3 Art Pieces (10th Week of April 1)

For my 3 art pieces of this week, I decided to focus on animation, as we are going to be doing a stop-motion project shortly in Design II.  I chose three animations with different purposes.  The first one is a stop-motion commercial for Beringer Wines featuring the growth of a paper vineyard.  The paper vineyard is most likely supposed to represent the vineyards that are used for the production of Beringer Wines.  The second animation is the movie title sequence and opening credits for the Pixar kid's movie Monster's Inc.  The animation is very colorful and fun, with cartoon characters that would appeal to children. Notice the use of transition and how each action leads into another.  The last one is a music video for Linkin Park's song Breaking the Habit.  It was animated with an anime-stylization that is very similar to Japanese cartoons.  This animated music video contains extremely dark and morbid references such as suicide, self-harm, drug addiction, adultery, and coronary work, which help portray the incredibly personal nature of the lyrics that are relative of Chester Bennington (lead vocalist of Linkin Park) own substance abuse struggles.

Commercial: Beringer Wines: Vineyard 45

Animated by Publicis & Hal Riney Advertisement Agency

Directed by Olivier Gondry

Movie Title Sequence: Monster's Inc.

Animated by Pixar Animation Studios

Directed by Pete Doctor

Music Video: Linkin Park, Breaking The Habit

Animated by Studio Gonzo

Directed by Joe Hahn

Sources: Wikipedia/YouTube

Weekly Quotation 10:

"Stay with the all unknown. 

Stay away from the hooks."

-Gimme Sympathy, Emily Haines: Canadian singer-songwriter of the indie-rock band Metric

I've always felt that these lyrics took on almost more than just words of a song and form an actual quotation by Metric's vocalist, Emily Haines.  While there is debate whether or not song lyrics can be used as quotations, I personally believe that powerful enough ones can.  I interpet what Haines is singing is that if people, especially visual and performing artists, want to achieve success, they need to be more than what society wants them to be. For example, Pablo Picasso did not become famous as an artist because he practiced realistic or impressionistic work.  No, Picasso became world-renowned because of his use of cubism and abstraction, a practice that initially received negative critical reactions.  However, because Picasso was practicing something entirely different than what people were comfortable with, he eventually became famous for his innovation and experimentation.  In order to be successful, an artist needs to push their limits of creativity, to go beyond what is expected from society, to therefore capture and intrigue their audiences. 

Sampling of Haine's Work:

Gimme Sympathy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqldwoDXHKg
Breathing Underwater http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOpsNdv0-Is
Help I'm Alive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4M068MSUpU
Black Sheep http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArkDWrHmmXI

Chess Piece Re-Design

My partner Brittany and I decided to completely change our chess piece design.  We plan on using white and black card stock paper as our material for the pieces and constructing them into Archimedean solids.  I went through the books Heather recommended looking through and they were extremely helpful with our decision to change our design.  We also plan to layer the shapes, to give the pieces a height difference.  Lastly, we felt that by using card stock paper it would help create a bit of unity between the base (also made of card stock) and the pieces.

List of Pieces Abstracted (Possibilities)

Pawn- Tetrahedron

Knight- Tetrahedron on top of cube

Rook- Truncated Dodecahedron on cube

Bishop- Cuboctahedron on cube

Queen- Rhombicuboctahedron on cube

King- Great Rhombicuboctahedron on cube

Flat-Packed Polyhedra

Archimedean Symmetries & Three-Dimensional Tessellations

Pictures from Platonic & Archimedean Solids by Daud Sutton.