Press Release

Memphis College of Art's own Cinema Six is proud to present to the public an extravagant digital display of awesome. Join Stephen, Jorge, Kaitlyn, Amanda, Aimee, and Jill Wissmiller for a two hour event that will knock your socks off. If you enjoy art and new age media stop in and play with our digital work. Best of all this event is free!

Isadora Experiments

Working with Isadora has taken some getting used too. It is interesting that with this software there is no need for render time. Resulting in the creation of media at the speed of thought. I love the amount of actors that we are given with Isadora's library of effects. I am a bit confused about some of the later blending modes though. One of the things that I wanted to do was to place a fire video shot on black overlaid on another video. I couldn't just set the layer blending modes to Regular.

Documentation

Self Critique

1, Title of your project.
- Basics in Motion
2, Main idea you started with.
- Originally my idea dealt with the imagery of antiquated entertainment (fire) meeting and being interacted with in context of the modern age.
3, Source of the idea and its importance to you
- Once the gears got turning and I figured out that I would be working with a circular device, that utilized persistence of vision, creating a zoetrope was the natural next step. I thought about my childhood and this old night light I had that was powered by heat. I thought about zoetropes in historical context, how they were considered toys for adults. As an adult I find it hard to play with simple toys, like a yoyo for instance, because of the expectations that we set on ourselves. I saw this experience as an opportunity to explore what people consider child's play things and what merits a more in depth look.
4, Key emotion or experience that you want your audience to experience.
- I want my audience to feel free to play and to not be limited by what they perceive as adult like behavior.
5, Theme or premise of the piece
- I want a person to pick up my zoetropes and have that connection to being young and having an interesting toy that is both simple and fun to use.
6, Problem areas, include notes on your own and others suggestions for improvements. What can be done to resolve/improve problem areas.
- One of the biggest problems that these final results have is that they are too small. Honestly they look like mockups for real zoetropes. Persistence of vision is not utilized in the way that I had hoped. A way to resolve these issues would be to make the zoetropes double or triple the size to make them work more effectively.
7, Any additional journal-type notes.
- Frame by frame has left me with an extreme desire to get back to working behind a camera. I guess I took this assignment as a challenge to make something more crafted than my usual works. I love working with my hands but building three dimensional paper objects is not my forte.
8, Exhibition strategy, list specific festivals and venues.
- This project was very crafty. I think that pursuing this as an artistic venture would work best as a model for selling these zoetropes. I feel like there is a very nit-ch market for objects created by hand by small time artists. Once you get the template down and you get a size that works with the zoetrope then these things can be made for a consumer setting. One place that I know would help me distribute these sort of crafts would be Etsy.com. This webpage is all about handcrafted and specialty items. I think that there is potential to create stock and turn a profit with these "toys" that are not made anymore. Another great place to take this sort of thing would be The Frisco Festival in Northwest Arkansas. This festival focuses on one of a kind crafted goods sold by local artists who use the money they raise to tone their craft. Since the opening of the Crystal Bridges, the local art museum, Northwest Arkansas has become quite a center for arts and people who want to be recognized as artist.

Experimentation failure

Since the last class I built and tested a prototype of what I wanted to make. Overall I feel that the prototype was a failure because it does not work as a zoetrope. Persistence of Vision is not working for my project as I had hoped. I guess today will tell where my direction is now.

Write up for being 50% done

When I unpackaged the idea that i was dealing with I found that I was interested by the idea of motion. What makes us move how we move and what that motion does to us. The Zoetrope is an optical illusion reliant on persistence of vision. So thinking about all of these things and where I was coming from before with fire got me to think about the motions of the three things that humans need to survive, shelter, food, and water. The shelter approach has remained on of the more steady images that I want to use in this project. The idea of hearth and watching a campfire as a unit has always had a mystical quality to it. When considering water and food things always get a little confusing to me. What represents food? How do i convey the idea of water as an essential part of human survival? For food I considered on of the more used products that countries try and secure when starting up, I though of wheat. Bread is basically an image I have strong connotations too when thinking of feeding people or sustaining them. Wheat blowing in a gentile breeze seems like the natural manifestation of it in my quest for reels. Water is the next issue to tackle that I had to think about. The best thing that I was able to come up with the process of water growing grain. Showing the sprouting of a plant speaks a lot about human survival I think. 

Tripod, Shutter-release Cable, Lighter Fluid

Since I want to play with the imagery of fire I chose to light some shit on fire. I had some lighter fluid lying around and some things that I din't mind setting fire too. Probably the most interesting results came from The wood structure I used, I saw in the results that fire would warp around things that weren't burning, creating an effect on the fire that seemed to give it the look reminiscent of breath. I felt that the way I was moving with the project could be better. I decided to change from a sort of hand crank design and drew inspiration from an old night light that I used to have. I remember it had sliced vents on the top in sort of a propeller configuration so it would use the heat from the light bulb to power the rest of the structure. The rising heat through the vents created motion, I think that having a sort of artificial fire powering the image of a fire to be an interesting concept. Heat is essential to both but one has to do with combustion while the other has to do with illumination. I have decided to create a basic rig for different slide collections to go into. These slides will have to do with the basic elements that are essential to human survival. I will make a slide set that has to do with shelter, for this one I want to use the imagery of fire to represent warmth and hearth. The second will represent food, for this set I want to use the imagery of a deer running. The third set will have to do with water, this set is the least developed of the bunch. Im not sure whether I should represent it with the imagery of a boat or the imagery of the actual consumption of water. My timeline for completion would probably no more than two weeks. I would spend the first week working out the logistics of getting the propeller shape at the top of the slide cylinders to work properly within the basic structure. The next week would be spent perfecting the imagery. I want to draw the images by hand using pen, pencil, and watercolors. The overall construction of the main housing structure would be made out of wooden dowels each filled with a translucent paper material, like wax paper, tracing paper, or maybe rice paper. The actual slides would be made from the same materials from above, perhaps something fully see through like cellophane or transparency paper. I think the most difficult part of this project will be figuring out the motion aspect of the night light and getting the correct look to the slides that I want to accompany it.