A Sense of Aliveness

A Sense of Aliveness draws inspiration from Futurism, an artistic movement that started in Italy in the early 20th century. According to dear old Wikipedia, Futurism emphasizes “dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.” Professor Park describes Futurism as “artists [experimenting] with moving images and [expanding] the potential of cinematic arts.” The specific definition of Futurism is not necessarily the point; the real aim of a Futuristic project is to give the things we love life. When I was contemplating this project, I was stumped on what to do. What did I love enough to give it life? I then remembered a poster I had hanging on the wall of my dorm room, Portrait of a Young Italian Woman with “Puck” the Dog by Thérèse Schwartze. I love this painting, I think it’s gorgeous, so I decided to give it life. Upon animating it, I looked deeper into the artist and discovered just how cool she is. Schwartze was a Dutch portrait painter in the late 19th century. She was a female artist, which was very unusual at the time, but she became very popular because of her portraits. They’re all stunning pieces, so I did a series of animations of some of my favorite works of hers for my GIF animations. Inspired by the animation of oil paintings, I did my Muybridge horse animation with an overlay of oil paint edits. However, the true inspiration for my Muybridge horse GIF is the Headless Horseman, because I was just really into folklore when I was animating it. For my longer animation, I was inspired by the editing style of mixed-media edits for music videos. A few weeks ago, while scrolling through social media, I saw a clip of someone showing off their animation of a music video. I thought this was so cool, and I wanted to try this out for myself. So I clipped a segment of my solo from when I was in the musical Godspell my Junior year of high school, split it up into frames, printed out the frames, painted on the frames, took photos of the frames, and then imported them into our video software to create a mixed media edit of myself. Was it time-consuming? Maybe. Could I have done something similar and probably neater through a digital animation program? Most likely. But I wanted the effect of hand-painted edits on printed photos; it gives it an old-fashioned film reel effect that I really like. It’s not exactly linear or abstract storytelling, but it’s me reviving clips of myself when I was younger and turning them into an art piece that I feel encapsulates who I am.