charlotte-e-carpenter

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Final Project Synopsis

Leisurely is a playful and humorous short film about "laziness" and the liberating results of refusals of productivity. The story takes place in an apartment and the main character is a woman who is simply trying to enjoy a relaxing day. In each scene, inanimate objects and "magical" apparitions attempt to force the woman to face what she should be accomplishing for the day (finding a job, for one), but she evades responsibility at every turn, choosing to escape into daydreams and ultimately embracing the peace and self-acceptance she finds there. My visual approach is the animation technique known as pixelation. The final scene of the film transitions into a fully illustrated tableau of the woman's daydreams. The sequence of scenes is as follows:

A sleeping woman is awakened as her sleeping mask and sheets are removed. A paper plane flies into scene with the message: "Find work." She tosses the note aside and sits up. A pair of shoes attempt to put themselves on her feet but she kicks them away and heads to the kitchen.

In the kitchen, the woman eagerly reaches for a box of donuts but is foiled when the donuts transform into a bunch of raw kale. Disgusted, she tosses the kale in the trash and reaches for a pint of ice cream in the refrigerator instead. As she leaves the kitchen, word magnets on her refrigerator form a message: "You're going to regret that"

On the couch in the living room, the woman begins to light up a joint but it "magically" transforms into a party horn with a pop of confetti. Another note appears amongst the confetti: "It's your dad's birthday. Call him." Again, she ignores the note.

Laying on the couch, the woman reaches for her remote control but it evades her reach, eventually escaping her grasp and making its way to the windowsill where it opens the window and leaps out. The woman looks on in horror.

With no TV for distraction, the woman reaches for her phone but it instantly turns into a literal brick with the message: "Don't even think about it"

At a loss for distraction, the woman picks up one of the magazines from her coffee table. The magazine snaps shut and cut-out letters begin to form a message: "Why are you so lazy?" The woman mouths, "I'm not lazy, I'm unlearning capitalism!" (These words appear as subtitles.) The magazine letters rearrange themselves: "Whatever helps you sleep at night."

The woman reclines back in the couch and drifts away in daydreams, the subjects of which appear in illustrated animations around her head.

In the final scene, the woman (now in rotoscoped animation) is in bed again with the sleeping mask, a sly smile visible. The final message of the film animates out filling the frame: HOW I SLEEP AT NIGHT KNOWING I AM LAZY.

The end!

I’ve secured an actor to play the protagonist and will be shooting this Saturday in my home.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

WEEK 9: Video Collage

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WEEK 8: Collage/Character Animation 

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WEEK 9: Reflection

Wong Ping's "Jungle of Desire" is a strange and titillating work of illustrated animation that relays a tale of marital dissatisfaction, sex, love and jealously. Narrative aside, I became fascinated by his completely unique visual style, which defies easy description. Ping renders his scenes in gradients of oversaturated colors, angular shapes, and all manner of digitally rendered anomalies. His characters have only vaguely human features and the motion is jerky and unrefined. All of it comes together to create a chaotic and destabilized world of shapes, sounds and colors that is only vaguely recognizable as our own. I appreciate this work for its total originality. It seems easy to fall into certain established visual styles within animation, so to see something so idiosyncratic is a breath of fresh air.

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WEEK 8: Reflection

This week I was struck by the piece "Patchwork Man" by David Marato. Marato executed this bizarre and unsettling character animation by digitally stitching together different elements of a man's face – hair, eyes, nose and mouth. While these parts and pieces shift around messily in time with the man's story, his body remains fixed in bed. The voiceover features multiple narrators, lending to the impression of a highly fragmented and disturbed subjectivity. The story itself is a man's retelling of an accident that profoundly altered his understanding of his own life. He realizes that his sense of self was built on unoriginality – everything he previously considered to be his was in fact only borrowed from somewhere else. Marato's visual approach is thus perfectly suited to illustrate this tale. Collage is a technique that takes appropriated parts to build a whole. Seen in animated form, the results are an ever-changing Frankenstein of an individual that challenges our sense of a coherent being.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

WEEK 7: Reflection

"MODERN" by Mirai Mizue had me mesmerized this week. In this short animated film, Mizue uses nothing but geometric shapes to create a sprawling landscape of optical illusions that grow and transform before our eyes. He says he was inspired by the works of the graphic artist MC Escher, and that very much comes through. Though the work is 2D, Mizue is playing with three-dimensional concepts that boggle the mind and eye into seeing what is not actually there. Though there is no narrative per se, I imagined that the endless repetition and permutation of rectangles represented the expansion of an urban metropolis. Within the kaleidoscope of shapes and colors I spotted scaffolding, high-rise buildings, and skylines. The eerie ambient soundtrack contributes a slightly dystopian quality to the work suggesting that these shapes and forms may not be what they appear.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

Signals: How Video Transformed the World

I was really impressed by the Signals exhibit at MoMA, so much so that I decided to purchase the accompanying exhibition catalogue to dive further into the works on display and gain some context for the overall curation. In the foreword, I was surprised to learn that Signals is actually the largest exhibition of video at the museum to date, though MoMA has been presenting works of video art since 1968. When I first entered the exhibition, I felt slightly overwhelmed by all the eye-catching screens begging for my attention, a feeling that mimics the way media operates more generally in our social media-driven attention economy. I had to be very intentional about taking each work in one-at-a-time and reading all provided text to really understand the overall theme guiding the exhibition. There seemed to be a general trajectory of video as it grew alongside and in opposition to broadcast television, and later to video's deployment in the era of smartphones and social media. Throughout the show, issues of surveillance, the utopian potential of video, and the way documentation shapes historical memory seemed to be particularly relevant. The catalogue argues that video is essentially part of the air we breathe:

  "Video is everywhere and nowhere at once. It surrounds us as signals and waves and data flows, but it remains ephemeral, shape-shifting, endlessly dispersed and dislocated... Video has arguably become the dominant mode of communication."

  I thought Signals was very effective at conveying this sense of video as an omnipresent force in modern life, but also as a medium ripe for artistic interventions. One of the pieces that left a big impression on me was Dara Birnbaum's Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission. In this five channel video installation, Birnbaum repurposes televised footage of the events surrounding the student-led, pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989. The extent of what I know about this historical moment can be summed up by the famous "Tank Man" photograph. In the photo, a protestor stands in front of a line of tanks exiting the square after a violent crackdown on protestors. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic photos of all time. While the photo certainly captures a powerful moment, it almost erases other memories of the protests through its very ubiquity. I think Birnbaum was attempting to push against this tendency to accept a single perspective on history by instead offering images that are fractured, slowed-down and difficult to process. The four LCD Screens the images play on are so tiny that you have to stand very close to them in order to see. From the catalogue, I found out that the fifth monitor randomly samples images from the four monitors through a surveillance switcher. Taken together, the work asks us to re-consider events that were poorly understood by Americans and suppressed by the Chinese state. Even though TV broadcast may have given us access to these images, what meaning was able to be garnered from them? What lessons were learned? How is history altered by visual documentation? This last question in particular lingered with me long after my visit.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

I made this day-to-night animation loop based on a design by illustrator George Greaves.

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WEEK 6: Logo Animation Exercise 

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WEEK 4: Reflection

This week I was really blown away by the music video, “Her Morning Elegance” by Oren Lavie. The pixelation animation concept was simple but well executed. From a birds-eye-view, we watch a woman go through an entire journey in her bed, from climbing stairs made of pillows to swimming undersea with sock fish. I thought the creator brought a lot of whimsey and magic to everyday objects and I came to understand the video as a projection of the woman’s dreams. I think animation is a particularly good medium for depicting dream-states, or at least making the viewer question whether what they are watching is based in reality or not. 

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WEEK 4: Stop Motion

This will be a cutaway shot for my longer final project. 

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WEEK 5: After Effects Introduction

For this exercise, I re-mixed a toy advertisement from the ‘70s.

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WEEK 5: Reflection

Even though it should come with a strobe warning, I really enjoy Gasper Noe’s title sequence from Into the Void. He might be one of the only directors I can think of who utilizes a signature opening credits style across his films. Climax has a very similar sequence the uses bold, colorful, stylized lettering that flashes on the screen to music: https://youtu.be/0woQ9AZyeZI

It’s also worth noting that in Climax, this sequence doesn’t come until 47 minutes into the film! At that point, they’re so unexpected it’s almost jarring. Taking into consideration all the aesthetic choices Noe made in that film, I’m sure that was his intent. Where you decide to place the credits in your film can have a big effect on the overall viewing experience. 

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WEEK 3: Storyboarding for Stop Motion

My idea (which I will probably build upon for my final project) mixes reality footage with moments of stop motion. A woman’s attempt to enjoy a lazy day is foiled at every turn by surreal happenings.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

WEEK 3: Reflection

STOP! m o t i o n by Carla Weindler really captured my imagination this week. I loved the handmade aesthetic that incorporated common craft materials like glitter, confetti, ribbon and tinsel. It was like the creator raided a Party City to make this film. I also liked the use of live-action footage and several moments of hand-drawn animation, which made it more like a hybrid piece rather than pure stop-motion. It was fun to watch and it looked fun to produce. While I think many animators strive to make things that make viewers ask, “how did they do that!?” I am a fan of works that aren’t extremely technically ambitious, instead leaning into the imperfections of the animation method to add a sense of whimsey and playfulness to the final work. I’m feeling inspired to make something in this vein for my stop motion project!

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

WEEK 1: Reflection

This week I really enjoyed the short animation Vovô by Luis Stockler. It exemplifies a very pared-down, minimalist style that I’m fond of in animation. The drawing style is quite simplistic, almost childlike, and each frame uses the least amount of visual information to support the voiceover narrative. For example, the hands of a clock moving instead of an entire clock, a lamp on a bedside illuminating a small corner of a black background, parts of a body but never the whole. It keeps the viewer engaged my letting their imagination fill in the rest of each scene. Not only is this an affective means of storytelling, it saves the animator a lot of time by not having to draw unnecessary details! Often less is more.

[charlotte-e-carpenter]

WEEK 1: Flipbook Animation