LEARNING JOURNAL

My inspiration for this project came from Drew Tyndell – https://www.drewtyndell.com – and a short animation that seems to be credited to him, however I cannot confrim that:

The “beef and potatoes” content of my work consists of graphics I produced earlier in the year using a technique called circuit bending. This was a processes where by I took a digital camera – in this case a simple usb webcam – and I interrupted the signals between the cameras sensor and the image processing chip. This is a technique pioneered by Reed Ghazala, who is often credited with its invention.

I took this camera and created a feedback loop by using my laptop as a live monitor for its output, then pointing the camera at the laptop. Looping the data from camera to laptop and back.

I then took one of these outputs into Photoshop and began to “cutout” shapes from the image.

Once I had these cutout, I took them into After Effects and began to place them where there were in the original image but on a blank slate. I am sure there are easier ways to this, however I just imported the original image and laid them over top, once done I removed the background layer.

I then in time with the music, manually keyed in each “segment” to come in on the beat. This took some time, however since the first 8 bars are the same melody I was able to copy and paste the key frames and reuse them for new sequences.

I carried on this process for, as I said, the first 8 bars or so. Then I went back into photoshop and began to cut the original imagine into a grid, creating many rectangle cutouts.

I then used the same sequence of keyframes to creating a strobing affect of the images that with such bright colours I think worked well.

You can sort of see in the “gallery” layout the way that the squares are cut but the patterns persist through the “borders” or “margins”.

I think wrapped up the piece by exploring after affects image warping effects to create fluidity in the image.

Below is the final piece…

Wrap UP

I really surprised my self with this project, I don’t usually find Adobe software, or other GUI based programs as intuitive or exciting to work in. However, here I really enjoyed it. I had lots of fun working between photoshop and After Effects and also learning new techniques in both. I may not have been going about stings in the most efficent way so that would be best next steps here – stop “bodging” things together –