#reflection on process

[haleystewartramblings]

Goodnight Moon: Artist Statement and Reflection

For our final project, my group from the last 4k project decided to stick together and to add a new member to the group so we could make a better 4k piece. We wanted to continue with stop motion, and wanted to take the critique we received from the class to improve. After discussing a few options, we wanted to really use the manipulations that can be achieved through stop motion like we did in FRESH but in a more challenging way. We watched the Amazon Kindle commercials, and became inspired to tell a story using this method. A few different story ideas were thrown around, until someone suggested Goodnight Moon. The idea of taking a story that we were all familiar with and had grown up reading, and remixing it to be a live action, stop motion 4k piece seemed very appealing. We wanted to take this story, and breathe new life into it, and we liked the challenge of adapting it to a stop motion piece that wasn't animated.

Once we picked the story we wanted to tell, our group sat down to figure out how we would go about adapting it. We found the script that we wanted to use, and figured out what shots and props we would need, as well as what the set needed to look like. After presenting our project to our professor Tracy, we received some great input to adjust some of the colors used on set and to use paper with different patterns to make it more visually appealing. Over the weekend, we worked to buy all the materials, build the props and set, and then spent the day shooting. This was a lot more difficult to shoot, since we needed Daniel to be extremely careful in his movements and we were working on a larger scale. It took a lot of time and patience, but were able to come up with all the shots we needed. 

What I liked most about this project was working with this group. We all had a part to play, we worked really well together, and really came together to try and make our piece the best it could be. We all collaborated to create the piece, and it's really nice to have found a group where not one person is doing all the work, coming up with all the ideas, or being a tyrant over the project. It was a great experience, because I have never really worked in a group that functioned so well together. Through each step of the process, each member of the group was there and contributed in some way. We also had a lot of fun working together!

Artist Statement: For our 4K final project, our concept is to take a childhood story and adapt it for 4K. Rather than use animation, we decided to style it after a particular style of stop motion to create it as a live action piece. To preserve the story book look and feel, we created titles that acted as the pages of the book with the text rather than a voice over reading the book so the viewer could actively read the story themselves. It's supposed to be bright and whimsical, and to stir up feelings of childhood nostalgia. We wanted to use 4K and stop motion to show the new ways that stories are being told to children as technology becomes more advanced. 

[behindthiscurtain-blog-blog]

a common place

July 19, 2011.

Commonplace Book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. 1578 COOPER Thesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke.   1642 FULLER Holy & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

-Oxford English Dictionary

A common place. An instance given place and then a corresponding reaction or replacing. Also, the common ground of communication, the shared place from which a community might evolve or to which it might return. In this case, the common ground of my thought. And, since so much of this concerns performance and the theatre, the common place of that exchange.

I want to see how my own working process, incidental discoveries and responses, may develop in new directions by forcing these disparate fragments to share a common place. This project seeks to honor the revelations and misapprehensions of immediate production. By making the work public immediately after writing, I hope to free myself from the endless and absurd pursuit of 'mastery' that constrains my more academic exercises.

I hope to continue the kind of fervent and freewheeling writing produced during a weeklong residency as Visiting Scholar at the 2011 Abandoned Practices program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, under the direction of Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, and Mark Jeffery. The idea for this site responds to a directive that Matthew offered to me in preparation for a talk I delivered yesterday in Chicago. A commonplace book: there I presented quotations from texts that related however obliquely to my own current thought as well as the productions of the participants at the school. The overarching rubric was taken from Barthes' A Lover's Discourse with its exploration of the lover who addresses a silent or departed loved one. I wanted to see the ways in which the lover's vocalizations and enactments before the obdurate other paralleled that between myself and the departed performance. I have turned to Tumblr via the inspiration of another newly discovered source, V.

Here, I am expanding on the notion of the common place to include responses to the day as a text from which I will excise quotations and respond. The commonplace transfigured.