Reflection:
This week was a exciting week. Being onboarded into a new project that involves communicating the ideas of bipolar has been a lot of fun, and I’m thrilled to be able to work collaboratively with a team on a Design project, as this is something I really aspire to do with my career in the long term. During class we discussed several ideas that related to individuals with bipolar by expanding upon the symptoms that result in a diagnosis, which I found fascinating, due to the project wanting to take representation for the highs and the lows. Growing up, I was surrounded around by a few individuals who would always perceive mental health in a negative stigma, and, while I’ve always disagreed with that sentiment, the opportunity to bring representation to a group of individuals that will educate its audience makes me very happy to be a part of the project. I had the opportunity to speak with the project’s director, where I showed him a prototype of something I was ideating on over last weekend, wanting to grasp the general ideas of colours, and themes of the project based on audio I was provided. The feedback was incredibly useful, as now I know not to lean into gothic, noir aesthetic, and rather, focus on the idea of representing individuals through the cracks in their personality. This thematic wording will be the crux of my future development, as I ideated about how we could represent cracks on the performance stage with the team, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the best approach will turn out to be in the coming weeks! Something I also thoroughly enjoyed in this week’s class was the discussion on narrative through our project, and how we should be giving that some deeper thought. Throughout the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking and exploring my own ideas of narrative through my weekly blogs, so it was nice to see some in class discussion around something I’ve been thinking about!
Bipolar animation prototype that I showed:
Research:
This week’s research was focused on laying the groundwork for my understanding of bipolar. To help assist me with bipolar, I read an article that went on to describe how “creativity and bipolar disorder is well documented in eminently creative individuals, with artists like Vincent van Gogh, authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, poets like Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, and composers like Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky all reportedly having struggled under the burden of illness” (Greenwood, 2017). Which got me thinking, if creativity is something that has been connected through bipolar, that could allow for more abstract forms of interpretation in the development of the project, which relates to my focus on AI generative work this semester! Further, the article goes on to expand upon this in the following quote, “Bipolar and creative individuals also have higher neuroticism, extraversion, and openness personality scores compared with noncreative controls” (Greenwood, 2017). These ideas of connecting openness and extroverted personality types with creativity in bipolar has given me ideas of how to represent this through the idea of the cracks. The duality between introverted/extroverted, closed/open, and happy/sad could be heightened through the idea of the cracks that was suggested in my meeting with the director. I also think there is an interesting opportunity to explore how “a positive mood appears to provide a significant cognitive advantage in the performance of divergent thinking tasks, whereas a negative mood inhibits this process” (Greenwood, 2017). I want to explore the ways that we can control and invoke a positive-negative duality where the audiences’ emotions can be heightened in response to abstract artwork, however, this is something I will need to discuss directly with my next meeting with the director to ensure that the target audience will be appropriate. While reading the article, I think the quote that stood out to me the most was “bipolar patients often discontinue their medications due to subjective experiences of diminished creativity” (Greenwood, 2017) which makes me want to see just how far we can push the limits of creativity when it comes to projecting the imagery I may develop. I will make sure to discuss this idea of the creative potential within bipolar individuals with the rest of the team, so we can figure out the ways we could promote awareness of symptoms of bipolar collaboratively.
Tiffany A. Greenwood, “Positive Traits in the Bipolar Spectrum: The Space between Madness and Genius”, December 09 2016, https://karger.com/mnp/article/2/4/198/202146/Positive-Traits-in-the-Bipolar-Spectrum-The-Space
Progress:
Due to next week being mid semester break, I wanted to pump out as much work as I could this week before taking next week as a hard rest so I can give my best to the rest of the semester. The result? The bipolar project has had the opportunity to have an animation prototype that I could show to the director. Despite this prototype not being used, the feedback in terms of its tone, and visual direction has given me the chance to go back to the drawing board for further iteration based on my in-class discussions. In ensuring my original project wasn’t going to lose progress, I have had to put a pause on progress on the bipolar animation. This led to the opportunity for my original project to have a second major thematic prototype! I haven’t had the chance to get any feedback on this prototype yet, as this one was developed later in the week, and is highly experimental, due to lacking the originals real world presence, and containing a different resolution scale all together, being locked in at 480p so that I can explore ways of upscaling the video.
The new exploration!
In fact… I had some great success regarding upscaling and may even turn the discovered result an animated wallpaper! I focused on only a handful of frames that were upscaled to 720p and found the visual fidelity to be incredibly high on my 1080p display, which, despite its two-hour rendering time, is great news. As much as I would love to render in 4k resolution, I believe, based on my experimentation over the last few weeks, that it will be entirely out of scope unless I happen to get access to an exceptionally powerful computer. I believe there is a possibility to develop a 1080p project after completing the full three minutes’ worth of animation. I could achieve a safe rendering progress in the final week, by breaking up the rendering periods in set chunks of frames, so that in case my laptop runs into any issues, the rendering progress will not create significant setbacks.
Now upscaled to 720p
I also had the opportunity to develop my technical skills, as I met up with some of my peers who were familiar with Adobe Premier and Adobe After Effects, where I had them teach me some more mechanical techniques to do with cropping the video, and masking so that I could create a stronger transition effect. One of my classmates, Hugh, who is also going to be a part of the bipolar project, had discussed prompt techniques to assist with the process of producing more visually consistent art, especially within the context of photoshop. His firsthand demonstration to me of how he can manipulate specific space with AI may come in handy to me when I need to fine tune some of the details of my work later in the project, especially if I decide that a cross between animation and reality approach would create a compelling surreal work.
The new transition:
Lighting Up Your week 