Bromance Final Draft

Bromance Draft 2

Craft: The draft of this project was created using a Canon DSLR for the footage, Adobe Premiere to compose the video, and Garage Band to compose the music. Adobe Premiere allowed me to edit the footage and time lapse the video.
Concept: The theme of the project was to make a short film featuring someone traveling, someone waiting, and one person having a package for another. I decided to intertwine this with the concept of "bromance" to delve into the lives of two friends who have ventured different paths after graduating college.
Composition: I used feedback from the previous critique to strengthen the video. One piece of advice was to add another flashback to reinforce the time the two spent together during college. Music was also a big change, in which I focused on conveying mood in the three key points of the film. For example, the music in the beginning was composed to communicate the character's loneliness as he played the game alone, wishing for his friend.

Bromance- Draft 1

Craft: The draft of this project was created using a Canon DSLR for the footage, Adobe Premiere to compose the video, and Garage Band to compose the music. Adobe Premiere allowed me to edit the footage and time lapse the video.
Concept: The theme of the project was to make a short film featuring someone traveling, someone waiting, and one person having a package for another. I decided to intertwine this with the concept of "bromance" to delve into the lives of two friends who have ventured different paths after graduating college.
Composition: Because I developed a script first, I was able to compose the events of the story in a logical sense. I experimented a lot with capturing actions from different angles to

VAC Performance

Craft: This project was made using two major programs. Adobe Premiere was used to compile both the video and audio while Garage Band was used to edit the music.
Concept: The object of the assignment was to compile the shots from the performance into one video along with the audio we edited last week.
Composition: I did not necessarily want to choose the exact scene where the audio occurred I chose to gather different clips to communicate some sort of progression.

Week 12: Audio Exploration

Craft: This project was edited using Garage Band on the Mac. Various tools enabled me to play with different ways to alter the sound of the music track.

Composition:One tool that I used was reverb which made the sound sound as if it filled space. Another tool was tremolo which was an effect that made the instrumentation sound shaky. I also played with vocal alterations. The monster one that I used made the voices deeper, muddying what was being said. I believe that making the words harder to understand turned the focus to the tones and sounds produced by the voices. I also played with echoes which were different from reverb in that each note was repeated without a sense of atmosphere.

Special Edition Post: Edyta Stepien Installation

This exhibition consisted of large-scale video projections on the walls of SXU's Art Gallery. When I first stepped in, there was a striking impact as if I had been transported to an entirely different environment, Stepien opened her presentation  by allowing the viewers to ask her questions about her piece. The first topic of concern was how the piece was made. She stated that the video clips were taken by pointing a micro-lens camera at a fish tank filled with water, with natural substances such as plants and sand while also including man-made objects such as wire, glitter, and bits of paper. To create a tumultuous atmosphere in this small setting, she created ripples in the water with a blow dryer and moving the water physically to created a disturbance into the items in the tank. The sound was also a component in this multimedia exhibit. Stepien stated that the sounds came from field recordings of pitches from hurricanes and storms.

Another topic was what she wanted to communicate with this piece. Stepien's inspiration for this piece came from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. Stepien stated that she wanted to explore the relationship between the natural and mechanical by making this simulation of a violent storm that transported us as the viewers to the center of the chaos. She explored how even natural objects have man-made components.I believe that this was successful in the way the entire gallery space was transformed to envelop the viewer in constant motion and dimness. 

This exhibition is different from any other exhibition I have attended in that it made me pay attention to both space and sound. I enjoyed how more than one sense was required to interpret  what was happening in the composition. Even though I knew I was inside of a building, the walls no longer felt like walls because of the depth and scale of the projection. While my eyes were visually interested, my ears were audibly interested in the ominous sounds of wind whistling and high pitched, resonating bells that provoked a certain emptiness or muffled sound as if I really was underwater, immersed in chaos.

Week 6:Impossible Fiction, One Instrument

Craft: The drawing was made on an iPAD app called Procreate. I used a variety of tools to illustrate my fictional character, mainly a chalk pencil mark which provided the furry texture I desired. The music was made using Garage Band.
Concept: The concept of this project was to create a piece of art and music using a specific set of rules. For the drawing, the rules were to not draw people, make a total of 5 drawings or make a drawing within the theme "Impossible Fiction". I chose the later theme, making a creature that is built of a rabbit, ram, and leopard. The musical piece required that we use only one instrument or use recordings/narration. I chose to make my piece of music with one instrument: the piano.
Composition: For the drawing, I thought mainly about how much of each animal had to be represented in a way that the viewer could identify each animal. I wanted the rabbit to be the most visible so that's why it is the head of the creature. The ram is most noted for its horns so I decided to replace the rabbit's ears with the horn. Since I didn't want to make the body primarily a ram's body, I decided to give it a snow leopard's body based on the color scheme I had started to establish of grays, black, and white. I used a separate layer to make a background that I thought gave a sort of mystical presence in the vibrant colors and light effects. Concerning the music, I only  used one instrument within the app's piano category, Those instruments were the arcade synth and the grid bass which gave an 8-bit video game quality. I wanted to play around with different melodies that could act as a drum's baseline although I couldn't use drums and differing melodies with low pitches and high pitches. I focused a lot on contrasting sounds although they were made by the same instrument.

Week 8: Daily Ritual

Craft: The video was made using a Canon DSLR camera. I staged the video in the Visual Arts Center while I filmed the subject playing a video game on his laptop as he does every day. Using soft light created by adding an umbrella to the lamp, I took into consideration not only the light and shadows on his face but also how I could angle the lamp to on his hands and the computer screen so that the content displayed would be clearly visible as well. That was by far the most difficult task. The music was composed using Garage Band. Since I had previously made a piece with a video game feel to it, I thought it would be suitable enough for the exercise.
Concept: The concept of this project was to record a daily ritual using multiple shots. Meaning, the camera had to be moved at various different angles with each shot. I found that the angles I shot below the subject to be the most interesting because of the expressions of the subject's face that I was able to capture along with the action on the laptop screen. After collecting these shots, we were to edit them down into interesting compositions then compose them in one 30 second or 60-second video using Adobe Premiere. This part of the exercise challenged me to evaluate what was interesting about the shots and how to compose the shots in a way that made logical sense. We also experimented with the use of audio fades and video fades to establish a beginning and ending in Adobe Premiere.
Composition: While composing the shots with the DSLR, I knew that I wanted to create a balance between both the figure and the actions he was engaged with. A lot of the shots required intense preparation to make sure the figure fit within the composition along with the laptop, the mouse, and his hands to show the movements he made. The composition also played a role in putting the shots together. I wanted there to be an implied beginning and ending, showing the subject opening his laptop to begin his frustrating journey through the game only to reach a game over.

Week 7: Video Wall Animation

Craft: This video consisted of several program components, The images were made using Procreate on the iPad. The music was created using Garage Band. Both the music and the images were compiled in Adobe Premiere. The inspiration for this projection came started with a set of guidelines, a few being, only one instrument for the music, no images of human figures and making impossible fiction. I started by exploring the musical instruments, stumbling across an instrument called Arcade which game the feel of a 8-bit video game. I decided a playful theme would dominate my composition.

Concept: The object of the project was to see what could be created given the certain guidelines mentioned above. Since the music inspired what I would draw, I thought up an imaginary creature that had the characteristics of a rabbit, ram, and leopard. The additional images, such as the sky and footprint gives an idea about what type of environment such a creature would live in.

Composition: I started off with the music. Since I would only be using one instrument, I wanted to play around with different melodies that could act as a drum's baseline although I couldn't use drums and differing melodies with low pitches and high pitches. I focused a lot on contrasting sounds although they were made by the same instrument. For the images, I wanted them all to connect in a similar color scheme. Since I worked with purples and blues in the rabbit, ram, leopard (Rambit-pard) composition, I used a similar scheme for a night time setting when my creature is most active. A huge component of the composition depended on the template of the video wall at SXU's Chicago campus. It was important to make square compositions to hold the spots in the diamond shapes of the template and a rectangular composition to fit in the center.

Week 5-Animated Drawing

Craft: The image was create using ProCreate and the music was created using Garage Band.

Concept: The image had to be made using a monochromatic pallette. I chose shades of reds since it is not a color scheme I am used to working in. The music had to relate to the image by expressing the theme of the drawing or the over all mood.

Composition: Inspired by the red hues, I wanted to create an eerie feeling. I started off with the subject in the center, focusing on how I could build the different folds in the garment using lighter, red hues in contrast to darker red hues. While experimenting with the different types of pens and brushes in ProCreate, I discover one that had a cloud-like texture and decided to use it along with the smudge tool to build a smokey background. The musical composition mirrors this creepy atmosphere in the long deep notes created with the  Smart strings and overall slowed tempo.

Week 4: Animated Drawing

Craft:The image was create using ProCreate

Concept: The image had to be made using a monochromatic pallette. I chose shades of reds since it is not a color scheme I am used to working in.

Composition: Inspired by the red hues, I wanted to create an eerie feeling. I started off with the subject in the center, focusing on how I could build the different folds in the garment using lighter, red hues in contrast to darker red hues. While experimenting with the different types of pens and brushes in ProCreate, I discover one that had a cloud-like texture and decided to use it along with the smudge tool to build a smokey background.

WEEK3: Final Animation

Craft: This animation was made using Photoshop. Each shape on the screen required a separate layer so that each object could be animated in either opacity, style, or position in the timeline window. For example, the grass-like wavy figures were controlled by inverting the opacity from high to low or vise versa. This was done by establishing frames or key-frames over the span of the video. The music was made using an iPad app called Garage Band. I started off by laying down the beat of the song, then adding two different melodies to create an interesting, polyphonic contrast between the piano and the strings.

Concept:The inspiration for this piece came from an aquatic theme. While I did not want to blatantly show a sea of depict fish, I used the shapes to abstract these ideas. Based off of the composition, I added music which I thought mirrored this idea of serenity.

Composition: The colors I chose were picked with the hope of creating a calm atmosphere. I worked towards that by choosing a deep, dark blue for the background and light teals for the bubble like objects and grassy figures. To stand out from the blues, I chose yellow and white for the "swimming" shapes because they added to the aquatic environment. The placement of the shapes was done to ensure that some areas of the composition were not too sparse or too dense.

Week 2: Abstract animation

Week 1- Introduction Post

Hello. My name is Kyeara Aikens and I am a junior here at SXU. As a Studio Art major and Graphic Design minor, I desire to grow in skill, creativity, and technique as an artist. The knowledge I gain in both very different forms of media will enable me to express my ideas in multiple visual languages. After I graduate, I hope to start a career in concept art.