For my final project I didn't start from a concept-idea,
but instead I spent some time exploring AE,
looking and trying different combinations of image-processing primiteves (blur, noise, layers, opacity, saturation, hue ecc...) and effects,
and writing a list of possible pictures that I could have "make".
The aim of this pre-production phase was to find connections, parallelism, and way to expand or distort the visual content, or convey new or different meaning, dissassembling and destroyng the source material.
I did some demo with portraits or ambivalents images,
for example I had a picture with a hand in which there was hand-written the word "solution",
to play with the figure of speech "have the solution in the palm of your hand",
that in this case was both figurate and real because of the real label.
Then I have established some rules:
1) distort the original images until they become barely understable, but still recognizable (for a very short time, or in the middle of a transition, or with a very low opacity ecc...)
2) use also text as a visual element, to connect the sequence of images and create a narrative meaning.
3) alternate, during the montage, text, visual contents, and processing techniques, to handle time and space
Finally all the the effects of blurriness, distortion, change of perception etc. brought me associate all this with the charachter of
Henry Chinasky.
Henry Charles "Hank" Chinaski is the literary alter ego of the American writer Charles Bukowski, appearing in many of Bukowski's novels, a number of his short stories and poems, and in the films Barfly and Factotum. Although much of Chinaski's biography is based on Bukowski's own life story, the Chinaski character is still a literary creation that is constructed with the veneer of what the writer Adam Kirsch calls "a pulp fiction hero."
At this point a collected a certain amount of quotes, that I wanted to use in the sequence.
So the concept that comes out is to create a sequence that would explore and express the point of view of the character:
- sometimes on a first-person perspective (ex. the first image is the awakening after a heavy drunk, staring at the crumbling ceiling, not being able to focus...)
- sometimes with some quotes that depicts his "vision of life"
The title is:
Little history of alcoholism and misanthropy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original AE file in a dropbox folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/home/gio_final_ART102
The rendered video in quick-time high-quality is 2.2 gB, so I'll upload on vimeo a low-quality version:
https://vimeo.com/61838530
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
- Henry Chinaski / Charles Bukowsky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp5wUH13Suw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEtBNoUnGJs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLMXuoyQ67Y
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/ ... ki?page=13
http://bukowski.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chinaski
- image as visual element
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wool
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&q=chr ... yQGau4GADA
http://www.brucemaudesign.com/
- AE
http://www.lynda.com/search?q=after+eff ... 1369&y=-42
http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html