Flip Book?

I converted my video into stills, resized each one and placed them on A4 using In-design. When I printed them off I was surprised to see that when the stills line up against one another, their repetitiveness, (yet slight difference in each one) presented an unexpected quality. And so i documented this: 

 It makes her almost ghost-like or creepy and even though the images still hold the aesthetically pleasing lines created by the dancer.. they hold the dark under-tones that dance holds in itself as a harsh discipline. 

I didn’t want to ditch my Flip-book idea of moving traced still straight away and so i traced each still, then layered them up. The result was quite interesting:

 

I played around with layering them. I moved them about quite a bit:

 

 I researched artists interested in movement and looked at ‘Eadweard Muybridge’ whos work holds similar trends to mine and inspired me to embrace the step I stumbled across and not to further the process into a flipbook. Here is an example of his work:

They sort of hold the notions of hard work and discipline.. the traced ruler lines turning into the dancer’s Bar, and the sketchy pencil marks run parallel with the expression- ‘Going back to the drawing board.’ expressing years of hard work; However i’m not sure these Hand drawn pencil traces hold the elegance of dance or the accomplished picture perfect lines. Taking a step back and going back to the stills and keeping the imagery with the writing duplicated several times on paper expresses what dancers are told over and over by their superiors: ‘If some one were to take a picture every second whilst you move, each picture must create a line and a story’. The stills re-itterate this as well as have dark undertones. This is the story i want to tell. Maybe now i want to make a series of posters. Each one individual and different to the next by selecting different stills. I will have to experiment with what printing technique I want to use.

Marketing Role

Here is a screen dump of the Facebook Page:

The QR code idea got ‘vetoed’.

This is the blurb to advertise the event I wrote up the other day:

‘Ba Art and Design Interdisciplinary invites you to come down to The Tetley and take a look at our hand-crafted individual works displayed and for sale on our very own stall in the midst of many other book makers, artists and designers from a range of different backgrounds. A huge variety of innovative artistic designs and ideas will be at your finger tips, as well as an affordable opportunity to purchase the objects and support the artists. It is an exciting and buzzing event, attracting global entries’

Here is the final poster:

The poster turned out looking great. I just wanted equal in-put, and found it very difficult working with another person.

My role for our stall in The International Artists Book fair: Marketing and Promotion

Tom and I are making a poster to promote our stall at the book fair this year. We want it to be bold, eye catching but simple. Upon our first meeting we came up with this rough sketch: 

 

The letters spelling book are going to be bold and black. The ‘B’, the ‘O’ and the ‘O’ are going to hold the important info and the K we are going to make into a sideways turned book. To make the poster up to date and modern we agrred on including a QR code that carries a link to the main website for the Book Fair. 

 

This is the QR code: 

Now we are going to work with Indesign (a programme i have recently learned how to use) to create a professional looking poster.

Example of dancing Flipbook:

I want mine to look a lot more sophisticated and maybe more simplistically stylised?

Personal Professional Practise 2

For the book fair part of this brief, I am very interested in making a Flipbook. Flipbooks have sparked my imagination from a young age and are fun interactive objects that come to life. Most people are very fond because of the familiarity we have with them from our childhoods. My aim is to make a more beautiful, sophisticated version. An ‘adult’ one so to speak. I want to print off the frames from my dance videos.. trace them, resize them and make them into a beautiful movement capturing paper ‘video’s’. I have not used my drawing skills since I started at LCA and see this as a great opportunity to include it and experiment with illustration.

Potentially looking something like this by this unknown artist?

Responsive Critial Evaluation

This is the first purely digital project I have ever done, and even if frustrating at times (because of programmes crashing/ loss of work/ the slow pace of learning a new programme) I really enjoyed working with film. Taking on the role of a sort of ‘director’ meant I could use my people skills and communicate what I was imagining more freely. This resulted in a primarily fast paced creation, from my imagination straight into a visual outcome that I found very effective, exciting and fun. Working with dancers was a big step for me as dance has been a sore spot for many years because injury and body shape hindered my own future within the discipline, however I found being on the choreography/ film director side of things built my confidence in way I would never have expected!

I am happy with the end result of this project however I feel it lacks in conceptual depth. What you see is what you get so to speak. I want to further my research towards movement through space, looking at choreographers and the symbolism behind their work. I know that I lack the ability to sift through texts and read theoretical research because I find reading so difficult. I know I need to ‘step up my game’ in this area of my practise.

I look forward to using choreography in my future work but combining it with a fine art practise. I love problem solving, perception, movement and repetitive mark making and so I want to bring through elements of this piece through to my future work. This project was hugely beneficial to me as it served as a learning tool of both Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I discovered a role within the art world I would never have even dreamed I would enjoy so much. It has inspired me for my future projects and has also given me a sense of direction. I can now work on refining my practise and research heavily around a few areas instead of skimming the surface of many like I did in previous projects!

Final video:

It comes across quite blurry online for some reason and also cuts off the end? I asked April the following questions:

Question 1: Where does the main focus of pressure originate from in your need to succeed as a dancer? Elaborate on this.

Question 2: A rather harsh way to describe a dancer’s career is by it having a short shelf life- meaning dancers will not perform for the most part of their life. Love for dance obviously plays a huge factor in all of this but the very foreseeable end could be a huge pressure. Does this effect your motivation to dance? Elaborate on this.

Question 3: It is a well-known fact that dancer’s have a lot of pressure to have the perfect bodily form. Give a few examples of when and how this has personally affected you

I then asked her to respond through her movement. Then at a later date I recorded her answers then edited the recording so it tied in with her movement.

Here is a link to my final edited video:

Choreography

I wanted to have a go at choreography. Some parts are improvised others I choreographed. I didn’t edit this at all because I didn’t want to use both dancers in my ‘final piece’.

Here is a link to the a snipped from the video:

Inspiration for choreography: Wayne Mcgregor

Editing my videos

Its been a long process where I have learned the ins and outs of Premiere Pro. A lot of things went wrong but I learnt so much from it and now feel very confident with the programme. Here is a link to a snippet of the initial video I was working with where I thought I wanted to include the two camera angles. How ever I reverted back to one camera angle because I thought the close ups were too confrontational!