Nathan had some interesting ideas for animation for the Oil project:
At some point it might be cool to bring in huge -
takes up the whole screen - font that shinks or bleeds
back so you can read it. Varying textures and colors
on the fonts. Black font - like oil - w/ liquid
effects would be good, I think. Crumbling-to-dust
and/or wind effects....
Meeting with WaKOW
Mindy: slowly dissolve photo into a paint-by-numbers with text instead of numbers
Nathan: make images out of smaller images—each photo standing for a pixel in larger image. Viewer could control zooming in and out.
See www.photomontage.com
Tasks:
Deadline:
Have something to share by Feb 11 at 2 pm.
Today I took a step toward making the text an image, in the vein of Charles Olson and Susan Howe, by arranging the words and letters on the stage (interesting semantics from Flash) and then splitting them, rotating them and scattering them.
….Or not….Maybe I won’t be able to import the movies into each other. When I tried it, it just put the movie in its separate layer without sound. I guess I’ll go back to the idea of combining the scenes under the umbrella of a master file, probably the Tulsita title page that I made as one of my first attempts at Flash, and have them linked with buttons that move to the next poem. Each poem will also then need a play button that the viewer will push to start the sound and animation. I will begin working on that while I am waiting for the “homework” to come in from the rest of the Wakowites.
I was able to get a simple push button to work so that it loaded a movie when I pressed it. This is probably the solution to follow. I think it would make it easier if I broke up the scenes into separate files.
One of the things I considered today was the speed of the animation on Death. I’m not sure I want to leave lines static long enough for people to read them completely because that would imply that the line are somehow aesthetic objects worthy of consideration. Part of keeping a fragment a fragment is not just text in space but also in time. A glance at a line is a way of making a fragment, since the sense can’t be fully garnered in the time given.
Messing around with the program after I had gotten to the ¼ mark on Death, I tried the “Import” command to see what would happen. Like publishing, it took a long time, which probably means it imports all the symbols, frames, tweens, and other data from the movie complete. So I now think that it won’t be a problem to have it run as a single movie without the need for actionscripts, etc.
While meditating today, I got some ideas for integrating photos into this movie. Although I think I want to submit it somewhere without photos, I’d like to continue working on integrating the photos we took at the time we were writing these poem and making the sound.
There are several possibilities:
At any rate, I could create a master movie in which the photo animation appears concurrently next to the text animation in a larger window (esp for #2 above). Or, the slide shows could be linked to the text animations within a master movie if they ran sequentially. However, I really like the idea of combining both #3 and one of the other options because it would make the piece more interactive and allow us to utilize more of the photos we took.
In the meantime, I should ask Mindy to convert all the photos we used in the Art Show slide show to PNG files (I think). Check on that.
Oh, that reminds me—I promised to host the next House Art Show, so I better get on that—we should hold it on the anniversary of that last in my house.
Knowing Nathan, he’ll ask me how this animation or the principles I’m using to animate the poem, relate to
To go over it again: The questions we are asking again and again in this project are
How do you put text into time like sound?
How do you represent music as an image?
How do you convert sound into text?
How does an image become musical?
How do you blend text and image?
How is an image translated into words?
Of course, the last one is how can all three—text, image, sound—work together seamlessly?
Don’t forget movies: Fantastic
I’m now thinking that using only the words from Death/Metal would be too limiting and too much like the previous poem. Outside of the animation, the idea is the same—there are other poems ‘trapped’ inside this one. If I used words/letters from all the other poems too, it might give me some more leeway. Words from other poems could come from outside the text.
To make new combinations of the words from the entire quartet, I made a list of all the words in a Word file, separated by commas, and then pasted them into Excel, where I could sort them alphabetically, each word to a cell. The procedure created an interested array of words across rows and down columns. I got some pretty amazing results, like this:
Nihilists fiat about the crap, if in thing of Hoppin truck then rising:
Oh Year’s is skin and can in my
it believes is townswept, find The and know
sun, as they believes, hoped water need not the oneself, the it—
Day wonderful steel lawn, believe and make it old, kind loving
you dry of believe, the above, about skin can, if crazy, think
New warm, Lower watered oil of—of Death—away, over and
within gin, scarfing everything, waiting days, hands, and for one say.
Canals my how But here when doesn’t riff-raff That city—by any
Then metal—know born The Tulsa in the one think severed.
Do shakes which the shake Satanic Model They else up bounds off
the you, dirt biggest sense—it—something—death severely of newly
the mainstream canal in You type tolerate of be, must like go, one in
outside
submerged a you, one’s, if dirt, you, my difference on Satan, the End.
Dip it, middle Caboose, honestly, that they little toe scarification
from the Dig doesn’t matter more sand, chokes it, wings it.
And that poem I simply transcribed from the Death/Metal column, which got cast in that arrangement when I sorted the first (or first two) columns alphabetically. Anyway, the concordance really makes it easier to take the words out of their original contexts and create new, interesting combinations.
The guys got their nets to me today, so I decided to start working on Dig Down instead of Death/Metal. It shouldn’t take me long, I don’t think.
As for Death/Metal, I was thinking that some of the alignments of words could be scattered like a Howe poem, not always in prose lines. Each of the poems is linear, so some scattering might be nice.
I’m running into some problems with the size of the file, I think. As I was trying to animate the beginning of scene 3, Dig Down Deeper, it was taking a few seconds to turn each word into a symbol. I soon discovered that this was because there were already so many symbols in the library. So, I decided to put scene three in its own movie, but I’m not sure how I will link it to the other two yet. I might make each poem its own movie and link them together within a larger “parent movie” (see Ch 12, Flash 5! pp 358-383). If I do this, I may have to have a button that would bring up the next movie, rather than them playing successively. I think it important, however, to retain the idea of the poem staying static without sound until the view pushes a “play” button. We may just have to add an extra step. In some ways, this could be a good thing, making the movie a bit more interactive, allowing the viewer to go in any order she chooses, as will the Action Yes html version. But it may not be good for an installation where it has to play successively.
Worked late last night and am 2/3 finished.
I found out this morning that Roy Clark is from
The animation on Modest has been basically a four-step process: 1) insert a keyframe in each layer/letter where I want the dissolve to begin and then one frame later in the layer below, 2) placing keyframes at the end of the fade (approx 20 frames or 1 sec. away), 3) changing each character into a symbol at the end keyframe and then changing the tint to white, and 4) putting motion tween the two keyframes. For some of the fade, I timed it with the voice-over, but that ends basically in the middle of the piece, with the remainder fading at a very steady, mechanical rate.
I’m hoping that the mechanistic fade will draw attention and enact the reverse of the kind of electronic mail composition referred to in the poem. We use computers so often to generate and disseminate texts, not to erase them.
As I’ve been working on the flash animation, I’ve been trying to figure out how the animation fits with the (
The movement in Big Box Block not only reinforces that but is less liquid and more airy, like the blowing wind that haunts that poem.
Death/Metal will work a little more like light or fire, flickering into new arrangments as the poem itself is consumed. The Dig poem, dwelling on the earth, will shudder and shift like a quake.
Although I hate it, I think I’m going for the four elements concept quite heavily….should find a way to deconstruct that expectation that since there are four, it must be a (seasonal) cycle like many other poetic quartets.
At this point, I’ve animated half of the poem.
I’ve been learning Flash over the Winter Break and have learned enough to animate “the big box block” like I want it. Instead of trying to duplicate my animation from ppt, I used a more reactive approach, focusing on the music and on the composition that was emerging (both in terms of shape of the poem and meaning).
I found that I was able to use animation to mimic, emphasize, and contradict the soundtrack. First, I could make animations that corresponded in some direct way to the meaning of the sound. Second, the animation could enact representationally the meaning of the words. And third, the animation could be used to draw attention to the sounds by happening both in synch with the sounds or not (I found that the sounds stood out more sometimes when there was no animation happening concurrently).
The goal of this experiment is to start with the “traditional poem” (whatever that might mean: left justified margins, jagged right margins, stanzas, use of fragment, etc) and to “undo” or deconstruct that construct using the sound and animation. The ultimate goal of this project is the same as our Wakow problem—how to integrate sound, text and image. Although this particular manifestation lacks images, it attempts to make an image of the poem itself using animation. The words become the ‘actors’ in the movie, calling attention to the materiality of language and the relation of text to sound.
Each poem will have the following animation scheme:
