Assignment 3 - "Emergency Sprinkles"

For this piece I really took kate's instructions to heart and played with my footage and premiere. I didn't really have a narrative in mind when I began collecting clips, but I had a few ideas in mind.
I noticed after the fact that a lot of the things I filmed happened to be things loosely intended to make me more comfortable. Besides the thumbtacks- that was mostly fore aesthetic. I call the sprinkles my "emergency sprinkles"- hence the title- for when I have cake that has no sprinkles or vanilla yogurt. I filmed tums and sleep aid pills the same way, and those tend to help me with the daunting task of falling asleep. My walk to class is included because I spend what feels like most of my day walking through the woods to and from class. This time is spent thinking and listening to music, which is sometimes therapeutic. I layered film of my pretty fairy lights because it gives the room a calming atmosphere, and I prefer dark places to light places. All these things, filmed in an intimate way, make everything warm and comfy.

I'm not sure where I got the idea to put my camera in a bowl of sprinkles and shake it around a bit, but I love the way that turned out. I set the blending mode to overlay on the footage of the sprinkles over every video clip so that you see both at the same time but not through each other. Parts of the video actually have it set to "pin light" so that the sprinkles look more liquid-y. When I filmed my lights I had a piece of saran wrap over the lens and expo marker colored on two of the edges so it has a faux vignette look. The sound was collected while I was filming, and I later removed it from the clips and mixed it in premiere. It's mostly the noises of sprinkles in a bowl and f.r.i.e.n.d.s playing in the background slowed down or reversed.

When we started talking about experimental film, I thought of Yayoi Kusama's early brush with film and her piece "self-obliteration". (I did extensive research on her life and work for John's class last semester, and revealed that I am a massive Kusama nerd. She's terrific.). In the film she paints her trademark polka-dots on naked people, dogs, film strips of buildings, and herself. The film overall is really poor film quality, but super hippy-dippy-trippy and defiantly homemade. So when I thought about getting experimental with film, she was my inspiration. My sprinkles were sort of an homage to her polkadots, and the fairy lights are like the club lights she filmed. The sound in her film was weird and distant, and mine is very abstract and detached. It wasn't intentional, I just noticed how parallel they kind of are as I was working. Minus the nudity, of corse.

The feeling of my piece is either really nostalgic and positive, or like a sinister drug trip. It can go either way. I like how it turned out looking like a home movie; very shaky and kind of crappy quality. The overlapping of the sprinkles and the pills/tacks, sort of make it seem like they're chasing each other. It reminds me of waves coming in at the beach. Like a swirly vortex of candy and lights.

-Avery McGrail

Nancy Floyd: Weathering Time

Weathering Time is comprised of a collection of black and white, self-portrait photographs of the Artist Nancy Floyd. The pictures were taken daily over the span of thirty years and all together they show the slow progression of time. 

She's pretty much centered and her whole body is visible, in every photo. Each picture presented in the work is unique, but because of the way she composes them they all tend  to look uniform and cohesive. Some of the collections have themes such as "misbehaving pets", where her pets in the photos are moving or interrupting the picture. The one I included above features the evolution of the typewriter into a mac computer; this shows the passage of time technologically as well as her age. Two of the pieces are pictures only taken during a short period of her life (like a month or two) and these really show how certain events effect her appearance and whether or not she could take a photo.  I also liked how she kept the blank spots in her film when she didn't take a photo because it keeps the eye moving. Also, I appreciate how none of her photos are edited because it shows how real and human this process was; there's mistakes, blurs, and sometimes half of the picture is missing. 

To me, this show is very raw. It's a simple idea; she just takes pictures of herself everyday for thirty years. But what came out of that is so complex and emotional to grasp. She has catalogued her life basically. What she wore, her family, her house, her job; she captured how she and everything around her has changed in a simple, raw way. During her artist talk she talked about the future of her project and how it in some ways reveals her mortality. In the progression of photos you see her age over thirty years, and it was sad to realize that she can't keep taking pictures forever. You don't really think about the artist as part of the art (even though they are the biggest part of the art!). They're the behind-the-scenes workers. Honestly, for some of the pieces I forgot that the woman in the photographs is the artist as well as the subject. I agree with what professor Thrasher said about him feeling like he knew her just by looking at her work. It's very personal and intimate, like a scrapbook.

I had the opportunity to talk to Nancy a little before the show opened, and even though I'm probably the most awkward little pipsqueak on the planet, she was so kind and warm. I told her about how I filmed parts for the next assignment using sprinkles in a bowl, saran wrap, and my camera to make a trippy surreal effect, and much to my surprise she went "That sounds FANTASTIC!". She told me about Cal-arts and how it's the place for animators. It was cool to feel like my art making made another artist excited, even for a little bit. I mean, her work definitely inspired me, so after meeting her I was stoked! Moral of the story: talk to artists. She was full of great advice on moving for school, being an art student, and creating art. Basically she's awesome.

Assignment 2: Breathe

I call this piece "breathe".
The sounds I used to create this piece are:
the tiny clock from my bathroom
the strings of my ukulele above the knot
keyboard typing
Beyonce's performance at the grammy's (reversed)
book pages being flipped through
my violin strings (plucked by my playing hand)
the washing machine
and my yawn

When I picked out what sounds to record for this project I was keeping in mind that I wanted an airy feeling to the piece. I originally wanted to do a whole composition made of sounds made from wrongly playing any of my instruments. However there isn't a lot of wrong ways to play instruments that make an unusual sound, so I had a small selection of violin and ukulele noises to incorporate somehow. I recorded bits and pieces of the Grammys to use and Beyonce's singing was so beautiful, I wanted to include it. However, I reversed it so that is sounds less like singing and more like a moaning of some kind. I sort of "fanned" the noises from left to right so that the listener is surrounded in it's atmosphere when they listen to it through headphones.
During the working process, I gravitated towards sounds that were light and airy, but also repetitious. The sounds create a building and rising of noise until a "breath" of resolution.

Working sonically was a challenge. It's really easy, almost too easy, to make everything sound creepy and cryptic. I tried to stay away from that because I'm not good at creepy. In my head I still had to visualize what the sound should "look" like. Which is weird because you can't see anything. For me, the layers of sound were equated to layers in photoshop, and I worked well that way. I made my piece very quiet in nature on purpose, however I think I may have made it too quiet. It was hard to tell if every layer was being heard and was working well together.

The atmosphere of my piece is very open. I used a lot of echo and paulstretch effects to give certain sounds more depth. It's starts out soft and almost silent and then grows into a flash of sound. I reversed the twinkling sound at the end and added a few more layers of sound to make the ending louder. The piece gradually builds and then there's a brief moment where it all dies down. Beyonce's "moaning" through the TV is very poltergeist and very creepy, but I wanted that to be subtle and faint. It adds a mysterious vibe.
It feels like anxiety or thoughts building up, and then being blown away. The ticking you hear softly at the beginning and end, signifies time continuing even as the stress mounts. It doesn't have a dark vibe of stress, instead it more neutral. It carries the essence of being anxious with out totally freaking the listener out.

-Avery Violet

Hello yes, I made this.
I collected sounds from walking around oval wood.

-Avery Violet