All Play and (Nearly) No Work

A. Play History

After talking all the things we did as kids in class on Thursday, I realized that the best memory I have of being a kid is the one that holds the most magic for me, and also is probably the lamest sounding to others. Trite as it may be, one of the most meaningful experiences I had as a child was getting my own library card. When I was growing up, one of the ways my parents would reward me for doing something correctly was to read a book to me. Not giving me candy, not buying me a new toy. I adored being read to more than anything, and storytime at night with my mom is one of my earliest memories. When I got a little older my mom would bring me to the library and let me pick out around 5 books per week; however, when I got a library card of my own, I felt this weird power of being responsible for the books being checked out in my name. I still remember going to the big library downtown (in fact, it's the one I still frequent when I go home.) Everything was a bit dimly lit, the floors were green marble and the reading areas had large, brown leather chairs with brass reading lamps, very much like a men's study from the beginning of the 20th century. Ever since I became an even more avid reader. By the age of 12 I was already exploring the adult fiction section and picking out around 4 books to read over the next week or two. Unfortunately, around the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had stopped reading for pleasure almost entirely. It has only been within the last year or so that I have taken up the habit once more.

I would say that there aren't that many direct connections to my work, but I do think the pieces I do tend to have a lot of fantastical imagery, some of which is definitely influenced by books that I read growing up (A Wrinkle in Time, anyone?) I would also say that my work tends to feature stories about strong, leading female characters, which is much like the books I was most interested in as a kid. Much of my work also seems to focus on adventure, going on quests to achieve a goal, etc. 

B. Favorite Games

Sorry!, Life, Red-Rover, Mother-May-I?, Yahtzee, Clue, Uno, Card Games (Gin and Crazy 8s), and Mille Bornes (educate yourself on the awesome)

As far as connections between these games, I would say that they are not very similar at all. Though it appears I like games with specialized decks of cards...

Games I hate? Only Dodgeball and Jenga really come to mind. Basically, both of these games are quite physical and tend to make me really nervous (losing leads to some physical negative response, either being hit by a ball or the crash of the Jenga blocks as they fall.)

C. Flying Solo

Firstly, I thought about what kinds of materials I had lying about my room. I knew I had a years old pack of origami and the ability to make the basic paper crane in about 2 minutes. As a kid I used to make this all of the time for fun. Sometimes I even do it now when I'm bored and feeling idle.

So, with that in mind, I made 12 crane in a short span of time and decided to time myself at 5 minutes--to see how much I could change each crane within that time frame. To create is to destroy, right?

I found that most changes was made by going back over the folds in the opposite direction, which often resulted in the object just tearing and falling apart. From here I was thinking about the fragility of paper and maybe implementing paper being torn to symbolize physical destruction in a future animation. (Example: A ball bounces and punches a hole through the paper, as if tearing a hole in space.) I can't lie, this wasn't the most successful experiment. However, the one below it makes up for it, I think.

D. Playing as a Group

Ultimately, the idea we came up with was to make "Exquisite Corpses" out of cut paper. The idea is that each of us make an assorted amount of body parts, be it human, animal, or none of the above, and photograph them all hodged-podged together to make new, weirdo creatures. After several hours of cutting out approx. 12 parts each, we began documenting our combinations. Here are my 6 favorites of the 20 we did:

I was pleasantly surprised with how they turned out. I especially like that the dynamics of the pieces translated to the camera. Ultimately, this was a lot of fun. In many ways, while I was experimenting with the different creatures I saw some parallels to my own work (some surrealist imagery, animal-human hybrids.) I think that this could also be a good project to practice with oneself if you were having some trouble coming up with character designs (of course, the parts wouldn't necessarily be crazy animal parts, but I choose those for this because I though they would be the most fun to work with.) 

E. Response 

First and foremost, I obviously like working with paper. I definitely want to continue to push forward on the paper aesthetic for my animations this semester. That aside, working with these materials made me realize that I need to return to straight-up storytelling. By trying to force my work to have some sort of parody or social commentary is not what I am really about: at my core, I enjoy reading and making stories. Maybe I will focus on making an animated story book (something a la Fractured Fairytales, perhaps?). Also there would be an undercurrent of dark humor in the retelling/original story. Or maybe I could work with my hipster parody more and work that into somehow having an animated storybook quality. More thoughts on this later.