For this assignment I had to make some art in 6 seconds. I thought it would be easy but quickly realized that I was wrong. I am not good at art and it is really hard to do something in 6 seconds. Time flies!! I did this about 15 times with different drawings but I was taking too long. I finally ended up drawing a butterfly. I did not enjoy this assignment at all! I ended up just using my camera off my computer by tilting the screen down towards the table. I then realized that by doing that I was going to have to draw upside down so that was challenge.
For this assignment we were asked to create a short video that demonstrates you creating art. One of my favorite pastimes is to create scrapbook pages and collages. There something about have so much control that makes me love making them. I have a scrapbook that I don’t regularly add to so I thought this project could be a great opportunity to jump back into it. Although it was not 6 seconds long, I think the length of mine makes more sense. I wanted the audience to see more of how I got to the final project and the end result. For most major changes, I took a picture and photographed as many movements as I could. Then I created a gif and took out any flaws. Lastly the gif was imported to Premiere, manipulated and given sound. This was all around a fun thing for me to do and I love how it turned out!
To finish up my assignments for the first round of video week, worth four stars, I decided to create six-second art. I’m not going to lie, my art actually is nine seconds, but you get the gist.
To create my six-second art, I decided to record myself drawing a picture of a giraffe I found online, as they are my favorite animal. I first practiced and then drew the one featured in the video. To record, I used my iPhone and uploaded the video to iMovie. The original video was a minute and 20 seconds. However, using iMovie, I sped the clip up 8x. This was as much as I could speed it up, otherwise, the video was only three seconds long. However, if you ask me, nine seconds is close enough to six. Once I finished fast forwarding the video, I uploaded it to YouTube and embedded it below.
I chose to do this assignment as I am fairly decent at art from time to time and I found the giraffe and thought it was adorable. The fast forwarding of the video was the part I was most hesitant about, but I watched a tutorial on YouTube and it was smooth sailing from there.
The first video assignment I chose to do for the week is the 4-star Six Second Art project. I’ll say right now that I’m no artist – I can’t draw for beans, I can’t paint, I can’t dance, and I can’t sing. I have shaky hands so anything that requires a gentle touch is out the window. Woosh. Bye bye, art that isn’t of the abstract performance variety!
What I am kinda good at is origami. For this video I decided I wanted to make a paper crane. When I was younger I used to make them all the time – I really wanted to make 1,000 cranes. As the legend goes, if you have the patience to make 1,000 paper cranes, you’ll get to ask the gods for a wish. I always went by the “you have to make them all in one year” rule, so I never made it to 1,000.
Instead, I’d try to challenge myself in other ways – what was the smallest crane I could possibly make? The biggest? I tried using all different kinds of paper too. Newspaper, construction paper, tissue paper… I think once I actually tried to make one using just plain old tissues. Pretty sure it didn’t go well.
Learning how to fold the crane was a really tough process for me, especially since it was a few years before everyone started posting How-To videos on Youtube. I had to go by crazy diagrams that were hard to figure out. But in the end I was able to do it, and even though I needed a “refresher course” to make the ones for this video, being able to fold them is something that I’m proud of. I realize that posting a video where my process is sped up 160% is exactly the opposite of what I would have wanted to find 10 years ago, but… that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The worst part about doing this assignment had nothing to do with the editing process – it was positioning my freaking camera. I didn’t have anyone on hand to help me out with this in the way of filming… I was hoping someone would hold my phone over my shoulder, but nope. Instead, I had a setup that ended up looking like this. Behold, my terrible art skills!
I had a BOX in my face the whole time. ARGH. It was a bit of a struggle getting the video from my phone to the computer (I use Google photos and have my camera roll sync to that when I open the app, but the video was nearly 3 minutes so it took a while to upload). But after getting it into Windows Movie Maker, it was pretty much smooth sailing for me. I chose a shamisen for the music track because it reminded me of Kubo and the Two Strings – a beautiful stop-motion film by Laika that was ROBBED OF AN OSCAR and features origami and the shamisen. Here’s a gallery of my process –
When I was younger, my family and I would go to El Salvador every summer. While there, my parents would put my siblings and I in art classes. These art classes had kids of all different ages and each week we would have a new project. These projects ranged from painting to ceramics. I remember for one of the classes the teacher made us throw paint onto our canvas, followed by folding the canvas in half. For this video assignment I recreated the lesson they taught us by simply laying paint down and folding my canvas. It doesn’t really sound like art, but I like the plethora of combinations you can create!
I chose this assignment for three reasons. The first reason is because I thought it would be an interesting assignment to complete especially since it had to be speeded up. The second reason is because I’ve never used my phone’s camera recorder, so I wanted to give it a try. And the third reason is because I was in the mood to paint and get my hands dirty, so I thought what better way to do that than this project! Little did I know that this assignment was going to be a lot tougher.
I have used Windows Live Movie Maker previously, but my new computer did not have the program so I had to redownload it. Well it turned out, after I had finished creating my assignment that I couldn’t convert it to a .WMV file because I only had the tutorial version. After many failed solutions I had to recreate my assignment with my sister’s computer, which wasn’t too bad but I was not much of a happy camper. The second time I did the assignment I had trouble limiting to six seconds because if i hyperlapsed it too much, it would skip sections, and I didn’t want that. There were two tutorials that assisted me through my struggles. The first one helped me with fast fowarding the video and the second one helped me save the video to a .WMV file.
If you would like to try this assignment follow the procedure below.
Procedure
Step 1: Open Windows Movie Maker, select the File tab, and click on Open Project. Import your recorded video first!
Step 2: Once you import your video, highlight it. A video editing tool should appear, select the speed option. Since this assignment requires you to speed up your video I recommend doing the 8x option.
Step 3: Go to the Home tab and select the Title option.
Step 4: Once you have a title name you can adjust the font and background color.
Step 5: To add music to your video, go to the Home tab and select the Add Music icon.
Step 6: Highlight your video to receive the Music Tools tab. Under this tab you will find the Music Volume, lower it a tad.
Step 7: When you are satisfied with your video, go to the File tab and select Save Project.
Link to assignment is tagged above in ‘Video #1: #SixSecondArt?
I don’t have vine but I got this to work just fine with the Photo Booth camera on my macbook. The original video was only 25 seconds, so once I imported that to iMovie I highlighted everything and dragged what I wanted into the box. From there I had to go to the settings of the video itself and then flip it order for the message to be read correctly. The last thing I did was speed it up 8x to get exactly 6 seconds.
I had trouble thinking of what I wanted to do for this since I couldn’t find scissors or anything like that. But I guess the notion of magnifying glass being related to spy things and investigations and whatnot gave me inspiration for this. Plus the end result isn’t that bad either! I wrote Alex B. on the inside in order to have a small connection to her within the drawing.
So this was actually way harder than I thought it would be. The assignment was to create a 6 second video of some sort of art. 6 seconds doesn’t sound so hard right? Not so much. I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination and really have no idea how to create it. Then I started thinking about it from the actual video angle. Whats types of videos could really be considered art? The it hit me, animation! Through a web search, I found there are quite a few different free sites out there where you can create your own animations. Some are much more user friendly than others and some have templates you can use. I eventually came across Dvolver. This is a really fun site that basically creates the animation for you, but uses your choices for background, characters, dialogue, and even music. I decided to throw a little humor into mine and here it is! It might be a little longer than 6 seconds but oh well.
This assignment took a spin on the six word story and six word quote ideas and had me do six second art. This was a tough one, not because of the art but because it took me like ten tries to fit what I wanted to draw into only six seconds. I thought a fun idea would be to draw what I used to draw myself like when I was only four or five years old.
This video assignments was one of my favorites! I did a stop motion video in high school using the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was a little more advanced than the video I did for this assignment, but it was still a lot of fun. The task was to create a 6 second video of yourself making art. Mine was 7 seconds… sorry. Here is the link to the original assignment. It was worth 3.5 stars. I used iMovie to create the video, I didn’t really have too much trouble using it but I found a Youtube video online with an easy tutorial to help me.
