In this assignment the objective was to remake a prior creative project of mine, but with 1 obstruction given by my classmates. Once I had shown them which project I had picked, my classmates chose to give me "Texture" as the obstruction, meaning I would have to come up with a fresh take on my original project using texture.
The project I chose was this animation I made a couple of years ago. What first inspired me to do this was the link between old school hip hop culture and graffiti. Also, I remember wanting to experiment with mixed media animation, combining stock photos of New York graffiti walls with 2D animation in a handdrawn style.
THE PROCESS
Once I knew that my obstruction was texture, I began brainstorming ideas on what to make of it. One of my classmates had suggested switching the texture between the character and the background to make something interesting. I played around with this and came up with two ideas: 1) Graffiti as limbs on the characters, or 2) Graffiti as a mask on top of the character:
With these ideas in mind I decided to go out and look at graffiti in Copenhagen. I took a loooot of images of graffiti in different styles and sizes. What struck me is how colorful and creative many of these are, and many of them I would consider pieces of art. Here are just a few of them:
I even met a graffiti artist who was working on a mural and got to ask him about his work. He told me that it was a therapeutic experience for him to paint and it allowed him to free his mind from dark thoughts. He said that if he didn't do this every other day he would probably be diagnosed with a mental disorder and be taking pills. I asked him if he prepares his pieces beforehand to which he replied that he doesn't. Instead, he has a faint idea of what he wants to paint, and then he just gives in to the process, changing directions multiple times along the way.
FINAL PRODUCT
With these experiences fresh in mind I went home and started putting the images together. I decided to combine all the images into a mask, cutting from one to the next every two frames. I really liked the look of these fast flashing images in vibrant colors. Finally I put the mask on top of the character with a white background to contrast the intensity of the texture. The final video can be seen below.
REFLECTION
This process was exciting and eye-opening to me. Especially my "field study" made an impact on me in terms of getting inspiration from new places. I find it hard to believe that I would have gotten this far just by sitting at home looking at the screen. By diving firsthand into the graffiti of Copenhagen I felt I learned a lot more about the culture than reading about it on a wikipedia page.
