A safe place for Nichola to experiment with her social media identity...
This is a quick test to see what will turn up from a post sent via email.
"Born in Kingston upon Thames, UK, at age 20 he emigrated to America as a bookseller, first to New York, and then to San Francisco. Planning a return trip to Europe in 1860, he suffered serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas. He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867. In 1868 he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, which made him world-famous.
In 1874 Muybridge shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. In 1875 he travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition.
Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. In the 1880s, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements.
During his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, returning frequently to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He returned to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, Kingston Museum was opened in his hometown and continues to house a collection of his works to this day in a dedicated 'Muybridge Exhibition'."
Meeting at 9:00 a.m in the Animation office/seminar space. Room i02.
As a starting point for getting to know you all, we would like you to select a favourite piece from your current art folio to take in for a friendly and informal show and tell together. Don’t panic! - You won’t be expected to talk at great length. Try to find a piece in your folio that you feel best expresses your current creative interests, a piece that you feel pleased with, and hopefully provokes your own interest to talk about it further. It can be a still image or moving image, we will also have a monitor and pc set up so if you have a link to online work you can screen this from there.
Some suggested questions to think about when looking at your own work could be; what you learned in creating it? Did it open up potential to you for future ideas? Why do you like it? Does it relate to other work and artist you admire? Are there things you don’t like about it – or would do differently? Artists usually always have something we would do differently – and not a bad thing at all, especially in the beginning stages of learning new processes, it’s how you progress, and we heartily encourage this way of reflection all throughout your time of the course.
Following this we will then take a look at the very starting point of making images move, and looking at work created with a ZOETROPE.
Zoetrope Task Outline:
You will be given a blank zoetrope sheet to complete. This short drawn exercise will introduce you to moving image helping you understand how long or short a second is and how much information the eye can take in during that second, and how the Persistence of Vision works in action. In week 2 we can film these through on the line testers but do feel free to test your work on the zoetrope as you go.
Remember that a zoetrope sequence is played on a loop so your sequence will start and end on almost the same picture. When played continuously it should be impossible to spot the beginning or the end. You will have fifteen boxes to fill which will last just over a second (the most common frame rate used by animators is 12 images per second).
Points to Consider:
The challenge of this project is in its simplicity and the restrictions of working in a short loop. Don’t over complicate your images. Backgrounds are not necessary but instead concentrate on the moving image. Choose repetitive themes that can play continuously. There are different approaches to filling your boxes…
Abstract: These work well and can take on many different forms from soft marks to hard lines.
Infinite: For example zooming into an image then passing through the image, managing to link the end of the loop the original drawing again.
Left to Right: make your image pass by the screen by moving it within the boxes left to right.
Character: simple drawn sequence such as a character waving.
Action Points for research!
Persistence of Vision
Eadweard Muybridge.
Other optical toys – for example phonotropes, praxinoscope, cakeatropes... check this collection on Vimeo curated by our animation graduate Jim LeFevre https://vimeo.com/channels/phonotropetmjlefevre
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