Pardon my lengthy post ahead as I did not have much progress till now, and this will help me present tomorrow so i’ll… dump my things here….

Two weeks ago, i hit rock-bottom. I thought I had a direction to go to after the coincidental good results during week 7 where I had accidentally created a zoom-in effect on the flowers which were really, really pretty. However, I lost that file and had to redo all over again (I still have the video below though) and that was when I hit rock bottom.

I felt that I am trying to rush things too quickly as I was aware that I had a dance concert coming up next week (not relevant but I think that was one of the reasons haha) and I just wanted to catch up on my studies, and particularly such a heavy project like MAN so I do not fall behind (actually I am already am for some modules – particularly drawn animation).

I had an initial concept in mind where there is a garden with all sorts of flowers i can find from paint effects (with literally trees and all), but it didn’t work out so well no matter how much i tried to arrange them in the way i want, unlike the last time i did it.

These are some stills i captured while documenting my process. (AND MY HANDWRITING’S RIDICULOUS??? IM SO SORRY??? AS WELL AS MY SKETCHES WITH ALL THE BOUNCING BALLS??????) Some of the comments were for week 7 as well though.

These were…. OK but i didn’t like how structured it was. I wanted it too look more random and the colors more in harmony. If i were to arrange them randomly, It would look chaotic And i didn’t like that. Also it looked empty. I wanted to make use of all the space in the media wall. Right now the negative space with the flowers was perhaps 50-50. Not nice at all, not nice.

This was the progress for week 7. I liked how the colors blend well together. Perhaps it might be because the arrangement in week 8 did not take into account the color wheel. Maybe it was because there was too many flowers.

I took a step back afterwards and looked at my inspiration again, Jennifer Steinkamp. She might not have done it using Maya (which no one was sure of, even her portfolio does not state much), but I can at least study how she plans her works, her flowers and colours used, though there was some difficulties that I have thought that I would have encountered.

Taking a step back

So i went back to look at Jennifer Steinkamp’s work again, probably for the entire of week 8? Since i wanted to observe even further.

I wanted to have this clustered, close-up effect like Rapunzel. However, her work is in portrait while MAN wall is in landscape. The first thing I have to think about is, how do I plan to make it a landscape?

1. Make 1 and duplicate in in aftereffects

   • This was one of the ideas that would be easier to execute, but it would ultimately lack in vairety???? So i would need variety at the beginning

2. Draw many more and make do the close up thing at the end

   • This was more ambitious but the effect would be nicer. But I don’t have to sleep when it is rendering. I’ll relive those 3D Production days again!!!!

3. Do a separate film as the second part of the clip and transit it from the first close-up clip.

   • Which really, to be honest, does not sit well with me. I tried doing that already but it looked weird.

 

–edit: ok i found a landscape one though the height is still larger than the MAN wall’s and the ratio is more like 16:9 in contrary to the MAN’s

Rapunzel 13, 2010.

From there, and the book I have studied, I have observed that the flowers were arranged NOT from the same plane, but rather, DIFFERENT PLANES. The values of the y-axis were different and not a zero all the time, hence creating a variation in height. Also, she has only used i think a total of 2 types of flowers for each installation, unlike me where i used 1381748234815374239372643294234 flowers…. no wonder I hit a dead end. Ina also told me to use lesser types of flowers.

Here is a close up i took from my book. There were many variations made by her, and I love the magical effect it has even on just the book.

During the remaining time i had, i was playing around with different type of 2-3 flowers together. The featured image was one of them. It was an improvement but it was lacking.