PP 2 “Planet A”
Posted: September 23, 2015 Filed under: Connor Wescoat, Pressure Project 2 Leave a comment »Intro:
While the initial influence for this project was to be loosely based around a “Mondrian” piece of art, my musical influences got in the way of that and I chose to try something with a slightly different dynamic. I am a pretty big fan of metal and core music and one band in particular that I cannot seem to get enough of recently is “The Devil Wears Prada” who are a “metalcore” band from good ole Dayton, OH. This band on their recent recordings and stage shows have chosen to use this kind of provoking, slightly sadistic, triangle shape shown below.
While the basic profile of the shape has remained the same, slight modifications and evolution’s have been added to make the shape unique to that specific album or period of time. My initial idea for this project was to kind of choreograph the bands discography through the evolution of this shape using different backgrounds and effects. While I did not entirely achieve this, I am still pretty happy about how my project turned out.
Documentation:
I started this project by initially drawing out how the scene would be sequenced. Below is my rough blueprint.
Beginning with the top section of the page you can see that I initially wanted to evolve the shape 5 times in a cohesive manner. White to red to “sharp” lines to grainy background and finally transparent. As I started to construct these 5 different stages a myriad of obstacles began to present themselves. Triggering the fades, manipulating the shape as a whole rather than individual pieces, background effects, layering, the list goes on. I initially perceived these faults as major hindrances to my final vision. However, the more I played with the actors and tried to over come these obstacles I began to uncover different effects and animations that began to mold a new animation entirely. I like to put it as “Creative process through failure”. I started to refine my design from 5 scenes to 2 scenes that showed off some pretty cool effects and that also flowed seamlessly. The result was a very “space-age” interpretation of the shape that I am honestly very proud of.
Presentation:
When I showed off my work to the rest of the class I was a little self-conscious at first. I had been living in this world for a couple of days now and I was anxious to see what my classmates thought of my work. To my delight it seemed that my classmates enjoyed my piece and responded to it with comments like “It looks like asteroids” or “It’s like a space age cultist symbol”. I also heard “mesmerizing” as a comment to describe my piece. All of these comments were what I was going for and thanks to the help of some of my classmates I was able to execute my vision with 95% percent success. I say 95% and not 100% because I kind of wish that I made the animation a little more intricate but I digress. I am very satisfied with what I came up with.
Achievements:
- Level 1: Check, I was able to fire the whole scene with one trigger
- Level 2: Check, the scene fades from one simple image to another, more complex piece with different movements and animations
- Level 3: Check, my second scene takes a couple loops to figure out what is happening but is simple enough to predict the repeating action
- Bonus 1: Blank, The scenes follow a repeated pattern with no variability after the first loop
- Bonus 2: Maybe?, While the scene is simple, I believe that the pattern and interplay between the shape, background animation and movement creates a hypnotic feel within the piece.