I’m currently in our video and animation module, and want to go ahead and share my first assignment, so I’m going to break from chronological order. As this is my second time doing video, I’m going to focus on what I really want to be doing, and that’s animation. Might as well use this module as a forcing to get me to try new (hard) things.

My goal here was to animate a mandarin, making it look alive, to have some presence. Initially, this idea was conceived as a simple idea to get this homework out of the way of an essay assignment, but ha, animation is never “easy.” After a couple of failed takes, I accepted that fact, and just leaned into it, taking the time to do the takes needed before I had more interesting footage.

There’s not much to say, other than, the mandarins were unexpectedly leaky. As I pierced the skin to trace the cut of the peel, juices flowed out, and the poor mandarin was looking pretty mangled from the piercing and squeezing. Several times I had to stop what I was doing to rinse and dry my hands, as eventually all my finger tips had juice on them. One feedback I got from class though was that the video was sensual, which is not what I was going for, but I can see it; the juice may be to blame.

In addition to doing animation, I also want to do my own music production. With little time left to make new sounds, I unearthed some experiments I made two years ago with just me and a loop pedal. And, it was meant to be——this audio clip, which has the right lightness of spirit for the content, also just happens to sync perfectly with the visual transitions.