Author: Reya Ahmed

Going into the second half of Unit 2, I wanted to expand upon the idea of hidden labour and ‘process’ existing outside of the final outcome. The inspiration for this came from the video essay that I worked on earlier this year.

I began writing stories, or rather, snippets. Most of it are fabrications with a few resemblances to my lived experiences. Once the snippets were written, I went on to illustrate the stories how I would normally for an editorial illustration. However, I recorded myself in every step of the process.

In the first week, the video is longer, describes a more detailed incident and the audience can see a back-and-forth in my design decisions.

I think in this week my focus was mostly to see if this exploration made much sense. The pairing of various clips from digital devices to analog tools was chaotic and fast-moving. While that was reflective of process itself, it was also a result of trying to pace the visuals with the length of the audio itself.

For the final week, I added more scenes to the animation to narrate the whole chapter. For this project, my aim was to translate the text from the book to an animation and then recirculate it as a publication. The short story is only half-a-page. The new publication was 160 pages long. It was also a way for me to show all the unique frames that I drew for the animation, thereby highlighting the process.

For week 2, I broke down the chapter into distinct scenes and treated them like individual animations. These collection of GIFs were put in sequence to create the final animation.

For continuity, I used the character from Positions through Iterating as the ‘traveller’.

Collection of visual and text references. In the image:

Reinfurt, D., 2019. A *New* Program for Graphic Design. Distributed Art Publishers, pp.101-107.

Persepolis. 2007. [film] Directed by V. Paronnaud and M. Satrapi.

Calvino, I., 1997. Invisible cities. p.77. Translated from Italian by W. Weaver. London: Penguin Random House

Tenen, D., 2017. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford University Press, pp.165-195

This week I became more interested in animation as a medium and how it essentially comes down to shortcuts and illusions. I wanted to explore if making changes to the key-frames in their pacing, sequence, silhouette, form and background would alter what the animation is supposed to depict – a simple action of running. The resulting video is a collection of iterations which are mostly absurd but often humorous.

I thought about Adhocism and how an object is a collection of several parts which may or may not make sense when taken out of the whole. Animation, particularly frame animation is also a sum of parts. Each part has to be drawn separately for the whole to exist but when we watch the final outcome – the parts are made invisible. It’s almost as if the more undetectable, the more inconspicuous the parts are – the more effective is the animation.

I think, what I wanted to do the most through this week’s experiments is reveal the process of animation. By putting the original 10 key-frames through different iterations, I am attempting to show them as individual images and not a collective whole.

100 ITERATIONS

selection of snippet

…Then, I redrew each key-frame 9 more times. Great, now I had 100 frames. Below, the gifs are supposed to be each key-frame joined with its 9 other unidentical counterparts.

To truly have 100 unique frames, I added the tombstone outlines from the ‘snippet’ and rearranged them in different combinations to create 100 backgrounds. Here are all 100 frames:

Each frame was exported as an image to create a publication of 100 pages.