Here it is

enjoy.

Final Thoughts

For this project I wanted to explore symbols and the meanings that we attach to them based on their environment. My project starts out slow. It allows the viewer to fully comprehend and contemplate the images. As it progresses, the pace quickens and the animation becomes more dissonant. This forces the viewer to make quicker judgments and form their ideas on an ever increasing visual environment. In this way, I feel that my project comments on contemporary life without being too direct.

Objective

At its core, this project is an exploration of pictograms, icons, their implied meaning, and how the meaning can be changed based on semiotic relationships and environment. There is a surreal element in my work where the icons change seemingly from one scene to another with no overall general theme. This is intentional, because I want the viewer to develop their own interpretation and find their own semiotic relationships between the scenes.
Topics of love, greed, hate, and consumerism are all hinted at, but not necessarily overtly displayed. Symbolism can be found in a lot of the scenes, but it is not essential.
I only want sound effects, no music, for my accompanying audio tracks. I think this will help keep the focus on the images instead of the music. Plus, I think that if I had background music it might look too much like a cartoon montage.
Visually, I want everything except the icons to be rough and loose with a strong analogue feel.
The very last composition is the iconic fake gun shot. This is an existential dissertation of sorts that plays with concept of using loaded imagery without any specific intent. kind of.

Story board

Final Project Thoughts

Subtlety and surrealism are the keys for this project. Basically, I want to create a weird, surreal picture of a strange world doing even stranger things. My imagery is going to be analogously derived. This project is going to be a direct allusion to our society in a hopefully non obvious and non angsty way. Now I need to make a storyboard, and figure out all of my aesthetic decisions.

10.24.07 Project

This project was really helpful for me because it refined my direction for the class and gave me a lot of interesting are to conduct some further research.
I based my idea for this project the essay "Body ritual among the Nacirema." This essasy describes american traditions of hygene from a purely anthropolicical viewpoint. It focouses on magic and a general sense of absurdity that surrounds a lot of our rituals of our body.
I chose to work in more a direction that is more consumer oriented for this project. Secondly, I was wanting to work on transition points between compositions, because I feel that I am weak in that aspect.
This project seeks to point out how many of the promiment activities of our culture can be reduced to symbols, and when the become these symbols there meaning is condensed and instantly clear. I rendered these symbols with the word "magic" repeated continously. On each symbol is also a label that simply states "i believe in magic"

This project made me realize that I am really interested in the customs, rituals, and symbols that surround us, how they are formed, and what they say about us a society. In fact, I feel that all of my projects this far can fit under this concept.

So Ive been absent, but in case if you missed it........

Text Project (Now With Video)

I chose to use text from poet/musician/visual artist adam drucker. Basically, he writes these strange, stream of consciousnesses poems that use a lot of really abstract metaphors. A lot of his subject matter is about how weird our society is, and while his work tends to portray the negative aspects of our society, he also manages to touch on some nice things too.

It too me a while to get a handle of the path text tool, but i got it figured out. Mostly, I just really tried to interpret his text with my text and emphasize line and phrases that I thought were important.