HUM 203: The World in Motion, Animation in Theory and Practice

Assignment 1

Assignment 2

Final project

The idea embodied by this piece is that while time is an infinity, we can intellectualize it as a series of events, which is actually experienced as one indivisible present. Time is an infinite, ever changing flow and what we experience is but a slice of that in a way that makes sense to our brains. “Time is Focus” is a flash animation that paints a hallucinogenic portrait of this view of time. It is meant to highlight one aspect of time, and that is our individual perception of it. Things move and morph through time at very strange paces during the course of the animation and that they are all juxtaposed on the screen simultaneously hints at a perception of time as being an infinitely large, unwieldy whole. Our visceral experience of time in this animation is relative to our mind's focus; we can focus on any one object and start to understand where it is shifting through time. This phenomenon is a highlighted example of the reality of time, which is that our believed passage of time is dependent on our focus.

This animation is meant to be watched in a loop until it is fully understood. It starts out with a dog experiencing time at a fairly normal rate. The sky, sun, and tree are all static. As the animation progresses, each individual object slips into a unique experience of time, and then towards the end returns to normalcy. This all happens within the same visual frame.

“Time is Focus” was created in Flash using mainly vector traced images gathered from free use, royalty-free sources. They were then altered for the purposes of the animation and then “shape-tweened” for the morphing effect. This process required a fair amount tweaking to get good timing. Unfortunately, the version of Flash I used has no way to export video files without losing the morphing effects, and so I had to settle for the unreliable .swf format, which plays at a different rate on everyone's computer. It is meant to be watched on a Mac PowerBook G4 with a 1.67 ghz processor or comparable machine. For the future, I want to find a way to export to video, nail the timing to work on any computer, and possibly add music.