Project 3: Audio

This is Project 3, in which we added audio to the animation of Project 2. There isn't much audio, and most of it is different growling and roaring because, well, it's a dragon. The gyrados roar and the jingling at the end are from the internet, and the omnomnom voice is the recording I kept in. The rest are files included in Mixcraft 6, which is what I used to do the audio. There is still more that could be added, I think...

This is in Medium quality, because the high quality was taking muuuuuuuch longer to upload.

Project 2: Diptych Animation

For project 2 we had to take our diptych images and animate them in photoshop. My side of the diptych is shaped like a dragon, so I have it nomnom the words and then fly up and then the image fades into lizzy's businessman side. Her side changes into mine, so it'll come full circle.

This took quite a long time because I rotated parts of the image often and there is a lot of work and layering involved when you want to rotate things doing animation like this in photoshop. It is long and tedious and did not really work well with my image, but I'm sure it is fine in other situations.

The part I'm really happy with how it turned out is the portion that the dragon eats the word "dream!" It looks just as I planned and it makes me laugh.

Reading 1: Walter Benjamin

In the beginning of the paper it was stated that in regards to mechanically reproduced works "the quality of its presence is always depreciated." then it goes into the importance of authenticity to a piece of art and how for natural objects such a thing is not brought into question. What I ask is do you notice yourself or other people tending to belittle art that is mechanically produced rather than manually, even when it takes just as much time to produce? If so, do you see this view changing and at some point in the future such work as film and digital media will be automatically lotted into art with mediums like painting or sculpture?

In section V it touches on art works that the public has limited access to or is in a fixed place. Easily reproduced or transported works can be exhibited in more accessible places and get much more exposure, but don’t they lose the stronger sense of atmosphere? How important is it for art to have a special setting that it is presented in? On this note, does mechanically produced art have less of the mentioned “aura” that a manually produced work have when it does not have a fixed or preffered setting? Compare maybe a theatre that prepares your for the show or movie prior to the showing as opposed to a dvd viewed at home or seeing a sculpture in a cathedral as opposed to a reproduction. 

Sorry that the questions are long and actually several questions rolled together. The critical ones are "Do people tend to belittle mechanically produced art?" and "How important is it to art for it to have a special setting to be presented in?" 

Project One: Montage Diptych, final choices

Artist Statement: These are the images that Lizzy and I chose for the Montage Diptych project, themed with Reality vs. Fantasy. For the theme and the comparison nature of the diptych, we have a "reality" side of adult, business life and a "fantasy" side of imaginative childhood. We found images of everday scenes and objects; responsible, businessy adult stuff; and some fun, childish fantasy things mostly involving games, toys, pop culture and the like. 

To show the differences, we arranged the pictures into different silhouettes for each side: a guy with a briefcase for the Reality side and a dragon on the Fantasy side.  The adult business related images were to be more prominent on the reality side and the fantastical images on the fantasy side. This seperation is kind of why Liz and I both did our own versions of both sides and chose one of each. 

We also had a word theme for the text requirement, that word being "DREAM." on the adult side, it's the American Dream of having a steady career, house and family and on the child side it is the dreaming up Fun with your imagination.

Project One: Montage Diptych

So y'all, the theme for our first project was Reality and Fantasy, yea? Me'n'Lizzy brainstormed some ideas about the imagination of kids and childhood and all that good stuff and how it compares to boring ol' reality. We ended up going with the idea of comparing businessy adult life with fantastical child life, and that led into the images we chose. But, since this is not my actual artist statement, I won't quite get into that. 

For this post, I wanted to show that both Liz and I did an adult 'reality' side and a child 'fantasy'  side. The first two images are Lizzy's and the second two are mine. For the final images we chose Liz's reality and my fantasy, those I'll post again in different post. Pictures everywhere!