file size: 14.2MB
As the culmination of the previous exercises to date, this animation explores the interpertation of section, surface, frame and motion as growth. This process of revision involved employing a new critical eye on the previous MOVIES (not previous models or even concepts). In acknowledging that the value was in the movie, I was able to use the movies themselves as building blocks. What was once the focus has now become the transition, the periphery to the new focus: the expression of raw, cyclical, infinite growth expressed, using a grammar of forms and spaces, in a language of animation.
I have always thought of the film industry as ahead of architecture in terms of integrating and embracing technology as a key player in shaping our respective products. Its easy to trace the potential causes of this phenomenon:
the film industry is much newer than architecture and therefore has less of a tendency for crippling nostalgia
the film industry is fundamentally about entertainment, it does not shy away from popular culture
our market driven economy demands that films provide new and surprising experiences with each successive release
a great movie review, From Here to Thermopylae, in this weekends post helped me clarify an opposing argument. Apparently Hunter wrote a bad review of 300 last weekend and there was some kind of public outcry. The public sentiment was that he somehow "didn't get" what the movie was REALLY about. First of all, don't ever tell an arts critic he doesn't know what he is talking about. But nonetheless, this essay published on Sunday brings up an interesting point. Bad movies by immature film makers are, at least lately, becoming too "self aware." The argument is that movies for movies sake are often too much about the actual movie rather than some sort of idea, concept, or "story," that transcends the actual movie experience. In the case of 300, this is especially problematic because the entire concept is allegedly historic. This conflict between represented event and the new event created to represent the event does not appear to be addressed.... This is beginning to sound a lot like the conflict that goes on between architecture and the representation of architecture.
I realized also that in using animation as a process, as a language, architects often have the opposite problem. Our animations are often so completely unself-aware. So much so that architects produce animations that fail, as animations. A critical point for me was when I stopped trying to communicate, or explain the form (as in a documentary--a concept that the makers of 300 would cringe at) and began to embrace the value of moving pictures to communicate more than the models used to generate those moving pictures.
