Kiera McWhinney

I'm a Visual Communications major at Ball State University in Muncie IN.

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Stills Video

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Proposal for Moving Still Image Video

For my stills video project, I was having trouble deciding how to illustrate my sound collage. My theme is about a dog dying in a house fire and why it’s important to be aware of potential hazards. My dog back home wasn’t willing to take much direction and I didn’t really know how make the images appear like they were going up in flames. My mother suggested that I show myself lighting a picture of a dog on fire, which is better but I still didn’t know how well that would flow. I have decided to illustrate the scene by drawing out a short animation to go with my sound collage by hand. At first my drawings were a little to detailed and it was taking forever to create even a simple scene. After briefly talking with some friends in animation I decided to drastically simplify my drawings into a more cartoon type style. I Found this was a lot more realistic and kind of fun. I still plan to finish the clip by lighting copies of my images slowly on fire but now the slips of paper I plan to take pictures of are a lot more manageable.

By drawing everything out I can easily find ways to represent my sounds because I’m not limited to what objects I can physically find. I can sometimes reuse frames and plan on showing a few drawings in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement. For example to show the dog is panting I switch back and forth between images where his tongue is in and out of his mouth. I want the viewers attention on the dog since the sound collage is told from his viewpoint, I tend to do this by making him one of the few object that regularly moves. I’ve had to rein myself in a little bit overall, but I’m happy with what I have so far and I’m moving forward with the project at a lot better pace. I’ve never done anything like this before so I’m a little nervous for my critique, but I’m really putting a lot into this so I’m just hoping this goes ok.

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Homework_10: Software Takes Command

The first section (Layers, Transparency, Compositing), basically gives a brief history lesson on the Velvet Revolution. The author talks about how transparency has elevated design from a dada era type of collage, to very a layered more cohesive design. Older computers had trouble storing more than a few images but now designers can have thousands of layers and images. So basically, In a span of approximately 10 years everything went from being hand done to completely digitized. The second section (After Effects interface: from “time-based” to “composition-based”), talks about NLE software and how the author was surprised when initially using After Effects because not all frames had the same size or aspect ratio. The use of after effects is compared to drawing where an artist may sketch different elements out on tracing paper and then stack everything together to create an image. Although the author stresses After effects is not animation, graphic Design, or cinematography, and insists that After effects is in a sense it’s own language of moving images that can be endlessly remixed.

The reading affects my understanding of After effects by giving me a sort of background on what it was initially used for. I used to make a lot of animated music videos when I was homeschooled from clips of some of my favorite shows. I just had a very basic free editing software, so I was always limited to splitting the clips that I already had and doing my best to line it up with changes in the audio. I had no way of overlaying anything, so I did my best with rearranging the clips in a new way. After effects allows a more canvas like experience so I can have more than one object per frame. I can stack and layer thing easily. I’m not sure how I can apply this to my current project, I’m still working on it and my ideas have been shaky at best because I really don’t want to illustrate a dog dying in pictures or otherwise. I really like being able to combine images though so I want to play more with that. There wasn’t a lot of “how to” type things in this article so It didn’t really help more than give me a brief history lesson but it was kind of interesting to read about.

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Visit Original Link

A Ruff Day

dog barking/whine, fire, car starting, my sister, makeup clanking, sirens, ect.

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Prompt: Something that has disappeared 

Self Care

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A quick three minute self portrait converted into a vector file via illustrator

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Image Remix Project 

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These are the source images for my collage assignment in Computer Art 200 that I am currently taking at Ball-State University. Along with a write up of the basic requirements and an explanation of my composition regarding the assignment.

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Homework_03: Read “Digital Foundations” Responce

What actually qualifies as appropriation? When I hear the word “appropriation” I usually think of the term “cultural appropriation”. Which basically refers to the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of other cultures customs, practices, ideas, etc. Which is essentially the same thing when you talk about appropriation in art. Appropriation is the use of someone else's ideas. Specifically in the article Fair Use, Appropriation & Advanced Image Searching appropriation is defined as taking over the meaning of something that is already known, by way of visual reference. But when is it okay to do that, or is it ever?

Sometimes the line between appropriation and plagiarism can seem pretty blurry. But it’s really not that difficult. It all kind of depends on if the subject is viewed as appropriate, or not. For example it’s not right to claim another artists work as your own or simply change a tiny detail. But you can reference it in your own design. In the article listed above, the artist mentioned, slightly alters a campbell's soup can in his artwork. Although he did not actually design the campbell's can, he can use it because the intent of his work is to reference the actual product, not replace it.

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The Infestation

[1000drawings]

by ask__the__dust

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Love this

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Throwback to the Golden Globes

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Assignment for Computer Art 200