Some mixed media experimentation I did during a workshop from Bas Steens.
During this 3-day workshop, we spent one day making collages and experimenting with combining the physical and the digital. We were told to bring something in that inspires you, which for me, is music.
Day 1: Mixed media collage
I took this as a starting point to see what interested me in the images. I quickly found how repetitive sheet music and pianos can be; the same melody every bar, the same 12 notes 7 times on a piano. The photos above were taken with my phone, using different settings and the panorama function for some of these photos. I made a few tiny collages from different photos and went to the scanner to digitalize them again. Moving the images across the scanner gave a chromatic abboration.
With these scans, I made this collage using Procreate on my iPad.
I tried to give it that repetative feeling that I felt while taking the pictures and looking at the sheet music and piano. I chose to focus on the words that were most visible in my scans: "I love to laugh". It may seem as though I was focused on that scentence even before scanning everything in, but I was not. It was pure coincidence that this same sentence made its way back into a lot of scans.
This was printed out again and I used it as a starting point to continue making a collage. Cutting out images from magazines and reusing the older images I printed, I eventually made this collage.
At this point I felt like I wanted to make something else to match the theme and see how I can combine what I'd already made and see what would happen if I combined the two. I tried making a cutout of a roundabout sign but messed up the direction of the arrows.
By moving the paper around as I scanned it in, I tried to give it more of that roundabout illusion.
Back to procreate, I layered the image on the right over the collage using different layer styles.
Trying out different colors, layers, effects and backgrounds, asking others for their opinions, I landed on the red image with the black background, but without the "roundabout" overlay. From this image, I started animating.
Days 2 and 3: animating
As my first animation experiment, I printed out the image of the crowded metro multiple times and drew over it using my white paint marker to get this frame-by-frame animation. I put the pieces of paper on a green piece of paper to use as a green screen and put it all together using After Effects.
Next, I wanted to make a simple animation of my hands playing the piano on the collage. I took 5 pictures of my left hand and 4 pictures of my right hands, this way the combination of hand poses won't stay the exact same throughout the animation. After putting this together in After Effects, I decided it needed something more. I used the same marker I used for the metro animation to loosely draw the shapes of my hands on the green paper to overlay it in After Effects.
Lastly, I wanted to try to make a stop-motion animation by folding the paper. I'm not the best at origami or any kind of folding, but I do know how to make paper airplanes; I wanted to try to make an animation of the airplane folding itself and flying away. This was definitely the hardest one to do; lack of stable lighting, a stable camera and a proper green screen made this a bit of a struggle and it needed quite a bit of digital retouching.
As you can see, this was a piece of work. After a lot of editing, color correcting and manually masking out the airplane, I got to a result I was happy with.
All that was left to do, was edit it all together onto the collage and make it one big looping animation. The metro and the hands were easy, as they didn't really move at all. Getting the right movement and timing for the airplane was another challenge, but nothing some experimenting and moving around keyframes won't solve.
I also added some music I found on a royalty free website. I wanted to play some music myself but never got around to do it. I also added the ambient noise of being in a mall of some sorts, to hopefully create the effect of standing still, listening to the piano, while life flies by in a time that doesn't feel real.