Assignment 2 for the Visual Principle class was to learn the idea of movement and crafting paper mechanisms. We are asked to work as a team for the second time after the Mask Up assignment. Dawson and I were the duos for this project who I felt comfortable with because have taken Principle classes together since last semester. We completed Collab-O Miro Board for the ice breaker and were able to get to know each other better.
Our class went to Thompson Library to explore printed compositions and pull-tabs that had some movements and paper mechanisms. I was surprised by the techniques each medium had and started looking carefully at mechanisms for future reference.
Exercise
The exercise for this project was crafting paper mechanisms. We were basically asked to make a mini-pull tab following the instructor’s instructions. I drew a football in the pull tab, so whenever I pull the tab, the football drawing would come out. It was an easy exercise process for me to follow and helped me understand the paper mechanisms.
Another exercise we did was visualizing music by trying to sketch the sound and emotions. The instructor played a few instrumental music, and we used our imaginations to draw out what we hear and feel. I felt kind of awkward while sketching, but this exercise helped me a lot when my partner and I were choosing the music later.
Iterations
Then we started selecting music samples to prototype. The music should only contain instrumental, no lyrics or words, so we added the favorite instrumental music to a Youtube playlist where we can share and listen to each other’s music. I added music that had at least two different parts so my partner could craft based on the first part and I could craft based on the second part. We spent a good amount of days selecting one music believed it was the most important part of the process because the music would decide the paper mechanism, theme, etc. We came up with the final two songs, “Fly O” by Coldplay and “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5. Choosing one song between these two was the part my partner and I struggled with. After discussing with the instructor and careful consideration, we decided the instrumental to be “Fly O” because it had more clear feelings, tone, and emotions. It also had ascending and descending parts in the music, and we thought we could make interesting outcomes from ascension and descension.
I focused on “ascension” while he focused on “descension” to start thinking about possible outcomes based on the word itself. To be honest, it was quite challenging for me to come up with ideas with that word because we decided the primary technique to be pull tabs. The reason for choosing the pull tabs technique was we knew more about pull tabs than other techniques, such as stop-motion since the exercise and printed compositions we looked at in the library were pull tabs. However, we were unable to come up with suitable ideas for crafting, so we both confessed our struggle and decided to change the technique to be “stop-motion.”
Various ideas came to my mind since we changed the technique we were going to use. I could simply use materials and make them look ascending with stop motion animations. I first tested out a physical handmade stop motion out of Bristol paper. The first stop motion I made included a bird flying from a tree to the sky since the music selected has the word ‘fly’ in the title.
It was not a good outcome but came out as I expected; I just wanted to see how it would look and try different phone applications for stop motion animations. The next stop motion I tried to proceed on my Ipad. The digital process was way much more comfortable and less time-consuming than handcrafting.
Because the song sounded like nature with whistle and bird sounds, I chose my theme as a life of a flower. Ascension is shown as the growth of the plant, and conversion from 3D to 2D is also one of the settings I set. I believed setting the composition as a plant growth not only accords to the music theme but also displays a sense of ascension. I set my composition as navy blue on sky blue while his craft is sky blue on navy blue to display the correlation between our works.
Production
To begin the crafting, all I needed was glue, scissors, blue scale paper, yellow paper, and a pencil. I overlapped the blue scale paper in order from light to dark scale with glue. Then I tore off the middle part of the paper and took a picture: I repeated this process until seeing almost a circle of navy blue paper. I took pictures from the top of the composition. The next step was making a paper plant. When lowering the camera angle to take pictures, I made the plant longer by sticking additional paper on the bottom of it. Then when pictures get to the front view of the composition from the top, it gets converted from 3D to 2D.
I drew out the scenes (2D and 3D and made them look almost the same scene.
The process gets easier from this step. I simply needed to make the plant get bigger. I drew and cut out different sizes of 21 plants and took pictures of each. I made it a 5-seconds video out of 64 images.
