3D Printed Stop Motion Narrative Assignment

Aging of a Musician

My piece is about all the changes in life, but the one constant of playing an instrument. The person and instrument were stop motion animation with a green screen, and the background was a mixture of footage filmed and found by me. Early on in the project I knew I wanted to print an instrument, but I did not know what kind of narrative to put to it. Originally there was going to be a busy street in the background, but I picked my story about the life cycle and decided the street didn't match as well as I had hoped. Throughout the piece three stages of the one person's life can be seen. First, child, then young adult and ending on adult. During the child portion of life the background is that of a more playful room. The character also plays a little more hastily and pauses more than in the other stages. The young adult section has a more serious room about it, but still a bit messy to show the person isn't fully grown up yet. This person plays a little more smoothly. Finally, the adult stage is in front of a concert hall, showing the goal of a musicians career. He plays a bit slower and smoother than the others do. To create the entire thing, first I did my 3d model and printed it. Then, after coming up with the concept I did the stop motion. That took a very long time to get all the pictures, but I did reuse footage. My inspiration for this partly came from La Jette, because of the romantic feel of that piece. Every time I kept trying to think of what to have the narrative be, I imagined the feeling of that and I knew I wanted to have a romantic air about it.

Stop Motion Video

Here is my group's (Zach, Jessie and I) stop motion video:

Chroma key assignment

Here is my video assignment using chroma key

Heidegger Response Project

    For my project relating to Heidegger I chose to make a music box out of found materials. My original thought was to get a bicycle and use that as the turning mechanism; however, once I started working on that I found there was no way to implement that practically. After digging around for materials I had my first version of the project made. It consisted of a sound board made of wood from one of my little brothers old projects, a crank made of pvc pipe from one of my last art projects, and a sheet of metal found at my inlaws house. The pvc pipe crank also had door stops that were left over from a home renovation project we did a few years ago.

When presented in class there were quite a few flaws that showed through. The original project was unstable, the crank mechanism would come off, and the metal just made noise. So, in the revision process I decided to see what I could fix about those. In version two of this project I used a lot of the same materials but changed the design. The wood still came from my brothers project and we used the same pvc pipe and part of the crank off the first one. The things that changed however, were the design and the noise. We found two small pieces of thing scrap metal at my inlaws house which we nailed to the bottom, giving the new piece a percussive sound. Then, we found an old toy bell kit from when our nieces were young, and took the keys off that. We suspended them using fishing line we had around the house. The crank was put in a new fashion so that it is stuck in the middle and cannot be taken out. The bass also has been stabilized a bit more so that it does not move as much when played.

    In response to Heidegger, my piece is a response to his statement on the use of materials. He talked a lot about how with the silver chalice, the silver was chosen as a material, and once it was made the chalice would have its purpose. In my piece, I took things that already had a purpose and repurposed them into something new. All of my pieces were things that had originally been used for something else, or had their own functions and I rebuilt them into a new chalice with new purposes.

Final Project

https://soundcloud.com/elizabeth-white-11/a-tour-of-a-familiar-place

For my Final piece, I made an audio tour. My tour is a meditative piece, taking the listener through the imagination. The piece, "A Tour of a Familiar Place" starts with a solo voice reciting a few guidelines to follow during the tour. After that is finished, the listener is requested to close their eyes. Once that has been done, the voice begins to guide people by saying vague descriptions. The descriptions are suppose to help the listener to imagine some place they have been. While this is going on, music is playing to help enhance the performer. The music is set to pan in different directions to lead the listener to different places. The piece ends with the person taking time to appreciate their destination, and opening their eyes when they are ready. The tour was inspired by Alter Bahnhof Video Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. After watching that video in class I had decided I wanted to make an audio tour that could be interpreted any way, but like in Cardiff and Miller's piece led you through a fantastic place. I enjoyed the visuals and music of their pieces. I also was inspired by the teachings of feldenkrais. Feldenkrais is suppose to be a meditative teaching that helps one learn about how their body should move. I took the mood of Feldenkrais and mixed it with the tour aspect of Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.

Tim Chatwood Graduate Recital

For my gallery viewing I went to a graduate student in composition, Tim Chatwood,'s graduate recital. He had a few pieces that were just instrumental, but for the most part he had video to accompany his work. For his first piece, Blurred Lines on McCarran, the video was of different streets along the border between Reno and Sparks. Each part of the video accompanied the piece of music very well. For his piece 21 Hit of Improvised Ensemble, he had a folder of 21 pictures and used chance to randomly pick two pictures, then the ensemble below played an improvised piece based around the pictures they were looking at. This was very similar to our visual scores, but it also used the chance aspect. This was not the only instance of improvisation in Tim's recital. Later, his piece An Improvised Outcome, he has a video set up of someone painting and the painter has to make marks depicting the music that was being played. Overall Tim's recital had a mix of music and video that blended well together. His pieces showed influence of John Cage with his use of chance and minimalism. The musicians all performed well and some of Tim Chatwood's pieces from the evening are being showcased at a few composers festivals around the US.

Triptych

My video tryptic is of a metronome. Each metronome is set to a different time, and they were all set off at once. Through out the videos they sync up, and then go out of sync. There was some video editing done to each one, so that the images don't line up all the time. The audio remained the same; however, it was spit between the speakers according to each metronomes left and right action. The piece was meant to be engaging yet overwhelming at the same time. I decided to leave the background plain so that it does not distract from the piece. This metronome was chosen over an older model because it was easier to find, and because this particular one wasn't as reliable as others. In a gallery this tryptic should be placed with one video on the left wall, one on the middle, and one on the right. Each speaker should line up with its corresponding video. The videos should be lined up to where they can be looped once they have finished their first showing.
Here is my Triptych of all three videos together:

Here is the Left side of the video:

Here is the Middle:

Here is the Left: