Reliving Memories
Sight of Sound | Risograph Animation and Installation
Michelle Nie and Julia So
Introduction
This project examines the intersection between sound and graphic design, giving the sound a sight. Constraints on the project include a 15-second stop-motion animation using the Risograph with only typography and including 4x6” in postcards. When Julia and I were given this assignment, we both decided to pick the theme of nostalgia. After selecting our topic, we choose to diverge and work on our own interpretation of the theme. We had our own mood boards and iterations and then we came together during our check-ins.
Research Check-in Notes from Krystyn and Prof. Grady (10/18):
Nostalgia. Noisy gradients and textures. How does time function, how does it affect our lives? Using type to create shapes.
Work-in Check in from Krystyn and Prof. Grady (10/27):
Julia: Awesome loop. Love the fading in and out of the text. Michelle: Great movement, liveliness, flickering. Good restraint, just variation in color. Zine: Individual zines in a folder. Showing individual frames, flipbook. Posters: Organic shapes, puzzle pieces, layering.
Michelle’s Process
I started this project by asking myself a series of questions. What is our interpretation of nostalgia? How does it feel to relive a memory? To forget a memory? How does memory come and go in unexpected ways and times? I started to think beyond simply just remembering an experience, but how does one live in the moment? What is it to experience time and how does time play a part in how we experience life? Julia and I diverged from this point and selected our own songs. I selected a song called “Times” by Hans Zimmer from the Inception soundtrack. I really enjoyed the song because it encapsulates how life progresses. The song starts off slow and then more layers and instruments add to the song. Similarly, life starts out slow, but then there are more elements that add to our experience. We get busier and new experiences come and from there we develop a newer sense of life.
One late night in the studio, we watched the movie, Soul. The movie was fitting our theme of nostalgia. The movie argues that we should live life not necessarily to find purpose but to enjoy it even in the most mundane moments. This concept is beautifully captured during the scene when he had the realization or his “epiphany” moment. I chose the phrase, “Regular Old Living” At first, as a team, we thought it would make sense if I started the video with the song “Time” and Julia could end the video with the song “Epiphany”. However, later in the animation process, I decided to stick with the same song as Julia to make the video more cohesive.
25 Iterations
For my 25 iterations, I was scrolling through Pinterest and Behance to look at letterforms that would work for my phrase. I started to grab some leftover charcoal and started drawing letterforms that were interesting. I created my own letterforms that were inspired by water droplets. In similar nature, water droplets represent how life itself is organic and fluid. I wanted to push how far I can incorporate my analog process into an animation. In our in-class critique, I was encouraged to use the drawings and create the same iterations over and over again.
First Draft
In my first draft, I took grid paper and drew each letter in the phrase, “Regular Old Living”, in 15 different font families. I scanned the letter form and vectorized it into Adobe Illustrator. The vectorized letterforms are put into After Effects and I animated them using a morphing effect. The downside to digitizing the letterforms is that you lose the imperfection from the mark-making. So then I decided to record a timelapse of myself hand drawing the phrase using different variations of the letterforms I’ve created. After the first check-in, I realized that the animation focuses on the movement of the hand instead of the development of the letterforms. Professor Grady suggested that I stick with one of the font families and rewrite the letters in the same font family multiple times. Instead of having multiple font families, rewriting the same letter a couple of times will create small subtle changes. I decided to rewrite the phrase 3 different times and the letters alternated in the same beat as the song.
Animation
I scanned the images and imported the drawings into Photoshop. I used the Slice tool to cut up the letters in the approximate width of each slice. Then I imported all the sliced images into After Effects and strenuously listened to the song to identify when the note changed. I didn’t include any special effects because I wanted to focus more on the mark-making on the letterforms.
Creating the Animation with the Risograph
The hardest part of the production was the risograph. In the After Effects animation, the changes in the letters were seamless. But the risograph created small imperfections during the printing process. So, after I sliced the frames and imported them back into AE, the frames had small misprints which created a glitch effect. Also, some of the frames were not sliced perfectly so it created a misalignment of the letters. This made the letters almost look like they were dancing. The risograph made the video appear to be a title sequence from the early days of cinema.
Zine, Postcards, and Posters
When creating the zine, I was careful to select the paper and binding of this book. I decided to use a traditional Japanese book binding technique with a needle and thread because the method of creating the video was primarily analog. I reused the paper from the misprints from the risograph to save the paper. I used the French fold to use the back of the misprints and to create a nice texture between the pages. Two nights before the project was due, the risograph machine ran out of master rolls. So, I had to improvise and switch gears to use the laser print. I used vellum in my half title pages of my zine to replicate the risograph’s process. When printing the zines, Julia accidently printed on the side with the risograph frames, which created a cool effect on the spreads. For the first zine, I decided to print all of my spreads on top of the riso-frames. The black and white photos were originally supposed to be the master spreads for the riso-zine. I decided to also use a double french fold on the first zine to create texture on the inside of the fold. With that, I made a hardcover book due to the thickness of the book.
On the topic of reusing materials, I created a sleeve for my postcards using the same vellum on the zine. The sleeve has all of the information of the exhibition which acts both as a postcard and protective sleeve. For the postcards, I left the one side blank to see the information on the back, with the phrase “Come make some memories with us!” in the Magilio font Julia used in her animation. I reused designs from the spreads in the zine and also the letterforms from the 25 iterations onto the postcards. I created a template for the sleeves to be slightly bigger than 4x6in to accommodate for the thickness of the paper. I created the sleeves for Julia’s postcard with only the phrase “Come make some memories with us!” since her postcards had information on it.
As for the posters, I reused the letterforms from the 25 iterations and placed it on top of the risograph frames. On the last poster, I took existing misprints and placed them on top of each other.
Project Takeaways
This project was entirely experimental and incredibly labor-intensive. I really enjoyed how I utilized both analog and digital processes. I wanted to explore more into the intersection between analog and digital processes in my graphic design practice. Usually when designing a poster, I only really have to worry about the design portion of the project and the printing would be the last part. I learned how to reuse the materials in my initial drafts into my final deliverables. In this project, I had to think thoroughly from drafting the concept, drawing out the letters, and digitizing them to After Effects to the production of the risograph frames. I’m interested in exploring how I can further use the risograph in my other projects as well.
Julia’s Process
I started with the concept of looking back to a different time and place with a calm tone or reflection on childhood. The original song selection was When I Close My Eyes by potsu, a lofi genre song with slow beats. It’s a song I used to listen to frequently in high school, and I believe it invoked a feeling of nostalgia.
Michelle selected the song Time from the film Inception by Hans Zimmer. Her song invokes more of a theme around living and experiencing life. We discussed how we were more intrigued by the idea of life. With that in mind, I changed my song selection to Epiphany from the Pixar film Soul by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor. The change influenced the direction of my new theme, reflecting on life and nostalgic memories.
I developed a mood board with the previous theme of nostalgia and selected images that used hazy images of simple sceneries and grainy noise effects and styles of stretching text. The imagery developed a general language of minimalism and simplistic effects that created a calm, soft tone. With the change in themes to reflect on memories and life, I had to think about how this would change the style approach.
Design Style
The next step of the assignment was to develop 25 iterations based on the mood board and theme we selected. Because the new theme was not too different from the original, I decided to incorporate styles from the mood board and imagery seen in the Soul film. I wanted to maintain the original idea of having simple minimalist typography animations with grainy effects and simple transition flashes similar to old television crackles.
The film Soul by Pixar is an animation about a man named Peter Archer getting into an accident and ends up in the Before, a place for new souls to grow and learn about life before going to Earth. There he tries to teach a new soul about the purpose of life, but instead learns more about himself and the values of just living in the moment. The film’s message is about enjoying life to the fullest and not getting caught up in making a purpose for yourself. Given this message, I made style choices influenced by Soul’s animation style.
The main focus of my iterations was trying many types of typography manipulations using warp and blending tools. I also created outlined type inspired by the characters in Soul designed by outlined shapes. During a critique, people gravitated to the outline text style, and some enjoyed the smooth gradient colors of blue and pink. These comments helped guide the direction of my animation.
Original Animation
In the original iteration of the animation, the design was supposed to represent the flow of thought. This animation used the Distorted Fashion typeface. The appeal of this typeface was the removed sections of the type’s characteristics. Its missing information about the typeface added to the theme of lost parts of a memory. The text would appear on the frame overlapping in ways that were hard to distinguish.
I was not satisfied with this design approach. The layering was messy and didn’t add a hazy effect that imbued the idea of reliving memories, nostalgia, or reflection. Instead, it felt too sharp and rigid to match the theme and the song. There was also the issue of not knowing how to incorporate more than one color.
When introduced to the Sight of Sound project, I was excited about using risograph printing. The risograph’s printing abilities using different textures and overlapping colors to create an effect were compelling. The animation didn’t use risographs capabilities at all and didn’t match the sound and theme. After being stumped because of these issues I decided to scrap this animation and start over.
New Animation Style
Drafting the new animation, I decided to focus more on what design style I would use before how to animate the theme. I looked back at the 25 iterations of the mood board’s style, grain and noise textures, outlined text, and gradient layering. With these three main points, I created a sample of the print style. The design sample was a great map that began to guide the creation of the animation.
I selected the typeface Magilio because it has a curvy and flowy style, a better representation of how fluid thoughts can be. I wanted to pick colors that seemed soft to feel nostalgic and represent happy and sad memories. Thus the colors Fluorescent Orange (happy color) and Cornflower Blue (sad color) were selected.
The next step was to determine how to use the risograph’s ability to overlay text and take advantage of its unpredictability. Trying to emphasize the theme of memories and reflection, I decided to use soft abstract shapes combined with outlined text. In doing so the risograph would layer the images in imperfect ways, breaking up the letters. The broken up type would represent how old memories are not clear and imperfect. We only remember certain things in our memories and memories are always changing.
Printing and Assembling
The start of the printing process was the easiest part to plan. The design system didn’t require the colors to be perfectly aligned and even encouraged misalignment. I didn’t have to carefully place the grayscale images into the Risograph machine to create the master scans. The only thing that needed to be tweaked was darkening the grayscale levels for the risograph printer to register the noise and gradients.
The printer made certain areas of the gradients lighter than the original digital design. It changed the texture and visuals of the animation, but in a way that best presents the theme of reliving memories.
After the risograph printing process, I scanned the pages of frames back into the computer. Next, the scans were sliced in Adobe Photoshop into their individual frames and assembled into the final animation on Adobe AfterEffects.
The risograph affected the frame alignments, causing the animation to look shaky, similar to old television static. It also caused certain sections of text to disappear. These were successful outcomes that the riso produced out of my control. My design plan allowed the risograph to take over part of the project and create effects that didn’t hinder the theme and benefited the final animation.
Zine Design
Finalizing the animation helped determine the final designs of the other deliverables (zine, postcards, and posters). The animation design style of gradients noise and organic shapes determined the style of the zine. The content of my zine design was the writing of the process creating the risograph animation.
The important characteristics of the zine was considering how to recycle paper. Any risograph printing project results in multiple misprinted pages that aren’t used. In order to prevent paper waste in our project, Michelle and I research paper recycling methods for our zines. We learned about the French Fold technique, a page fold technique that uses one side of the paper for main content and the inside of the fold is tucked in.
The French fold allowed our zines to use the back side of the leftover pages for the zine content and to create tiny pockets in the book to reveal “sneak peek” images of the original risograph print spreads. Using this technique some of the zines have double french fold to create a flower like design.
As we were getting closer to the gallery opening there was a shortage of masters for the risograph printer preventing us from using the risograph.This forced us to print our zine on the laser. Due to a misprint on a paper with risograph printed on both sides the zine content was laser printed on top of a risograph master design. This misprint texture was a nice way to mix the laser and risograph styles together in a natural way. For the laser printed version of the zine we decided to print everything on top of risograph pages.
Postcard and Poster Designs
The postcards and posters were kept simple. The content of the postcard was using the original frame designs of the animation. The back of the postcard was advertising the opening date of the gallery, therefore the use of the frame design was meant to be a preview of the content of the animation and gallery.
The poster design has the same idea. The three poster designs are meant to be a series and acts as a preview for animation style. All shapes that were used were from shapes drawn out on a sketchbook page, the relationship of the shapes on the page created interesting forms. Using the layout of the shapes I created posters with the shapes cutting out parts of the letters in one version all in cornflower blue and the other all in fluorescent orange, each version cutting parts out in different areas with different shapes. For the third version both the cornflower blue and fluorescent orange shapes are overlapped together to make the letters legible, revealing the words “Reliving Memories”.
Flipbook
The shapes in the animation that were used were drawn in my sketchbook, because of this I wanted to create another deliverable that was more analogue. Keeping the need to use up old frames in mind, I decided to create a flip book of all frames that were used to create the risograph animation. This way I had both a digital and physical version of the animation. Due to the total amount of frames being 240, the flipbook would be too huge to flip through. As a solution the frames were split into two separate flipbooks of 120 frames each.
Final Critique
During our final critique in Gallery 5, Julia and I explained our thought process on how the project progressed. We showed all of our deliverables and highlighted certain aspects of our booklets. We passed our deliverables around the class. Morgan Moscinski (Guest Critic) and Krystyn applauded us for the craftsmanship of our zines and postcards. Morgan connected our project to a project she worked on during her undergraduate years regarding memories. Professor Grady was interested in how we can expand our projects even further to the digital realm.
PROFESSOR GRADY
It would be interesting to see how you can turn the letterforms in your animation into an interactive installation. Maybe you can assign each letter to a key and the visitors can play with it.
DENNIS TRAN:
The shapes touching sort of remind me of brain neurons linking, sending signals to one another about the nostalgic moments that come about. The colors do bring back some sort of nostalgic feeling since we associate colors with certain memories. It was very cool to have a flipbook as a keepsake for this moment in the far future. It will definitely bring back some nostalgic feelings once you pick it back up again.
MAX HUANG-DEBOW:
I think the grid pattern for your animation was a nice choice! It’s organization would be rather static normally, but with the RISO it has a weird shifting effect that feels very nostalgic. I think that the misprint of the book adds a nice touch, it’s a process of the RISO! I also used velum in my project, I did not consider it being used to replicate the RISO, very cool effect. Using it on the postcards was also a great idea, it protects and stylizes them, as well as drawing people to them. Nice job adapting to not having access to the RISO as well.
Exhibition
The exhibition opened on Nov.11 at 6:00 pm and it was a success. It was very nice to see everyone’s work in one space while celebrating it with other people. I do wish we were able to put the exhibition up longer for a week. But overall, it was a successful first exhibition for the senior class and it definitely prepared us for our senior thesis show.
NICOLE CHEN (Visitor)
The opening show was amazing! I did think that the show could have been organized a little better. The space was a little overwhelming and I didn’t know which project belonged to who. I wish there were labels to show who the designers were.
KATRINA LIU (Visitor)
I thought the exhibition was sick! I loved seeing everyone’s work and the range of styles and techniques. My only critique is that I wish there was a description on the wall describing what the exhibition was about. I only knew about the project because Michelle and Julia were describing it to me prior to the opening show.
