Remixability in Action

On the 12th of January 2014 I had the pleasure of attending a concert at Leigh Sawmill Cafe featuring Julia Deans, Annie Crummer and my brother Tama Waipara. It was my second visit to the venue as I also was there on Oct 6 2013, to hear my brother perform songs off his new album ‘Fill Up The Silence’, for which I designed the artwork.

On his previous ‘Sir Plus’ album cover I used a more traditional approach, such as photo referencing for pencil sketches, then traced in Adobe Illustrator, and since the brief dealt with a fictitous/secondary/alternate persona, rendering it in a comic-book style seemed highly appropriate. The theme also had elements of the theatrical about it, and this influenced the layout and typography design choices.

Album Artwork © copyright Tama Waipara

By contrast, on the new album I used a motion graphics program (normally associated with animation) to build a 2D design solution. The name of the album, ‘Fill Up the Silence’ suggested a void, but rather than being empty I imagined a background with some sort of noise radiation that would exist in the universe since creation. The workflow started off in Adobe Illustrator where graphic and typographic elements were assembled and imported into Adobe After Effects, where the use of 3D space, virtual camera, lights and special effects could be employed. This assemblage was then exported as .psd files into Adobe Photoshop, before finally being added to layout pages back in Adobe Illustrator.

Album Artwork © copyright Tama Waipara

This approach was inspired by Lev Manovich’s theory of remixability, which I first encountered in the seminal article After Effects and the Velvet Revolution. And so this album cover was an experiment on my part to see if something like cross-platform/cross-program creativity would be possible, working from the impetus of my past and ongoing research.

Comic Character Workshop

The staff at the Mt Roskill branch of Auckland City Libraries are fantastic at creating all sorts of intiatives to engage with their members, such as hosting events and workshops. A good example is their September Comic Book Month celebration.

Flyer image copyright Auckland Council (characters trademarked Beyond Reality Media).

So when I was asked to contribute by hosting a workshop during this Comic event, I was only too happy to help out. In initial discussions with Marion Walker (the Children’s Librarian), we brainstormed about what shape the workshop could take (given the timeframe of an hour and a half) and came up with – ‘Create your own Comic Character’.

I prepared a worksheet with ideas and illustrations in advance of the workshop itself, liasing with Marion and later with Harriet Hodge, whose feedback was helpful in this regard.

© Photos copyright Harriet Hodge.

The worksheet was a summary of approaches to coming up with ideas, and some general principles of drawing. But this has to be done in balance, as I think it is important to not be too prescriptive and thereby overwhelm a child’s natural creativity, by setting all sorts of rules around ‘this is the way to draw’, etc.

© Photos copyright Harriet Hodge.

The workshop was open to all comers, and was very enjoyable to run, with children and adults attending (including Library staff – who helped to provide valuable support on the day). I had a great time working alongside all the participants, and it was amazing to see all the art that was produced. 

© Photos copyright Harriet Hodge.

Once again, I used this chance to show my own portfolio (demonstrating different styles and approaches) as another deadline, providing further impetus to complete more of my ongoing Masters’ project.

It’s great to have the chance to be involved with the next generation of NZ comic artists! Many thanks to Harriet for providing photos.

Storylines 2013

On Sunday, 18 August I appeared as a participant in Storylines 2013, specifically in the Comic Zone area. I have a long association with the Storylines festival going back to 1998. Summaries of previous festivals (pdfs) are available on the Storylines website, and here some responses from the schools themselves. 

It was a useful opportunity to promote my book illustration & portfolio work (including my work-in-progress comic pages) and demonstrate live sketching and colouring. I also gave away promotional cards and stickers based on the Rock of Ages characters. The artists attending this year’s festival were asked to create a picture based on one of Margaret Mahy’s stories, to be auctioned off at a later date.

Here’s a scan of my contribution. © Zak Waipara 2013. 

Events of this kind provide an important chance to meet your potential audience, and I enjoy talking with both children and adults about my work and the artistic process. It’s also a valuable opportunity to meet other professionals (storytellers, writers and artists), and likewise share information and artistic knowledge. 

 Comic area (inset), and portfolio pages. © Zak Waipara 2013.

Critically for me, given my current research trajectory, it also provided the impetus to get more work finished! Presenting at the Art & Design postgraduate conference (discussed last post) also required me to complete practical work (and solidify my theoretical principles) to help demonstrate my on-going project. I see these events as an important part of the process. 

I was also recently asked to present at Dominion Rd School’s Book Week (at the end of June). This involved speaking to the whole school about my role as illustrator, graphic designer, animator and storyteller.

Dominion Road School presentation. © Zak Waipara 2013.

In order to engage the children with the illustration aspect of story creation, I was asked to provide a colouring-in page of my artwork for the junior school (I based this on an animated Maui story I had worked on) and an illustration challenge for the senior school. For the older children, I adapted a story I illustrated called Kopuwai the Monster, and formatted the story into a comic page. To provide incentives, I donated some of my illustrated books as 1st and 2nd prizes, and made certificates for the winning students of the comic challenge, which I judged the following week, presenting these prizes and certificates at the school assembly. Lest anyone feel left out, all the 300 children received Otea stickers as well. It was only at the end of the challenge that I realised how well the children had done to illustrate 12 comic panels within a week! 

Finally, I gifted a laminated copy of my 2007 Storylines poster to the school library. The poster itself has an interesting genesis. In about 2004, the Children’s Literature Foundation of NZ (as they were called at the time) were selected to host the IBBY conference for 2007, and needed a poster to commemorate the event and asked for submissions from local illustrators, including myself. I was fortunate enough to be chosen for this endeavour, and had the chance to illustrate the poster to accompany the late Margaret Mahy’s text, though I never had the chance to meet her in person (although she did visit my primary school when I was a child living in Kaiapoi). There’s a complimentary write-up here. 

Since it was sent out to over 70 member countries, many variants of the poster were created; some countries even adapted it and translated the text into their own language/s. The poster and its accompanying text were often posted online at the time. Such as this Portugese post,and a Spanish post or two and a Chinese blog, and a Russian post. Wayne Mills of CLFNZ very kindly gave me this copy of my design, turned into an Arabic calendar, and told me he had seen a Japanese variant of the poster – which I still would like to see one day.

Arabic Calendar. Photo © Zak Waipara 2013.

The poster also happens to includes my own two characters from the Rock of Ages comic prologue. Even at this stage, the idea of transferring characters and stories across different types of media and formats was a very normal approach for me, and so naturally leads into my current investigation into transmedia.

Recollect Revisited

This week was the AUT Art & Design Postgraduate Symposium, and a lot has happened in the lead up to it. On Wednesday I was fortunate enough to receive the Art & Design Discipline Postgraduate Research Award (Digital Design).

Accepting the award from my supervisor Greg Bennett. © Zak Waipara.

Thursday, I presented my current Masters transmedia research project to a public filled auditorium. This meant spending the three weeks prior trying to organise my material into a presentable form in order to communicate the gist of it clearly. It was a useful exercise, it brought some ideas to the fore (like genealogy as a metaphorical linking theme) – which I will now use to bolster up the actual written research component that will accompany my transmedia project. It provided some much needed impetus to the project in general and helped me organise the various elements in a way that lets me see how much is still required to complete the various transmedia sections.

Graduation was held on the previous Friday and I graduated (albeit in absentia), and my Honours document arrived by courier today. In order to graduate, the prospective graduand must lodge their work (with corrections with the AUT library). I had only a few minor corrections to make to the text copy, and some timing issues to fix on the actual short film/animations. Those of us Art & Design students who had used moving image as a medium had our work screened together as one continuous looping reel, the exhibition being held last year in St Pauls St Gallery at AUT.

The Recollect DVD © Copyright 2013 Zak Waipara

I used the intervening time, between its screening and submission to the library, to tweak some of the motion graphics, improve parts of the art, finish off some sections that were rushed to meet the deadline etc. This took longer than expected, because the motion graphics all had so many ‘moving parts’ and in fixing some areas, other errors popped up. As a result, I ended up having to submit the DVD twice! That meant I missed the cut off date to apply to graduate in person (hence the ‘in absentia’ part). 

So this post marks the official completion and submission/acceptance of my Honours thesis (part exegesis and part practical project). It will now be held, as a digital copy, in the AUT’s library. Parts of this blog have been created from the exegesis document, with some sections almost verbatim and others summaries or re-wordings, while of course other entries are wholly original – having only a tangential connection. 

This blog was set up to talk about using academia (postgraduate research and classroom experience) to help produce creative work. An academic lens is a perfectly appropriate way to describe this process, because in addition to providing parameters, deadlines and measurable outcomes it also forces you to focus in on what you are really doing and the why of it. It gives you a chance to describe your work thoroughly, in a way that might not be asked of you in an industry based project. In the academic environment, even if only working part-time, it is hard to maintain credible industry experience, even more so if engaged in a full-time teaching position. In addition the rapid changes in technology, techniques and design trends in the digital arena can make any prior experience less relevant to practical training/tuition due to its currency or lack of it. Research with a creative practical component offers some potential to achieve a much sought after balance between being a lecturer and a practitioner.

The Case for Abstract Animation

This year, on 21-23 March, AUT held its inaugural animation festival: Animation Revelations. Due to a hectic schedule I only managed to attend two of the many events offered.

© Photo copyright Zak Waipara 2013. Pass from the festival.

One of these was the animation programme titled The Case for Abstract Animation. Though I am still interested in both experiencing and creating more overt forms of narrative, I have also become intrigued with the possiblities of other, less literal, narratives, particularly with regard to motion graphics. I present here, in paraphrased form, some notes I managed to take from the introduction to the screening. 

 ..........

Malcolm Turner, the curator of the festival, described abstract animation as a subset of the animation field, a specialist area but important nonetheless. In his opinion, creative indie auteur animation is the pinnacle of human animation, which provides a pathway for animators and audiences trying to push the artform. Turner believes that everybody who works in the general field produces something that has the whiff of abstract animation about it - even the most obvious forms of animation have this quality about them - and yet most animators try to create the opposite: striving for the hyper-real. He noted that animation takes a lot of effort, and each animator has only a few films inside them, so they need to be judicious with time and resources. Turner described abstract animation as the R & D engine room of the animation world, and discussed how this practice examines the limits of the cinema frame, and teaches us how the frame can be breached by the power of imagination. 

Blurb from the programme.

 ..........

I agree with Turner that experimental cinema of this kind takes risks and can produce unexpected results. And the analogy of an R & D engine room shows how these experiments often find their way back into the mainstream via the intersection of art and commerce. For example, Shynola, a collective I referenced in my Honours exegesis, used the techniques of direct animation based film-making (as pioneered by such artists as Len Lye) to produce the Scott Pilgrim film titles. They also employed remix, delving into student era work to add a sense of realism to their technique. It’s amazing to see that in a cyclical way, this kind of work has found a voice again. It always used to feature in film festivals’ animation programmes - what I used to refer to (with tongue in cheek) as ‘squiggly line films’.

© copyright Tumanako Productions 2010.

I have been fortunate to have the chance to work with a different type of abstract animation inside of a documentary format: Powhiri: Welcome or Not. My animation was more formal and geometric in its approach, drawing as it did from Maori patterns, and it was also influenced heavily by motion graphic design techniques. I was able to work in this fashion due to the director Kay Ellmers, who saw the possibilities that such abstract forms held for offering new storytelling techniques for more mainstream projects. 

Motion design seems to be well suited to employ aspects of experimental animation, situated as it is inside so many disciplines. As such, this is an area worthy of further investigation.

The Fulfilment of Creative Possibility

As I stated in my very first post on this blog, my Honours project Recollect was a proof of concept into the possibilities of using remix, and my contention was that the remix process is a useful improvisational creative methodology for the digital media practitioner. Why is this the case? 

I found that using remix created all the parameters for the project. For example, some way had to be found to glue an amount of unused illustrative material together in a cohesive fashion. Remix for me enabled this. Genres were determined by assembling and grouping the material by theme. The illustrative bent determined situating the work inside a motion graphic approach. The short duration nature of motion design suggested working without overt narrative, and emphasising style instead. It became important to use all the unused material and seek creative solutions to make sure every piece found a home somewhere. The continued success of this practice meant reaching back even further into the past to repurpose an old unused motif which eventually helped segue between scenes.

Motif. © Copyright Zak Waipara

But these unused pieces by themselves were not enough material to create a whole universe of side-by-side genres. So I returned to the drawing board and the computer, and created all new material to help hide the joins. As a result, that single unused motif morphed into a plethora of variations.

Motif variations. © Copyright Zak Waipara

This process gave rise to discoveries, as new digital techniques and solutions emerged. Using remix was a way to spark creativity, offering unconventional ways of thinking. This was an altogether freeing process, such as dispensing with plot and character, as I was very interested in leaving literal narrative to one side for the moment. 

During my digital design undergraduate years, I got to experiment with narrative form in 2D and 3D animation, but also with more abstract motion graphics, and in some cases abstract narrative sitting inside and next to more overt narrative. This heralded the beginnings of using remix and self-sampling, though I wasn’t defining it as such back then.

© Copyright Tama Waipara

One of these experiments with narrative culminated in a year long music video project that I put together in third year. This involved remix and self-sampling. The genesis came from an illustration style I tried that proved successful and a song, Leaving Paradise, my musician brother had composed.

This project was actually the second iteration of the video (using a different iteration of the song). It built upon the earlier attempt of two separate animations put together in Flash and was finally improved upon in After Effects. Interestingly, one of the remix practitioners (Bent TV) I referenced in my finished Honours thesis did an almost similar thing with the Star Wars Gangsta Rap. It was a chance for that team to make improvements upon an earlier work: the first version and second version.

Though my music video is not currently online, some snippets can be seen at 2:31 and 4:25 at this link here (scroll down) advertising the Digital Design Dept of AUT.

First and second versions (literal narrative). © Copyright Zak Waipara

The chance to re-train allowed me to assess my own learning style – to find out firsthand what works and what doesn’t. Not all teaching styles suit every student, and not all students learn in exactly the same way. This may not be apparent to the novice who goes straight from high school to tertiary training. In the same way, working and researching in a post-graduate arena allows the practitioner to assess their own working style. What is a consistent pattern or methodology that keeps appearing in the work and what design processes offer interesting areas of investigation? 

For me, remix keeps popping up for one thing. Different narrative approaches hold great appeal, such as this idea of abstract vs. literal. This led to a desire to break new personal storytelling ground using a multi-genre non-literal approach. Innovation often occurs when you explore where the boundaries of a discipline lie and then cross over them. Deliberate cross-pollination is another creative strategy full of possibility, given that it had worked for me in the undergraduate years, and again in my Honours year.

First and second versions (abstract narrative). © Copyright Zak Waipara

Much of what occurred was surprising in its discovery, but it was contingent on first remaining open to serendipity. When you find a methodology that works, you should take the chance to pursue it to its fullest extent, especially if it proves to be creatively fulfilling.

Information Hierarchy

One of my duties, when I worked as an editorial graphic artist, was researching, writing and designing information graphics. Infographics tend to be simple things like charts, graphs, tables etc., and this is true where space is an issue, editorially speaking. But occasionally, when given the opportunity, I was able to create infographics on a really large scale.

The easiest way to explain what they are is by showing some examples. This example below was uploaded onto the Herald website (since expired) and then quickly re-posted by a Brazilian Lord of the Rings fan (almost 11 years ago).

Follow the link above for a hi-res version. © copyright NZ Herald.

This is another example below, which shows the third in a series of Matariki infographics. The first two were eventually combined, licensed and sold as a poster through the Stardome Observatory store. This link seems like it might be an attempt to do something similar. I suppose it says something about the appeal of the work, that they’re still trying to leverage money off of it, long after I’ve left. 

Follow the link above for a hi-res version. © copyright NZ Herald.

Still, I’m proud of the work I got to produce during this period, especially as I began generating my own editorial projects rather than just being handed them by someone else. A small portfolio of my infographic examples can be viewed here. What I discovered through this process is that anything can be adapted into a infographic, given the right angle, and it helps if it happens to be topical. In addition a good infographic is more than just a visual artifact, it actually contains a written article inside it, constructed like any piece of journalism, requiring careful research and considered, pared back writing. Working on these kinds of projects helped me to develop good editing instincts, and I was always careful to reference my sources. 

All design and visual communication employs a principle known as the hierarchy of information. Put simply, the most important items are signposted (using size, location, colour, contrast) in such a way to make the eye look at this object first. In infographics this hierarchy is made more explicit, in that numbers, arrows, icons, and other items are employed to make it absolutely clear where to start – and the information is often broken down into easily understood steps. This technique is also shared by the language of comics - which uses sequential panels to break the story down into digestible parts, and uses composition (and artwork inside panels) to lead the eye around the page in the correct sequence. Infographic design also often uses comic storytelling as one of its communication tools (such as those found in airline safety instruction sheets). Furthermore infographics use a mix of words and pictures, just as comics do. 

For my Masters project, one of the purposes of employing transmedia will be the dissemination of specific knowledge, by way of storytelling. As well as using infographic elements in the game section, I plan to use the hierarchy principle in the e-comic portion of the project. The most obvious example will be hierarchical comic storytelling, that all comic artists employ (often unconsciously) to tell the story in the most interesting and/or logical way possible. The second use will be inspired by infographic design, which will play a small yet intrinsic part in this dissemination of information. So (even in only a small way) this project will explore comics using infographics, just as infographics sometimes employ comics.