So
Traces of TUV ended up going better than I could have ever planned.
For those of you who do not know, I made a project for my Dance on
Camera class in which I had three separate wall panels and had
silhouettes on each panel surrounded by words related to a specific
topic. Each panel represent the character of either T,U, or V. I
added on to the project daily so that you would see more of a
character day by day until all three panels were completely filled
with text. In addition to this I made a video for each character in
which they performed a sort phrase while audio of a narrative they
had written played over them. The end result was this brief look into
the lives of these characters in which you get to see how their
personality affects their dance style and motivations, which was the
entire point of this project. I do not usually dabble in making
working with hidden meanings or subtle hints at deeper topics, I
prefer working the surface and using narratives to get a point
across. This may simply because I am not currently able to sneak in
subtly, or because I am so tired of the way narratives get abused in
modern story telling that I just want to make some quality art. So
when I started this project I had one goal: tell the story of these
characters. That was it. If I could accomplish that I could move on
to my next piece and be happy about my work. As it turned out that
was not enough, once I started crafting this idea I kept noticing all
these little details that keep falling into place, little details
that seemed intentional but were just a result of the creative
process. Each video component had a particular color that wen allow
with it, and the color matched the tone of each character perfectly.
This happen simply because I picked filming locations that I thought
would suit the characters. I wanted to show people how personality
affects your own dance style, but I ended seeing how the world has
its own affects on your art. During the creative process I try to
just take simple ideas and get as much millage out of them as
possible, but what ends up happening is that all these tiny
coincidences keep affecting my creations in the best of ways. So what
I have learned to do is just let my projects shape themselves in a
way.
In
this project in particular I was heavily inspired by the idea of
cross media production. I wanted to make a project that spanned
multiple mediums but still carried the same message. So my videos did
not take away from my panels, and my audio did not take away from my
video, and my panels did not take away from my audio. Since there
were many ways to view my project I wanted to make it so that no
matter who much time you spent with it you came away with the same
impression or idea. The challenge of this was that some parts of the
projects took more time than others. I spent a good two hours per
video making sure the editing was as good as I could make it, but
only about 2 hours total went into the panel display. So how could I
make sure one did not outshine the other? The answer came in the
harsh form that this was simply not possible, so instead what I did
was do my best to directly tie all the ideas together so that there
would be no disconnect between them. They were different parts of the
same whole, so experiencing one was just not enough. My Traces
display become such that if you wanted a holistic view of my idea you
needed to see everything, which in most cases was not possible. This
lead to me viewing my project as a failure. I did not want people to
think I had tried to confused them my leaving out information, there
was simply not enough time to get everything out there. The feedback
I got, however, made me think otherwise. Since people only saw a
piece of the puzzle they wanted to see more and I was asked where the
rest of the project was. I tried to have it all up front, but natural
curiosity and art go hand in hand and in the end I'm glad the display
turned out the way it did. I wanted people to see this as a
reflection of dancers and how we feel and how we incorporate that in
our own work. I have learned that as an artist, I still have plenty
of pieces of my own puzzle to fill in.
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