Throughout this project I have felt way out of my comfort zone. I chose the motion brief simply to experiment in a subject I have never really touched on before. After making a video for pro con, I didn’t really know how this project would pan out. Firstly, a gif is something I have seen, but never really had any interest in making, so learning how to do this was an important part of the project. Once I had nailed the basics, I really utilized the techniques. We got taught how to make a simple gif, and after much research and artist inspiration, I took the art of gif making, and experimented in a whole number of ways, I felt motivated at this stage, because I was creating things where I didn’t really know what the outcome was going to look like, I felt excited.
After a number of weeks experimenting and brainstorming narratives, I decided on an idea. The idea was to represent sleeping. I wanted to take the phrase ‘the city that never sleeps’ and try and visualize this. My idea came from a narrative like The Wolf of Wall Street. I was also inspired by some artwork I had seen in the 2022NQ exhibition – Pong Ping. This lead me to create a gif using neon signs, showing how men would stay up late and probably end up in gentleman’s clubs. This brought me to the end of the 5-week mark, leaving me with only one week left at university, but 4 weeks left in the project because of the Easter Break. After a crucial seminar just before Easter, I found my idea wasn’t really the best. So I went back to brainstorming.
During Easter, I had 3 weeks to completely redo my gif. I was at a stage where I had enough experimentation to create a gif that looked good, but I just needed a narrative. So I changed my theme, I went back to the theme of thinking, and the subject of anxiety. I had originally planned on doing this but considered it too hard to visualize. I gained first hand research and set out on representing this mental disorder. This subject is very personal to me, and it was important I was trying to express how it has effected me, not try to inform people. I created a number of gifs, some didn’t work because I was trying to use so many frames. After having a selection to show, I narrowed it down to one, which I am reasonably happy with.
I am more pleased with the experience of this project and the techniques I have picked up, rather than my final outcome. I feel I have given this project my fullest and wouldn’t change the development stages. If I could make any changes, I would try to experiment with more photographs for my subject, and maybe experiment using more than one photo, or more than one gif.