Digitopia by Miwa Matreyek

Digitopia from citrusink on Vimeo.


Focus Questions

Imagery:
Digitopia is a very surreal video that uses many different things meant to symbolize and represent society and its various rituals/practices.
Hands are featured repetitively throughout the film, mostly with the arm, sometimes without.
It also includes various other body parts, heads, eyes, mouths etc.
Lots of people are also shown doing different jobs or actions, being operated on and operating, dancing etc.
A few backgrounds were used throughout: blue sky with mountains, labratory, cityscape.
A lot of the movements or actions were repeated a number of times for each scene.

Overall impression:
Initally the audience may get a slightly disturbed impression from this video. However if the meaning of the video is explored you can began to understand what Miwa Matreyek was trying to portray. The music certainly gave it a calming slightly sad mood which greatly effected the feelings the audience would experience while watching it. This calmed mood was assisted by the fluid movements the hands, people and objects made. Obviously the clip is very surreal which initially would make the audience feel disturbed. The film is about forgetting who you are and being in a dreamy state of mind, just relaxing.. That is most likely why Miwa Matreyek chose the calming music and a surreal theme, as surrealism is based on having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream. 

Visual language cues, sound cues and editing:
The music to this film is a very calming song, not too upbeat and sung in a calming low key voice, this all contributes to the relaxed theme of the video. The visual language in this film is also important: the main colours being blue, white and black, with bits of red, the blue also enhanced the theme as it is a calming colour. There is quite extensive editing of this film as the mountains are hand drawn and the hands and various body parts, laboratories, cities and additions to the body parts would have to be edited in.

The artist has used contrast and colour to emphasis the shapes and objects in the film. For example the red, black and white contrast well with the blue background and so stand out. She has used proportion, scale, repetition and movement to create emphasis on jobs or actions. Miwa Matreyek also uses line to help define the objects in the film.

Interpretation:
This film could be interpreted as trying to portray a relaxing surreal theme, much like a dream. This view could be taken from the calm music, surreal themes and visual language used.
Stephanie Rutherford found this movie quite disturbing, Courtney Palmer agreed with this and added that the music gave her chills.
The intended audience for this film is most likely adults who have artist personalities as it could not often be appreciated by others, such as teens, proven through Stephanies and Courtneys statements as they are both teenagers.
The visual language in this film gives this interpretation as the colour scheme, mostly black white and blue, gives a very calming effect. The rhythm and movement also aided to this interpretation.
The backing music of this short movie helps interpret the film in this way as it has a slow and calming tune, also the voice is very low and soothing tone.

ePub thingo

So I've started my pages document iBook ePub thing, I've spilt up the video into the scene so I can put them into a document. So yeh I can start that next week :) just thought i'd let you know hehe

Appraising task

This lesson we have been discussing our Appraising task and what we will be doing, we looked at videos made by Miwa Matreyek and talking about the meanings and so on. We have to pick one of her three films, and have 3 weeks to describe it on our blogs. I think i'm going to the hands one, because i can see the meaning in it. so yeh, thats about it...

term 4 - im bringing creative media back! yow!

today is our first day back to term 4, and Mr Powell is teaching us how to make and ePub because for our next assignment we are making an ePub.
I've already made an ePub for French this year, so i already know how to make them, which is good because it means i won't have much difficulty with this assignment.

For the assignment we are making an ePub about our animation, and what we thought when creating each scene. We also have to cut up each scene to put into the ePub, which should be.. interesting.. as i don't know if I have the scenes anymore :\ but it'll be fine . . .

Animation Evaluation

With my animation I had quite a few difficulties, but overall I am pretty pleased with my final result.

With the first song, ET, the difficulty wasnt the drawings, i found that easy, the hard part was the perfecting the timing. I took me a few lessons once we finished the animation to put it into iMovie, find out how off time it was, go back and fix it, then put it back into iMovie. Then check the next scene timing and repeat till i finished all the scenes.

What I also found hard were the transitions from each scene, because i really wanted them to link well together, so i really had to think about each one for a while. 

Lastly, the final animation turned out a lot different to our storyboard because a lot of the ideas we had just wouldn't work, so they had to be edited, and it was hard to think of ways to do each scene. For example the technique i used for the spinning globe took me a while to think of (using a world map in the back ground and the foreground was a sort of stencil, blacking out everything else but a circle) so these sorts of things were challenging.

The next song, Last Friday Night, involved a different set of problems and challenges as the style was very different to the other video.

At first we were going to have a photo background with Katy Perry drawn in, as this made it easier to change her body movements, however it turns out it is quite hard to draw Katy Perry haha. So we ended up using pictures and rotating, cutting, flipping and moving images to stimulate movement.

In the first scene we just flipped her and used different images to get different poses for her dancing, this was easy and didn't take long. However the next scene took me a while to come up with a technique to make her move, which was cutting off her arms or legs or whatever needed to move, and rotating them. This was both hard and easy, easy because rotating was simple, hard because when you do rotate them they don't always fit into the jointing body part perfecting. Also this effect may look unrealistic if done wrong or the picture doesn't suit it. This scene became quite useful and was used in most scenes.

I also had some difficulty with the actual images, because i was using photos of Katy Perry it meant the backgrounds needed to be photoshopped out, which with so many images of her, takes a long long time. 

Lastly, in the streaking in the park scene, I had some difficulty because it was quite hard to move her legs in the right direction to stimulate walking because i had to cut and move her legs. However this was aided with the package truck thingo on animationish, because it meant i also didn't have to move her, i just used the tool to mover her for me :) With the next scene however I didn't move each random girls legs as I didn't have the time, so I thought that no one would notice if I just had alot of girls, bunched up, and some moving, so made one cartwheel in and one tumble in to distract from the fact the others legs were still. 

The timing with this video was not that hard, i just had to fix one scene because i think we initially timed it wrong, but other then that they were fine.

With this video in general, i found the thing that helped me the most was the storyboard, i founded it made things easier to figure out when starting a new scene if i just referred back to the storyboard, it told me how long the scene was, what was in it, and the how it transitioned to the next scene.

I learnt alot of new animation techniques during the process, such as the cutting and rotating effect i used in the Last Friday Night video, and how to make a world spin and how to make girls in bikinis looks naked using black bars haha.

If i could redo this animation I would make a back up of everything, because of my losing Stephs USB : \ Also I would spend less time mucking around in class as it all eventually adds up and means less time to do the finishing touches. 

OMMMGGG finally finished!!

OK, so i was meant to post this the other day but didnt have time i was sooo busy doing my assignments!!

anyway, the other day, we were all on track nearly done, then BOOM Steph's gets sick and cant finish her scenes because she couldn't come to school, so she gave me her usb with her scenes, and by this stage i had finished all my scenes, i just had to do the final rerun scene and put in the music. So i wasn't really stressing that much. But then i lost said usb and had to red Steph's scenes again, luckily she had posted them on her blog so it was easy to recreate them, and it only took me 2 hours.

then because i was running out of time and could rerun the scenes the way i wanted for the final scene, which was to copy and paste every second frame from each scene to make it go faster, i just cheated slightly and make them go faster on animationish.

then i put them all into iMovie, and realised one scene was half of what it was meant to be, because i forgot about transition time or the timing was mucked up while we were timing it. whatever, so i just repeated the end part of that scene and added it in, but then it took over some the next scene. However for me to fix that would take too long and be too hard, because it meant fixing that scene, then opening the scene after and adding more to that, which i couldn't really do without it looking funny, so i just left it.
After that though the timing was fine, and adding the songs was easy.

Last thing was the credits which, cause i wanted really long credits and was bored, put really random things in. I listed all the stars, directors, writers, creators, animaters, bloggers, brands featured, places featured, people featured, song names and artists, llamas featured, llama trainer, carer, llama mating advice, llama scholarship provided by, backstage critical support crew (which is just people who told me it looked good haha), financially supported by and i think so other random stuff haha.

here (is a really bad quality copy of ) the final thing, but i dont think u can read the credits, sorry

Last few lessons :\

So after a week of camo we only have two lessons left to work on our animation, and its due on Thursday. In class today I finished scene 5 and the transition to scene 6.
We are running a bit short on time, we still have 2 scenes to do, then match it to the music, so we are running a bit off schedule, but thats ok. Steph and I are just going to try get some done at lunch and at home.Technically we only have 1 scene to go, because the last scene is just a quick rerun of all the other scenes. Steph is going to work on scene 6 tomorrow. Then we just have scene 7 to go. I'm more worried about matching the music, because I can be quite a perfectionist with that sort of thing.
So yeh, catch ya later alligator ;)