Charlie Smith Art Exam Blog (03csmith)

As we travelled around Paris and the multitude of museums there, I was more interested in capturing the story of our journey more than the art we were seeing. Whilst the composition, colours and lighting of the pieces we saw was inspiring and useful for film as a medium, the actual art itself was arguably less important for me to document than the narrative of my friends reacting to the pieces and reflecting on them. 

These are some of the most inspiring artworks I saw, mostly in the Rodin museum. The expressive, kinetic energy the sculptures possessed made them feel like they were almost moving in front of us from many angles, just like the Deacon's:

(You can see all the photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/120003728@N08/sets/72157642144355534) 

Responding to these works and others led me to experiment with subtle types of animation.  The attempt was to inject some of this kinetic energy back into the works I was viewing and capture the feeling of seeing them in the flesh in a digital form.

My first experiment ended up being slightly comical. I brought the photo into Photoshop and split the image into a foreground, middle ground and background all on separate layers. From there, I had to remove the fingers of the statue from its palm and figure out a way to move them to demonstrate the effect. 

The photo had some overlap, and so this proved harder than I originally thought. I had to create negative space behind the fingers to fill the gap left when they moved. To fill in this background layer I had to first remove the foreground elements obscuring the view, and then use the healing tool, clone tool and content aware fill tool fill in the background. I decided to make a slightly comic image to trial the effect, moving the fingers of the statue in a ridiculous, amusing way.


This image is what I eventually managed to create using the 'puppet-warp' tool between the fingers. This let me manipulate the pixels organically, a new feature of Photoshop CS6. The process involved creating a frame animation in photoshop using the timeline feature and moving the fingers with puppet-warp each frame by about 2 pixels. When played back as a GIF animation and looped, this gives the illusion of movement to the images.


To progress the animation further, I added parallax movement to imply three-dimensional depth to the piece. This technique requires animating the different layers of the photo to move horizontally at different speeds: faster if it is closer to the lens and slower if further away from the foreground. When played back, this imitates the natural parallax we witness when we move our heads in front of a solid object in the real world - the same basis that 3D films rely on to suggest depth.



I believe the image is comical because too much is happening in too unrealistic a way - it needs to be subtler in future.

As this method had proven relatively successful with the Rodin sculpture, I decided to extend it to other artworks I had seen as well. Firstly I wondered if I could add this same parallax to flat works, rather than the physical sculptures I had used before to experiment with the technique. I again split the image into a foreground and background, by carefully masking and erasing elements of each layer. The negative spaces were again filled so as not to reveal any 'holes' during animation. Then I took this result and animated it, so that the foreground moved 10px to the right, and the background moved 5px to the left. After being cropped and exported, this is what the piece looked like:

I wanted to try and push the effect slightly further and see what else I could do to alter these images. I began thinking about the limitations of painting a picture such as this one several hundred years ago (it was originally painted by François-Auguste Biard in 1840 - titled 'Magdalena Bay') and concluded that as pairing in its very nature freezes a moment of time forever, it cannot obviously capture movement or subtle nuances of movement. Thus, a portrait cannot move, and a fire cannot burn. 

This prompted me to create this quick experiment - adding a fire to the scene, to totally change the mood of the piece by adding warmth and movement to the otherwise cold and tranquil/frozen and icy scene. This was a much smaller movement, and so didn't seem as comical to me. 

I think the effect worked to certain extent, as I tried to make the fire appear in keeping with its surroundings and feel 'realistic' in terms of Biard's style. This style of photo is often called a Cinemagraph, a partially animated photo that is mostly still but with a small moving element that is usually repeated or looped. Two of the pioneers of the technique were Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, American photographers who used the technique for fashion shoots in New York to great effect, as documented on their website here.

These are two of my favourite works by them:

The image of the woman looking the mirror particularly grabs me, as eyes are one of the most expressive parts of the human body, and integral to filmmaking in terms of conveying emotion to the audience. The small movement of her gaze redirecting itself really makes the woman come alive before the audience - in my opinion more effective at convincing us that she is a 'real' person than, for example, her lips moving. 

The work of Burg and Beck led me to consider how we observe. In their photo, the woman is observing both herself, and fleetingly her audience, as her line of sight changes  The idea of watching someone look on at something was fascinating to me. Thus I browsed through some of the other photos I took in Paris and looked for ones I could appropriate into a comparable result. The following are photos of people, and people observing art:

This photo was the first one I experimented with. My friend Dominic looks onwards at a Callum Innes painting at the Pompidou Centre exhibition of modern art, and I captured him deep in thought. I added a very slight head-tilt to his stance, which animates every few seconds to suggest his contemplative nature as he looks on. Again, this is amusing, as it seems slightly 'tongue-in-cheek' and comical.

I then decided to make the observer the complete object of the piece, rather than simply looking on. This allowed me to look at the people as they observed the art, inverting the norm and following the story of them exploring the artworks in the museums. 

I began to think about the relationship between art and artist as well as art and observer. This is a fascinating connection, and one a lot of artists have explored. 

This image was a much more natal movement, and so as a result manages to remain convincingly unnoticeable at first glance. 

Imagining an audience looking at a piece, staring for a period of time before they even realise it's animated is a really captivating idea I'd like to pursue.