It’s a bright and sunny, but cold, day in Camberwell.

The residency starts today, and we all meet up in the Fine Art Digital Studio at Camberwell for introductions. Being part of the online cohort this is the first time to meet each other in the real world. The London-based cohort are there too. As are some of the second-year students.

The plan for today. It’s an Animation Takeover, using Adobe After Effects for pure digital animation, and Dragon Frame for analog stop-frame animation.

We’re divided into small groups, and I am working with Jiaqi Huang, Yi Liu, Blanca Ulloa, and Philip Spooner. In the morning our group will be working in the digital real with Adobe After Effects, and after lunch in the analog realm with Dragon Frame. One twist is that we will start or continue the work with another group, and our efforts will be compiled together.

Adobe After Effects

As everybody would be working on a computer in Adobe After Effects we decided that each of us would work on our own thing, and hope that it would come together in a cohesive manner.

As I have never used After Effects before, I opted to go for something very simple, and inspired by my recent seeing of Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture. I created an image (in Adobe PhotoShop) that contained colored outlines of geometric shapes that After Effects would then animate by applying simple translation and rotation effects.

geometrics

Stop-Frame

To make stop-frame animation we’re using Dragon Frame and a rostrum camera.

The Big Bang Theory

And here’s the result of three hours of work:

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