Dynamic Page

Visuals

Click the GIF to launch the video with music included!

GIF of the animation

 

Project Statement

In this partner project, the goal was to conceptualize and visualize “movement” by collaborating with one another and creating two separate but connected compositions and their themes. With my theme of descent/descension, I wanted to create downward movement through scale. Finding ways to do that was easy of course, but then it came down to what was descending is where I explored the most. Examining what descent is as a concept, I found many different ways to visualize it and ended up landing on the one idea that was the most communicative and dynamic in its demonstration of the principle of movement. The song we chose has a very audible sense of movement. The piano crescendos and repeats itself over and over throughout the song but it’s a very somber melody. It’s very light as well, which is where a monochrome blue color palette lends to my animation. The lighter blue color contrasts heavily with the dark background, emphasizing its movement on the page.

 

Process

You can view a detailed project process at Dynamic Page: Process as well as my partner’s animation which you can find in Brian’s Portfolio!

 

Reflection

This is definitely an instance where I know I could’ve explored much further with what I was doing. As happy as I am with the outcome given that I’ve never done stop motion before and I had to cut most of the pieces by hand, I am very pleased with how everything looks. The resolution could’ve been better and I’m definitely gonna try and find a better way to move the file around without Google Photos which compressed it a fair bit. The theme I was using was very broad and could’ve been explored in a lot of different ways which was one of my main issues. In the beginning, I stayed tunnel-visioned on representation and many iterations dealt with real-world physics and weight being displayed in the animations. The definition is effectively “downward movement” and I spent a to of time representing that in a very literal way which didn’t help with my ideas. To combat this, I forced myself to think more abstractly about the word, refusing to give it anyone true meaning, and rather examined it from multiple definitions and then worked from there. In the end, I think the animation itself turned out very well and you can see how it’s a hand-drawn animation but the texture and reflective quality of the paper grounds it in reality. It’s dynamic and for my first time doing stop motion, it turned out well!