Final Project Prototype, take 2.

Slowly but surely the flipbooks are coming along. The process is very tedious and I now have a newfound appreciation for hand-drawn animation.

Basically I've decided that I want to display 3 main elements:
1) how the animals have/will change
2) how nature (as we know it) is disappearing
3) how garbage (mostly e-waste) is appearing

The animals will change as a result of the other two; because of all the garbage and e-waste, nature as we know it cannot survive due to the toxic chemicals found in our everything things. Humans, with long life expectancies, cannot evolve quickly enough to be able to fight off the toxins and very few survive. Animals on the other hand, with much shorter live times can and will evolve into creatures that are unfathomable to us today, helping them to become immune to the toxic effects of the chemicals found in garbage and e-waste.

These flipbooks will serve as a message from the future as to why we need better e-waste management and control today. They will show the consequences of creating items with planned obsolescence that are known even today to have toxic chemical compounds.

As the animals, in this case coyote, change so will the 2 background images. The real photo of the ground and rocks will sink lower and lower to the bottom of the frame until there is nothing left. The garbage, in this case cell phones, will continue to climb up to the top of the frame until it and the animal are all that is left.

I'm still fine tuning the backgrounds and deciding on colors, sizes, and whether or not to use a real image for the garbage. Keep in mind, these pictures only show about 1/2 of the flipbook for coyotes. There will be a total of 4 books, 4.75" x 2.75", showing the consequences of 4 kinds of garbage on 4 kinds of animals found in Glen Canyon Park (coyote, hawk, snake, and mouse).

Final Project Prototype... for now.

Here is a quick example of how one of my flip books would work. As you can see, the mouse morphs into something more sinister looking. As you can see, this is pretty hard to see and fuzzy as it is currently hand drawn with pencil on tracing paper... The final version would be much more clear with more detail, including a background of some kind. This same process would be applied to 3 other animals: coyote, hawk, and snake. I think that these 4 animals give the audience a fairly good idea as to what the ecosystem of the present is like and therefore, how it will change in the future.

I want to incorporate humans into the project somehow but I'm not quite sure where they will fit in at this point. I'm still playing around with a couple of ideas, including possibly constructing an interactive display piece similar to a old-fashioned zoetrope...

In any event, I want to keep with the idea from my group's midterm project of seeing the world from a different point of view.

Midterm and Glen Park Library Experience

The library experience for me created a mixture of feelings. Of course I was nervous about presenting something in front of a group of strangers in an unfamiliar location but I figured that it would prove to be a good experience... provided that our group was ready.

Working as a group was a difficult and often nerve-wracking experience. We seemed to have a hard time coming to agree on just about everything; something you kind of expect. I for one became very frustrated because I couldn't seem to get an answer out of one group member in particular. It seemed to take forever to figure out what we would in fact do for this project and even longer to actually do it.

Our group's library presentation I felt could have gone a lot smoother. Going first is always difficult but this time in particular it seemed worse than usual. Our one group member forgot to print out a copy of the dog brochure which caused our slideshow to become choppy and awkward, especially at the end as we then had to display her work on screen right in the middle. This was very frustrating as we had agreed and planned on how our presentation would go and who would say and show what when. Apart from the awkward silence at the end, I felt that we conveyed our ideas well. We received very few comments from the audience at the end of all the presentations so I think that it would have been beneficial to have had questions answered at the end of each presentation.

I think that everyone else did a great job and explained their projects beautifully. Just about every group seemed very well prepared and in many cases presented better in front of the community than in the classroom.

Final Project Ideas/Proposal

At this point I'm still not entirely sure what I want to accomplish with this final project. I'm still really interested in the wildlife of Glen Canyon Park and want to incorporate that. I also like the idea I had for the cards that flip to create one image and would like to play around with and try to expand it.

Idea #1
At first I thought it might be interesting to do a series of pictures of how much the park has changed through the hundreds of years. I was thinking that this could take the form of an art book where I could alter the pictures both by hand and digitally. The pictures would all be black and white and their alterations might be in color. 

Idea #2
What if the animals took over the park?
If the time period for the project is 500 years in the future and we basically can imagine it any way we want, what if everything was reversed? In this case, the animals would be the ones in control of not only the park but also the whole city. In order to have accomplished a complete take-over from humans, several things would have had to change; their size and behavior mostly. As a result, humans would have had to change as well and might not be as advanced, which might be that technology is not used the way it is today. Basically, it would be like going in the past before we had technology and instead had to rely on ourselves to survive and get through our days. All of this would mean that nature has taken over the city and the creek would be allowed to flow and change any way it wants. As a result, humans would be considered the "wildlife" and animals do as they please. Human population would decrease as there would be more competition and everyday dangers.

As far as the form that this would take, I'm looking into maybe a series of very small flip books depicting the changes through time or everyday events. I want everything to feel hand-made and hand-drawn... maybe almost cartoonish. Instead of/in addition maybe a small book kind of explaining what happened might be a good way to make this concept more understandable.

Again, none of this is set in stone and is definitely subject to change as I'm still figuring things out.

Thoughts... Ideas... Stuff

History
-restoring back to the way it was originally
-original natural area

Wildlife
-photographic study
-black and white images
-native species and plants
-flippy cards with different shots

-city vs natural
-different views/perspectives... different ways of looking at things
-comparison of different time periods
-blurry images... images in motion

Brief Description...

Brief description of my group's project:

Our group from the start was very interested in the different uses of Glen Canyon Park. Upon further examination and after many visits, we discovered a large number of dog owners that seem to frequent the park on a regular basis. We also seemed to notice that from a particular clearing, there seemed to not only be a lot of dog-walking activity but also wildlife activity; we called this area "The Clearing." The wildlife that seemed the most active was the scurrying of mice throughout the grasses and shrubs. Then the question hit: How is it that humans and animals are able to frequent the same area without disturbing or even really noticing one another? In an attempt to examine the relationship, we wanted to try to get into the state of mind of these two groups; dog walkers were easy enough but that of a mouse was a little more complex. Then came the challenge of seeing the world through an unusual point of view and allowing ourselves to become completely immersed in it. Then of course once understood, how would other humans be able to learn and understand about the world that we share with these tiny creatures?

At this point, we decided to create two different brochures to entice people to Glen Canyon Park. One brochure would be directed towards humans, specifically dog owners, written by humans. The other would also be written for humans but penned by/through the eyes of the mice of "The Clearing." The ultimate goal was to gain a better understanding of an otherwise familiar place (Glen Canyon Park) by comparing and examining two different worlds that occupy the same space.

Cards

Here is the card idea that I've been playing around with... They are the different perspectives of home, what one would see or notice versus the other, etc...


First set... top 4 are the mouse perspective while the 2nd 4 are the human perspective

 Second set... again the top ones are the mouse perspective...