Each artist was asked to create an immersive three minute digital art video which the City planned to show on three eight-foot-high LED panels. Every screen had to be different. Artists were provided with technical assistance during creation if required while specialists performed necessary tests to ensure that the videos played correctly on the outdoor screens.
Rustic broom |
Pointe shoes & ribbons |
I had to create my screens intuitively because I didn't have an application or software that allowed me to see all three simultaneously.
My goal was to entertain the general public. I thought a ballet or
dance theme would be perfect for the music festival. I had recently
finished a series of paper works on which I had collaged pieces of
sheet music. The imagery grew to depict a funky ballet character. I was motivated to keep working on the idea of dance and these are the elements and characters that ended up in my ballet.
OBJECTS:
- rustic brooms
- pointe shoes and ribbons
CHARACTERS:
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- his wife Josephine
- a mummy wrapped up in pointe shoe ribbons
- a chubby dancer
- linear, transparent dancers
- a spirit that inhabits the broom handle
Having created a first video with entirely digital components in 2021 (for the Natura project), I wanted to approach this work differently. The upper body of my Joséphine, the shadow Napoleon, and coloured shapes were digitally extracted from an unfinished acrylic painting, while the ballet legs and Napoleonic hat were taken from some of my mixed media works on paper. Other characters and objects in the video were all drawn digitally in Procreate.
Ballet leg |
Josephine with Napoleon's hat |
The learning curve is endless when it comes to digital art and my works have evolved a great deal over the past 10 years. For this project, I wanted to improve my mastery of the applications I use on a regular basis to achieve flexibility of execution during my creative process. When acquiring new skills, it's often difficult to obtain a desired result right from the get go.
I experimented with frame-by-frame animation in Procreate. Since this process is extremely laborious, intensive, and time-consuming, I created and incorporated a short clip in the centre screen panel.
Spirit in the handle (frame by frame animation) |
I switched between several applications on my iPad to create my video, mainly Procreate, Keynote and Video Joiner.
Napoleon with ballet legs |
Many animations were conceived in Keynote particularly the broom dance. I repeated and distorted objects to create rotations. Exported videos from Keynote were way too slow and clunky so I imported them into Video Joiner to increase their speed and to add special effects. I achieved relatively smooth movements in various clips.
Josephine with broom handle legs |
I used time-lapse videos to create other segments and also inserted two small mirror videos of mummies wrapped in pointe shoe ribbons in the central screen above the chubby dancer character. This gave the illusion of fluttering butterflies. I was delighted to discover that I could insert videos into videos.
Mummy wrapped in pointe shoe ribbons |
Chubby dancer |
Once the Festival was over, I added a soundtrack to my video. The lab technician again provided valuable assistance in producing an electronic version of the Nutcracker overture which worked well with my characters' rhythms.
In situ - Photo: Je suis Mozaik |
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