Simplified Chaos on the Landscape of Over-Consumption..
I’m happy to share a new animated video piece here in the final days of 2022.
I have been reflecting back on the very challenging year of 2022… Words like “chaos”, “over-consumption”, “over-compensation”, “over-saturation”, “glitch”, “plastic” and “synthetics” keep poking at me. The piece below is a reaction to those words in no particular order. Sometimes, the goal is to work and experiment with “video” or “animation” as a subject itself. Sometimes, there is not even a specific context other than being experimental with an energy, a series of words (as listed above) assets, sequences, techniques, process, color and texture. Exploration happens in real-time while new decisions can be made in both micro and macro ways. This piece unfolded in that way, and I always love when this happens. The more I watch the result the more meaning I seem to attach to it. A larger narrative is taking form, so let’s view this piece as iteration number one.
“Simplified Chaos on the Landscape of Over-Consumption”, December 2022, Video Art / Animated Loop
The video was made and rendered using adobe after effects. “Simplified Chaos on the Landscape of Over-Consumption” is the working title for now. It is intended to be played as an endless loop. I haven’t experimented with presentation formats outside of the web browser at this point, but I would like to do so. It’s all too easy to publish the work to social media, and also hard to resist that immediacy. Im not 100% sure if the video is completed, what do you think? Part of me wants to include some text based effects, a subtle overlay of the html that is behind the front end of this post perhaps? The assets are choppy, sloppily cut out and the green screen residue was left around the edges on purpose (you can remove that in after effects if you want to quite well.) In this case, I feel that it helps compliment the overall over saturation of the piece as a whole. It was fun to create the flat landscape environment with simple shapes and then contrast that with green screen footage taken from real life.
“Simplified Chaos on the Landscape of Over-Consumption Iteration 2”, 2022, Video Art / Animated Loop
The first original version of this piece had fewer assets composed into the composition. I may post that video here later for context, but I wanted to see if I could apply some of the new neural filters in photoshop 2022 to the video. Obviously it works as you can see above. I thought it was only meant for static images but Im glad that Im wrong about that! The render time is slow, I mean, its rendering out of adobe photoshop, which is clearly not an animation program, but I must say, I really like some of the textures and control over the details. Plus the overall visual aesthetic makes me want to do more with this. I decided to push things a bit further with the neural filters using this animation below. It worked really well transferring a style and enhancing an already neon and light-heavy effect.
I can already see and feel that 2023 will be filled with a lot more experimental creation, animation and video art!
Hope to see you here again soon, feel free to share your thoughts and interpretations below!
