First Post

The purpose of this blog is to document my progress on my thesis project that I am completing for my Masters of Art & Design. It is going to be sort of a conglomeration of my notes and thoughts, progress on my write up, art, and writing about various sources I read. I’ve never created a blog before so this process will be new for me as well.

I have been working on crafting my project statement for the last few weeks. I’ve decided to go in a direction that is more of a fun passion project instead of a serious, change the world type of project. I’ve always been fascinated with surrealist stop motion animation. One of my favorite projects I did as an undergrad was for a history of animation course. For our final project, we were supposed to pick a historical style / piece of animation and create a short homage to it. I did a short animation in the vein of the Brothers Quay. It was not the easiest project to do. I had to construct the environment and puppet in my apartment and transport it to the campus which was in downtown Pittsburgh and use a capture stand meant for hand drawn animation (turned sideways) to do it in one afternoon. I had a lot of fun doing it and I always wanted to return to the subject matter. Why not for my Masters project

This project is going to be a little more involved than that. Since my undergrad, I’ve developed a lot of skills outside of animation – I’m very proficient at photogrammetry and I’ve been a lead artist on Unity VR games. I’m going to combine the two to make an interactive VR piece using photogrammetry to capture the physical set.

My longer problem statement I’ve been working on crafting for this project is this:

Historically, surrealist stop motion animation engages its audience in exploring concepts dealing with perception and reality using a bizarre, dream-like aesthetic by manipulating physical objects one frame at a time. 

A limitation of the current medium is that, despite its kinetic nature, engagement with the piece is static. The viewer is a passive participant, locked into the creator’s perspective. By capturing traditionally constructed pieces using photogrammetry and placing them in a game engine, the tangible quality of the medium can be preserved while allowing viewers to engage with the narrative as avatars through VR headsets.

Animation has always been progressive in using technology and has embraced surrealism since its beginning. By utilizing new technology, this work aims to push the boundaries of the medium, blurring the line between the viewer and the surreal, artist-created world, demonstrating to artists new ways to express themselves.

We were encouraged to use AI to help us generate visuals as we work through our pre production and I will include those on this blog, but I will make sure they are tagged as AI generated. I know there is a lot of controversy surrounding the use of AI art right now, but I don’t plan to have any AI generated art in my piece. This is the concept piece I generated using Midjourney (and photoshopping it to get it closer to what I wanted)

For now, I am calling it “The Dollhouse”, but I haven’t settled on what the actual setting of the piece is going to be. As a bonus, here is my undergrad stop motion piece: