The final presentation is few days ahead and now I managed to gathered 9 sequences together to see how they work together and also to think about the idea in the combining as well.

I still want to add one last sequence that use dying leaves to represent life and death and also revisiting the car sequence to add a beeping sound of the pedestrian light.

For this first version, I still need to adjust the timing for each frame, add sound and I might want to rearrange the sequence again to create more dynamic rhythm? maybe…

On Sunday I visited the school again and decided to try the third alternative of the light sequence by removing the tracing paper and thinking of drawing a line of my character on top of the photographs instead in order to get more vivid colors and also explore how working in mixture between physical and digital media.

Then I moved on to another sequence about the experience when you listen to music from your headphones and you feel align with with rhythm of the sound and forget the world for a moment.

I felt even more aware how concept, process, materials and context were tied together from working on this piece. Attention in the details in the process bought up the experience kindly the same as when I experienced the immersion in the music I listened back in the parks putting it concretely.

The next step is to find music or sound for this piece. Recently, listening to Echhart Tolle who is my spiritual teacher in terms of the presence and the power of now, I became more interested in the terms ‘collective consciousness’ or how we can ‘shift consciousness’ and wondered whether I could be able to be a part of this meaningful transformation to my audiences through my animation.

On Saturday I went into Kensington Garden to record new sound with the Tascam recorder to get sound with less wind to use for my sequences edit.

I also managed to interview one man who walked through the park with two questions which are,

Q: What kind of sound you hear looking at Nature in the city?

A: I hear piano music.

Q: What kind of image you see hearing like birds or the sound of the trees?

A: Blue Jay. It’s a type of bird.

These are interesting in terms of how we experience and see the world differently.

In the afternoon, I visited the studio to continue my work. I gathered more found objects from the recycled bin as show here.

I started the next sequence with the theme around ‘memories’ which would depict a scene in the garden of my mother when I hear her voice.

I would like an image to feel soft and sentimental since it reminds me of my mother. Instead of my first sketch idea of using crayon, I changed my mind to do watercolor instead since I felt it could give the gentle feeling more.

I satisfied with the mood of the image but still, there were a lot of reflection which I felt make it looks less sentimental, so I tried again with an EE pencil on white paper.

Then, I played with a Clayette which is a kind of clay I got introduced in 3D Making workshop days ago and decided to use it to add up onto my bird sequence for a transformation into a swan.

After than I revisited also the light sequence to try changing the colors of the light and background to reflect a more realistic night sky and yellow lights.

And, this is when I changed the colors.

Today I explored into the latest sequence that was inspired from recent experience seeing decorative lights on trees near the seating area outside of Westfield shopping mall. Even though it’s not a park, I still considered it a part of my ‘nature’ experience and decided to investigate into it. My concept of the project might become more of ‘exploration of sight and sound of nature in London city’

This sequence is about how we sometimes ignore the sound when the sight becomes more attractive to us. I wanted to visualise the shining bits of the light here and there on the tree and so chose to cut out coloured papers onto circles to represent it.

Then I also found a way of utilising my found object of a transparent paper and used it as a medium to draw my character as a foreground onto the coloured circle shapes. I animated her with only two actions and kept messing around with the circles for each shot to create movement between each frame.

I’m thinking of using a recording of the train noise nearby the trees area as a mean to explore contrast between beautiful visual and noisy sound.

This morning was a session that introduced me to Premiere Pro and how exciting it was. I’m interested in the split screen to use in my work since most of the time when you are in a park, you don’t only hear one sound but many altogether. Also, the panning effect and the movement of the video inside a video is also interesting in simulating the various geography of sound.

Here is the fun vid I made roughly.(to be uploaded soon)

I can’t wait to play more with the software.

In late afternoon, I constructed a sixth sequence (out of 10 currently!) which explores the sound of ‘a fly’ buzzing in your ears. This experience leaves a very unpleasant yet memorable for me, so I would like to visualise it. I could not remember whether this idea came before or after watching this clip from Fantasia (1940) that illustrated a ‘soundtrack’ vibrating with different movement and colours which fascinated me into drawing the ‘buzzing’ sound.

An irritating buzzing sound of a fly as a sample,

The soundtrack sequence from Fantasia (1940)

For the execution at first I thought of using copic pens on normal papers but I checked out recycled materials and found these interesting objects.

I thought of using possibly a previous cohort student work that got thrown away before final that is a large brown-colored paper zine with texts on it. I thought of drawing on those texts as to represent the ‘buzzing’ feeling which also happens when there are words talking non-stop.

I used Dragronframe again as opposed to drawing digitally to broaden my skill with physical materials. For the first version, I drawn little fly into the image which seem more as a distraction at the end. Also, I observed that there are quite ‘too many’ changes happen at the same time which are, the movement of my character, the fly, the change of words and no words, the change in the orientation of the words which makes the overall film looks too much discontinuous and unrelated to form any significant interpretation. So I tried it again from scratch with only my character and the vibration. And, trying to keep the words in only one orientation that reads from up to down.

The first version,

The second version,

I experimented this sequence using a hobby clay bought a little while ago from Flying Tiger. By using a medium I’m not used to, I felt less attached on usual habits in the making process which led to more possibilities I did not thought of.

For example, I played with the opening of this sequence with the eyebrows before turning the whole form into a bird which was my original idea.

I intend to add more length by transforming the form into other kinds of birds. The idea of this sequence is to visualise not just the form of image when we hear a word but also the differences in language.

For this sequence, you will hear the work “Nok” which means bird in Thai. I will further include a swan to represent a bird when hearing the word “Bird” as in English which I would voice-over, and a red-crowned crane when hearing the word “Tori” which means bird but in Japanese language that I also understand.

For the video above, I still feel unsure about whether or not there should be the sub-story of the eye brows. Also, I would like to revise the export method in order to create better quality images if possible.

The huge takeaway from the portfolio session yesterday is about coming up with the contents to include in a portfolio which I found really important in order to understand more about your works and ultimately yourself. Those key 4 areas to think about are as follows,

1. Concepts : Ideas and questions being explored.
2. Process : Technique, Activities and Methods undertaken. It’s worth noting there isn’t only about software used for the final work but also the actions taken during the research such as interviewing people, collecting materials, or even attending workshops that have given ideas for my work.
3. Context : Social, Political, Cultural, Site Analysis, etc.
4. Material : Type, Composition and also Provenance, or the origin of the material.

It’s interesting also to find that each of the area above sometimes become intertwined with one another. For example in my work, How a context of working in collaboration inspiring me in order to come up with a concept of work that might aligns with my partner. How encountering new object in the city inspires me for a concept of work, at first I tried to explore how sound affect our experience and then try to visualise it, but later, by seeing an interesting shape of a plant, it raises question on the other hand on what about how sight inspires back sound in us? Also, how material, like crayons I found in an art supply store, causes me to think about what kind of sequences this material could be used for and finally come up with the idea of visualising ‘memories’.

So far I have finished roughly 4 short sequences of my character experiencing sound from parks with different responses.

Since for this project it seems for now I would like to explore different kinds of medium and also concept in each sequence, I sketched them into small storyboards to see how it would look once put together.

For some sequences, the sound originates the visual, for example, a sequence with a voice-over of the word ‘bird’ as if what we might experience in a park would generate a visual of a bird.

For some sequences, the visual instead inspires the sound. Like this clip from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) which talks about how ‘soundtrack’ works in films made me think of the sound of buzzing flies in your ears so I would develop visual for such sequence with reference from this.

I continued exploring visual scenarios I came up with through sound in parks and this time it’s about the noise made from man-made objects like cars and traffic poles. I managed to finish only a car for now just to see how it goes first. This idea was brought up from Gary, in order for me to create some contrast between organic and inorganic shapes.

Here is the sample of the sound of the noise I found in my recording a while ago in the park. During this week, I will also visit a park again and this time deliberately record sound that I’m interested in to compose new sound out of it.

Here is the sequence I made digitally. I intended to create the shape of a car in Adobe Illustrator since it represents well with the geometric shapes of an inorganic objects. Then, I transferred the image onto Adobe Photoshop, and worked from that for the transformation of my character.

I still would like to add more man-made elemetns such as the pedestrian crossing box and also the bus and make them move as well.

Here is another sequence of my experimental animation of my experience within a park in London. This small clip shows response towards sound of the wind blowing through the tree near the lake in Burgess Park.

At first I drew my images on notepads but decided to grab some recycled (from previous cohort students perhaps) paperes to work with instead due to my sustainability concern.

The inspiration from the movement of the tree that create shades of colours inspired me to colour this piece with nuances of natural colours with coloured pencils. Although by hearing, you can’t see the colours, when you know what you hear is tree, I think subconsciously we might be able to imagine some colours to match the noise.

I also like coloured pencils since pencil has some connection with wood and also nature. It also reminds me of my previous sketch study of the wood texture when I see the rough texture of these drawings.

First version of this sequence,

And here is my reference recording of the tree near the lake in Burgess park.