Elaborate part 2 – Walk
After feedback from the first tutorial I started working with some animations.
The first animation was a bit messy trial of different ways of breaking down the experience of a simple action – for example going for a walk. I was working on all the parts simultaneously in one file, just trying every idea that crossed my mind and seeing how it developed.
The methods that came out in the process were
- alternating visuals with sounds
- showing the motion of surroundings passed by
- flashes of close-ups
When looking for references, in one article I found a Honda commercial:
What occurred to me was that type can also give the impression of space and motion, and wanted to try it out with the conversations recorded from the Investigate project:
To me this video had an abstract feel because of simplistic indication of people passed by – not showing them or surroundings but just giving a hint about where they are, in which direction they’re moving, and what they are talking about.
This gave a strange insight into fragments of their lives, some small everyday problems. In result, the video focused less on the experience of the person walking, and more on the people passed by.
An interesting reference I came across that touched on this change of focus was an essay ‘A Temporary Cessation of Habit: On experiencing Landscape’ by Tadeusz Sławek.
Just like Andy Rutledge in his text about Gestalt theory of perception, Sławek says:
Reality is imag-ed (which has nothing to do with its being imag-ined), assembled from components […]. This IMAGEworld comes into being when […] we create series of new objects that are based on their own image and likeness.
But what interested me the most in his text was the alternative way of perceiving which he calls OUT-LINEimage as opposed to IMAGEworld (I’m not sure about the accuracy of this translation from Polish, but since the magazine is printed in both Polish and English, the quotes I’m using here are from the published translation).
An OUT-LINEimage comes into being when I suddenly find myself at the edge of hitherto familiar world, which has to date positioned me – or so it seemed to me – in its main stream.
I experience the landscape as OUT-LINEimage in a completely different order than the IMAGEworld. The analytical way of looking, which gradually leads to a synthesis of the entire view, cedes ground to the detail, which fills more and more of the field vision. I thus see somehow differently than I am accustomed, meaning that the ‘absolute focus’ of my attention is no longer on ‘the synthesis, the All, the whole’, for now ‘the detail becomes the All’.
In my view, the method of showing conversations forced the beholder to somehow engage with snippets of daily lives happening around the walking person. It gave not only the impression of someone going for a walk but shifted the focus to that drama of everyday life, which can sometimes be so immersive that you find yourself forgetting about everything else for a moment.
I gave it a try and pushed a bit further, this time adding the impression of lurking inside peoples houses in the evening, in hope that it would make the viewer immerse a bit more in what’s happening around.
The feedback I got suggested either fragmentising the ‘input’ even more, not to make it so literal, or explore further the use of kinetic typography.