As this project progressed and I struggled through the challenges of my inaugural foray into animation, two issues came to dominate my thinking. First was the way in which I was conceptualizing the intial study of the body in motion. The intial impulse for me was to take a very scientific approach. I was concerned with the accuracy of the inputs and the descriptive value of the derived model.
At some point, however, it became clear to me that our analyses of the body in motion were incredibly superficial and arbitrary. The reality of the situation reveals that no matter how many views we took, or how accurately we plotted points in 3-dimensional space, we could never perfectly describe the space through which these bodies moved. This realization was important to me in directing my investigation away from discrete, tangible objects to one in which I began harness the representational and design potential of animation.
This leads to the second issue - namely, what role did animation play in my design process? Was it merely the assigned media? Was I only using animation to describe what I had already done? Did it lead me down new paths, instill in me new ideas?
Of course, as my first shot with this new media, my narrow range of knowledge and experience limited my exploitation of animation's potential. However, I did begin to utilize its ability to describe not only the beginning and the end, but the in-between, as well. This change in thought is incredibly enlightening, as I can now, using animation, study, represent, and design processes, not merely discrete objects or views. Similarly, I now have a more accurate method by which to represent and design space, which exists in the "in-between".
[An obvious criticism of my latest animation, then, is that my models described actual, discrete moments, as opposed to depicting the fluid process of echoes.]
No comments:
Post a Comment