This animation is an atmospheric mash up of natural and unnatural worlds. The visuals are a simple moving scene beginning with wool from an old pillow forming shapes that appear to be clouds, a pseudo weather/rain demonstration made from cut up painted scraps, an unusual oil-pastel rainbow, and ending with the background being crumpled, disappearing into thin air.
In my art I tend to gravitate towards topics of sustainability, environmental concerns, and dystopia.
For the main audio I wanted to experiment with something new to me, a borrowed mini synthesizer called a Korg - Volca fm. If you are not familiar with this - it looks a little like a toy keyboard with around 15 adjustments (knobs and sliders). You can start with basic sounds on an electric keyboard and then adjust as desired. I spent a day twisting the sounds of ‘musicbox’ to make all the electronic sounds in the animation.
The audio became a glitch/tech vibe that has a bit of an eeriness. I wanted to have cuteness & happiness interact with a dystopian forecast. Crumpling the background paper at the end is the finale of destruction.
I have done sound walks with a Zoom recorder which I used to record the nature sounds you hear throughout the animation. There are sounds of a creek near the ocean with birds and a foghorn in the distance in the middle of the animation and towards the end you may hear the double beat sound of an interesting bird chirping along with ocean wave sounds. Overlaid on the last half of the animation is a recording I took using the Zoom recorder of an old crank mini music box. It is playing the music from the song “What a wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong. The following are the lyrics to the part of the song:
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
I hoped that the creaky music box mashed with the nature and synthesized sounds would demonstrate the complex interaction between humans and the natural world. There is an element of hope, with the lyrics and the rainbow of color used in the animation.
Technical aspects:
Stop motion images – 388 photographs
Animation & Audio – mixed in Adobe Premiere
Digital sounds – Korg Volca fm synthesizer
Old music box playing “What a Wonderful World” – hand cranked, recorded with Zoom H1n
Nature sounds – Sound walk recorded with Zoom H1n in November 2020
Paper crumpling – recorded with Zoom H1n
