Facing Feelings: Molding Mindscapes
Structure design and construction: Erin Carman, Olivia Gladstone, Max Hanuschak, Alex Maksymova
Animation: Erin Carman, Dan Hodges, Bambou Kenneth, with narration by Christian John
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- The original rods we used for the structure, before they all snapped the week of the project.
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- Problem solving: we switched to bamboo!
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- Working with fabric is hard…
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- …but we figured it out, eventually.
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- Our finished structure was composed of many unique pieces of fabric, combined with one another to create an inhabitable “safe” space.
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- This structure itself was a physical manifestation of the purpose of this project as a whole, and served as an experience that affected those who interacted with it.
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- Attempts at drawing water: Take 1
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- Attempts at drawing water: Take 2
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- *2 weeks later*
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- Scan of drawings, ready to become digitized
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- We image traced the drawing in Illustrator, and I used this as a sort of template to draw over top of in Photoshop
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- Final drawn bubbles, completed without using a tablet
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- They move!
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- I drew the background to be reminiscent of the deep see, and animated glowy white specks over top of it to suggest movement in the water.
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- The completed animation was then modified to be viewed through goggles for a more personalized experience.
This project is the product of 15 individual explorations of mental health, joined with one another through making, to create a collaborative experience for both ourselves and everyone who interacts with it.
My personal contribution to this project existed within the creation of the structure and the animation. I had no previous experience building physical structures, working with fabric, drawing digitally, or with animating, so this process for me was extremely enlightening and enormously frustrating. Every part of this process for me was a challenge, from having to gain an understanding of the way light moves through water in order to be able to draw it, to having to pretend I’m a confrontational person and confront the guy who sold us the wrong fabric in Spandex World in order to not be taken advantage of and be stuck with nearly $200 worth of useless fabric. I feel like I grew as a person, an artist, and a designer over the course of this project.
While working on the structure, I was able to learn about construction and making material connections mostly from observing someone else take the lead, and by the end, I was able to offer suggestions to help solve the problems we encountered. We had to redesign the shape and material choices for the structure in the last week of the project after the rods we used as the supports in our original structure broke, and I had learned enough through observation by that point to be able to assist in problem solving during that process.
For the animation, I was able to receive help with learning to draw water by analyzing it and talking it through with other people, and I received a demo on how to set up and draw a timeline animation on Photoshop both with and without a tablet. Ultimately, for my portion of the animation though, I felt like I had to figure out how to make something I was proud of by myself. Learning to draw water by hand in graphite was how I spent the first half of the project in order to feel capable while digitizing, and that exploration was ultimately what allowed me to draw it digitally with minimal struggle, despite having never drawn digitally nor having much experience drawing in color in general. By the end of the animation project, I was both able and comfortable enough to volunteer to draw the background for the animation, as well as create a second animation to overlay the entire collaborative animation, and I was able to complete both of those things in one day, as opposed to the 3 weeks the water took me to digitize.
Here is the final complete animation, along with the version modified specifically to be viewed through goggles:
Here is a video of the experience watching the animation through the goggles:
