Senior Studio Fall ’23 — The Sight of Sound: 714🐈
Overview
“Visualizing the unseen,” laid out by the project prompt, informed our group’s approach to utilizing Riso and animation to convey how we uniquely create design. This project allowed our group to explore techniques that interested us, but we were not given the opportunity to experiment with those forms until now. While in the process of making our animations, we learned to adapt to each other’s workflows and creative decision-making.
Our group dove into the project with a lot of enthusiasm, and it was clear we both thought of ourselves as observers of the world around us. Anna likes to take photos and videos to share on her Instagram, and she referenced reels that she had saved. Angie wanted to utilize the animation assets of Procreate, inspired by indie shortform animation.
Discover
For our mood boards, Anna was drawn to stop-motion and analog techniques. She compiled storefronts near her apartment in South Boston and noted the storeowners’ habits that interested her. She also talked about her two-hour trip every morning from home to classes and how she wanted to visualize the experience of a particular storefront. The mundane scape of city storefronts being activated by Riso and stop-motion cutouts represented a delicacy and craft that Anna wanted to make. Additionally, we discussed incorporating audio that can be reversed or videos that can be reflections of each other.
James Grady suggested the music video Sugar Water, where there are two videos shown side-by-side that are played in reverse and then switched back to normal. The video was an inspiration for thinking about times of day and locations. Angie used a different website that was recommended to them from the Impact and Empathy interviews, Designspiration. Moving away from usual illustrative inspirations, Angie looked into film and contact sheet references. There were also surrealist and sequential thumbnails that prompted a full mood board of creepy cats that ended up coming back later.
“When a black cat crosses my path,
A woman in the moon is singing to the earth.”“Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto
Diverge
We shared music back and forth, from weird satanic chants to cool soundwave effects. We eventually settled on the opening scene theme “ODDTAXI” from the anime of the same name. We really liked the syncopation of the pre-chorus because we were also talking about movement and sound. Anna shared the song with her partner, and they specified the genre of music as “city pop”. The opening sequence itself also inspired Angie’s animation style.
After discussing the accessibility of the spaces, our group decided to focus on the Florist and Crispy Crepes Cafe, right on the Boston University campus. Anna started taking footage and pictures of the florist after our first critique, and Angie, who frequented the crepe shop, took pictures of the space and food menu. We had a lot of references to the space and started coming up with our own narratives.
The story of Oddaxi also inspired and collected the group’s narrative. The main character of the show has a mental condition that only allows him to see other humans as animals. At one point of the story, he sees a cat, but it begs the question of *how* he could see the cat if he couldn’t see humans normally. Would he see a human child? Is the cat real? So we decided to both use a cat character interacting with the animation to ground the two different styles.
Design
Anna wanted to use collage and stop-motion for her 16 seconds of footage. She printed out 8 by 8 frames of a single background (the day version of the storefront) and went through multiple renditions on the Riso. During this process, she also hand-cut different elements from the florist’s storefront: plants, flowers, a billboard, and signage. She also used string and, frame-by-frame, spelled out the store name “Florist” and scanned each stitch.
There was also a struggle to finalize the background, which was difficult for the group because what looked good on the computer screen didn’t necessarily translate smoothly onto the Riso. There was a lot of back and forth of adjusting analog elements, Riso, and going into After Effects “stitching” the frames together.
For Angie, the process was to animate the elements that stood out in the night scene of the storefront. The animation asset of Procreate required each frame to be a grouped folder, which wasn’t as intuitive with all the animated shots in one Procreate file. In the end, they decided to utilize the still image of the background and trace it with a hand-drawn style. The transition of the animation to After Effects was pretty smooth. They referenced the ODDTAXI animation opening’s style with the traced layered frames.
Delivery
After Riso printed the frames and scanned them in, we completed our videos at different times but had a complete picture of how they looked next to each other in the final week. Then Anna reused a lot of her Riso experiments for The Sight of Sound, while Angie was more reserved with printing just enough to show. The postcards and posters were designed to include elements from each respective video. The zine served as a way to combine the two people’s styles in an interactive zine with sliding frames and smaller pages.
Overall, it was a project that was worth more than the final deliverable. Both group members had differing directions to take from the beginning, and the collaboration involved giving technical advice and feedback during critique and design. The senior studio community was really passionate and came together to make this show great. The reception went well, and we invited guests who congratulated us for our hard work. This was definitely a fulfilling project and a “test” for the chaos that the thesis show will expect from our class.