Topic: Adobe ImageReady Animation

The use of Adobe ImageReady for animation purposes has become obsolete as the functions in ImageReady come bundled with Photoshop as of CS3. I have an older Photoshop that has ImageReady however, so i had to learn to create animations with that program. The new CS3 process is probably similar though.
To start you need to create multiple layers. Each layer will become a separate frame in the animation. Since each of my frames will also have individual layers themselves, I'll have to make and flatten each one individually before I begin animating. Once the frame layers are created, you need to create each frame through the animation window. To assign a layer to a frame, it simply has to be the only visible one when the frame is selected, therefore two or more layers could also become one frame if needed. This is the bulk of the process, after each frame is created you can control the time delay from frame to frame and whether the animation will loop or not. All this is done through the animation window as well. Finally, you can save the animation as a layered Photoshop file, and export it as an animated GIF, HTML page, Flash, or Quicktime movie.

http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/discontinued/imageready/animation/layers.html

Artist: The Brothers Quay

The Brothers Quay consists of Stephen and Timothy Quay, American identical twin brothers. They were born in 1947 and moved to England to study at the Royal College of Art in London. To this day, they are two of the most influential stop motion animators.
Their animations, the bulk of their work, are short films, but they have produced a few live action feature films. The animations they produce are generally dark and moody, often portraying creepy dolls as characters in dirty urban settings. The films lack dialog, relying on dramatic musical scores and sound effects to relay their themes. The visuals of the short films really demonstrate the power of stop motion animation when in the hands of someone as imaginative and patient as they are, and act as the perfect medium to portray their dark thematic influences. What amazes me is how detailed the sets and props are, achieving a stylized, aged look that makes you wonder how many dusty attics they must have sifted through to come up with all these unusual items.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Quay

Topic: Digital Recording

Interestingly, the transition from analog to digital sound recording doesn't follow the same pros and cons as experienced in photography. Digitally, sound recordings are more easily manipulated and stored, and have reached the point in which the human ear often cannot distinguish the difference in quality compared to analog recordings. The limitations in speaker power and more importantly the comfort zone of our own ears made this threshold much easier to reach for digital media than it has been on the visual side, as it seems that photographs can always get better in the quality department. Take into account the lack of dust or electromagnetic interference often found in analog playback and the switch to digital sounds pretty clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_recording_and_reproduction

Artist: Oliver Herring

Born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964, Herring's early work consisted of woven sculptures and performance pieces, recorded through photography, video, or stop motion. His most recent work however consists of sculptures carved in foam and covered in hundreds of photograph cutouts. His process is best described through his quotes:

"When you look at these sculptures, you don't really get how they're put together. You might conceptually understand that they're made from photographs, but you don't really get the in-between stages. There are two separate mediums here: the Styrofoam structure, and the added photographs. They constantly struggle against each other."

"In these photographic pieces, I'm working with a person for two or three months, and that leaves a huge margin for things to happen and change. The person changes- things happen- and change gets incorporated into the piece. I take thousands of photographs. It feels very deconstructive. Then I try to bring it back together again, and that's the restructuring process."

These works represent an incredible approach to the sort of image collage processes that I use, portraying the images 3-dimensionally in sculptural form rather than digitally. The fact that he shoots the models over the course of a few months is also interesting, seemingly forming a more accurate representation of a person rather than the way they might have looked on one certain day in a particular lighting setup.



http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=90

Topic: Stop Motion

Stop Motion is an animation technique in which photography is used to capture each frame of animation. The most popular form of stop motion is claymation, where clay is manipulated slightly between each frame so as to appear animated. The techniques that I'm more interested in however are graphic animation and time lapse animation. Graphic animation is most closely associated with animated cartoons, but can be created with photographs of anything, not just drawings. Time lapse animation seeks to speed up time, taking frames of an object or location in extended intervals. A main contributor to this technique was Dr. John Ott, who photographed plants as they grew and created stop motion animations of the plants appearing to grow very rapidly. Ott even developed a way to create the appearance of a panning camera and controlled the amount of water the plants recieved in order to make them droop down or spring up over time, so in the animations they appeared dance-like. Above is an example of a compilation of frames I created that might be used to form a stop motion animation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion

Artist: Will Pearson

Will Pearson is a photographer from London that specializes in panoramic photographs of city and landscapes. His work is very similar to mine, except that his images are entirely seamless and have an almost painterly quality to them. Many of the panoramas have elements that are captured so seamlessly throughout that I wonder whether he uses multiple images at all, and instead has a special camera or fisheye lens that he then straightens out in photoshop. Many of the images I believe make use of HDR editing, as the range of lighting seen in the top right photo here, for example, would be impossible to capture in one exposure. This type of HDR imagery, with separate exposures to capture both sky and landscape in stunning contrast, is something ive been wanting to try. Some of his newer pieces are also shot in high definition with amazing detail.