As you’ve seen in Rick Black, i’m fond of mask interpolation in Adobe After Effects. It consists of me making my keyframes in Illustrator and pasting each path onto a solid layer as a mask in After Effects. The technique is vastly time consuming and tedious but being able to manipulate the time between keyframes and frames per second, which you can probably do in Flash, is a pretty nice trade-off.
The difference between this and Rick Black as you can see is the use of color. Since i have to make a mask for each moving piece, i ended up with 27 different layers to make the character which is a huge step up from Black’s five (the arms were separate).
The finished video will showcase a few techniques i’ve yet to experiment with so it won’t be anything too fancy or mindblowing. stay tuned.
Do not attempt to adjust your monitor. The mothership HAS landed. Sit back and relax and let the Funktopus enter your mind. He has traveled for eons ridin’ on the nebulous waves of funk Looking For the Perfect Beat. He continues his Motorbootyaffair and won’t stop until The Beat Goes Boom.
Hailing from all-over, make room for the Swampstar. He’s been all the way up and down the Mighty Mississipi and can tell you whatever you wanna know about the dutty South. He makes his home in the Louisianna bayou and you can find him on the swampiest of swampy nights.
And now to kick off Series 2 of the Tubii. This series is dedicated to hip-hop and monsters. Each week, there will be a new character and hopefully a few surprises at the end. I enjoyed coming up with these new characters and i hope you have fun building them despite the notorious trickiness of my toys.
This week, boys and girls, i introduce Hipfoot: a bigfoot like creature in his size 32 Dunks and requisite shudder shades stepping out of his native habitat to hang at his other native habitat of indie film festivals and art shows.
Here’s an all-new custom of Nick Knite’s Kujira. I took some liberties with the shape and fused it with some messoamerican style to make this half wale half bird. You can find it at his blog.
Here’s an oldie but goodie from 2007. Rick Black. If you haven’t seen it, i was just experimenting with masking. The whole thing is masks down to the characters themselves. That just made it easier to make the animation fluid without having to actually draw too many frames.
Where does the mask end and the face begin? How we perceive ourselves, as well as, what we truly are, is determined by our pasts and our experiences – that which we can never escape. We masquerade to protect our vulnerabilities, or our pasts and to perhaps deceive others or join them. These guises are as fragile as the idea of identity in itself, yet we still choose to conceal ourselves. Derrida theorizes that our identities are not self contained, but constructed from language, culture, and history, and are therefore composites of experience and circumstance. I submit that masking, by proxy, is that manifested identity constructed totally outside of circumstance shaped by the other.
“Maskharaâ€* is an Arabic word meaning to distort or falsify into an animal or monster and is where the European iterations of “mask†are derived.
This investigation observes the ruse and questions its role in determining identity by abstracting the form of three physical masks, and in turn, further distorting the true face. These pieces are constructed of paper in order to express the malleability of identity, and at once, show the weak, and impermanence of the façade. Folding each piece rather than cutting, expresses the natural forming of the deception. Each fold is dependent upon the fold that came before. As these creases begin to layer, flatten, and disappear, the piece gains a sense of lineage.
“While we are alive, we cannot escape from masks or names. We are inseparable from our fictions – our features. We are condemned to invent a mask for ourselves and afterward to discover that the mask is our true face.†—Octavio Paz, 1970
