The Cinemagraph

In just a few short weeks I’ve gone from fumbling with Keynote slideshows and movies to making interesting cinemagraphs with Photoshop and iPad apps. Fellow WordPress blogger, James Liswed, recently commented on one of my posts with a link to TEKNARI, and OMG my life has changed forever!! THANK YOU JAMES!!

Of course, my original mission was to learn how to create animated GIFs that are relevant to my current projects, especially Projet Sage NU. The goal is now firmly in sight.

See more of my animated GIFs on Tumblr … it’s where I’m showcasing my growing collection!

Slight of Hand

The Blue Egg

There’s a good reason why single frames captured from a movie are called stills. The movie moves, while the still… well… keeps still.  It is a moment paused for all eternity so that we may go back to it again and again, examining every detail as if searching for the answer to an unasked question.  But what happens when we subvert the still image and transform it into something more than what it represents on its own? How does the narrative change?

Recently I’ve been experimenting with animation for two of my projects, Mixed States, and Project Sage Nu. While I have experience with video and Final Cut editing software, I also find simple flip books intriguing—maybe because there is an element of mystery to them. A similar effect sometimes happens while browsing through your own photos on the computer—suddenly the people in a series of photographs taken within seconds of each other start to move. I love it when that happens, which is how I became interested in the mechanics of GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format).

Today my goal was to learn how to make GIFs from scratch in Photoshop on my desktop instead of using apps on the iPad (see my last post, There’s an App for That). SUCCESS!!! I am officially one step closer to realizing a particular animation I envision for Projet Sage Nu. The next stage will be to incorporate recorded audio. Boy, this is exciting stuff!!

Thanks for dropping by, and please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section below. Do you think the GIF above fits with my PSN project, or does it have an entirely different narrative of its own? Is this the beginning of a third project? Hell, why not! 🙂

Ophélie . . . continued

Craquelure

Ophélie: un état d’âme (introduced in my previous post) continues to evolve as I gather up the scattered pieces that were lost, or migrated over to other projects. Today while organizing folders I found an old file and decided to have another go at it. The image was originally comprised of a mask (photo from one of my old acrylic paintings) superimposed over the woman’s face with one of the old boxcar photos as a background. It was pretty awful, but I was determined to make it work. In the end, I ditched the mask and sandwiched the woman between two duplicate layers of the boxcar. Bam! Ophelia is totally cracking up!

While Craquelure is quite different than most of the previous works associated with this project, there’s just something about it. Maybe it’s a reminder that as humans, all of us are composed of many complex layers – layers of ourselves that we construct and deconstruct over time. We build them up, we peel them off, and sometimes they just fall off all by themselves without us even noticing.

Click here for more photos and details about this intriguing project, or go to Ophélie: un état d’âme in the drop-down menu under Projects at the top of this page. Thanks for dropping by.

 

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