Origami
3D Design
This weeks rotation is 3D Design. At the start of the project the class was put into groups, given different materials and then told to create a 3 dimensional sculpture, the meaning behind this activity was to open our minds a bit so we could understand 3D Design that little bit more.
After that, I decided to look into different ideas for what I could make. I thought about different materials like wood, paper, plastic, and card, and looked at the different methods I could use to make a sculpture. After I had a little brainstorm about materials and methods I got a little stuck so I decided to look at some artists for some inspiration. The first artist I looked at was Tomas Saraceno; instantly when I looked at his website it came up with his current piece In Orbit. In Orbit is a fantastic piece that shows how space can be used and distorted. I then went onto looking at Richard Serra’s ‘Matter of Time’, an installation/sculpture piece that I believe is designed to pull in the audience right to the heart of the artwork.
Having looked at these artists, I still had trouble coming up with ideas, mainly on how to execute them. I then came across a very clever video called ‘Box‘. ‘Box’ is a video which shows very technical use of projection-mapping, this is where a projection is being displayed on a moving surface allowing the user to create optical illusions. So after watching this video, I decided to create an origami shape of my own design and display it in its own environment, two foam boards that will hang behind the origami.
I originally wanted the concept that the boards would be the same as the boards in the ‘Box’ video, but then my tutor shed some light on the matter and said that he liked how the origami sat in its own space between the boards, and that the origami gives off an unreal feeling, that the origami should be some unknown material that could create its own laws. My tutor then told me that if I was to extend this project, I should maybe consider doing some form of animation and give the origami its own physics and laws and an unusual quality. The images below is the final piece.
Animation
For my first rotation, me and a few friends have to work together to create an animation. We can make anything and do anything to go into this animation; we started with a brainstorm and came up with ideas that interested us all. After the brainstorm we came to an agreement to start off with a card trick. We didn’t really have any plan on what to do or which direction the animation would go. So we decided to look at a few animations created by PES, who are a group of people that have created animations for tv and also for their own pleasure. After looking at PES’s work, we had a better idea of what can be done in an animation and came up with a fuller plan than we started out with.
Now that we had a better idea of what we could do, we decided to look at a bit of ‘smudge and click’ animation; this is where you draw out the animation but leave behind a trail of where the animation has been. We started off the animation with a simple ‘pick a card’ card trick, then when the volunteer went to place the card back, the deck would move; this then lead to the whole deck traveling from a 3 dimensional to 2 dimensional form and becoming ‘smudge and click’. We didn’t realise how long it would take to do the ‘smudge and click’ which meant that we had to wait to the next day to continue.
When we came back to finish the animation, we realised that we didn’t need to do more ‘smudge and click’ and that we could go back to the stop motion. After having the time to think, we decided to move the drawing back into 3D by turning it into origami, then have that origami run around on the floor which would then return to the magician. After returning, the magician would pick up the origami, retrieve the deck of cards and complete the trick.
Below is the animation that was created for this project, I hope you enjoy it.
Railston Artworks 