Session 4: Get Moving!

Padlet link displaying all the videos in this post – https://artslondon.padlet.org/akuthethoor1120191/ke4qy0fm4tnfe6z1

I have to say, session 4 of ITFS has been my favourite class so far this academic year! I’ve always been interested in the media side of fashion… originally it’s what I wanted to go into in terms of styling and social media and advertising and photography. Media is what I feel I’m good at, more so when I’m inspired and motivated. Despite this class, I still feel pretty affixed to studying Fashion Management and following the business pathway as I see more opportunity to grow broadly in that and even reach media through it, but I do love how creative I can be in media!

Anyway this session required us to create a short video/ animation of the customised shoes we had designed using various apps we could find on our phones. I decided to look at creating a GIF, Instagram boomerang and Tik Tok video, primarily using my bedroom window as a location for this mini shoot, as I liked the idea of these shoes being related to travel and wanting to move and explore. I felt this connected with my chosen artist and his sense of place in his works, as well as the design of my shoes itself as they connect to London. With London in lockdown right now, however, using the window was a way of portraying that sense of being trapped inside with this bold, colourful and rigorous need to escape and get out. I’m not sure how well this may have come across in my work, but I hope it resonated somewhat.

Originally, I started off with boomerangs and a tik tok video, but realised they were quite simple and plain, and although I did like them, found they didn’t quite hit the bar of creativity this task required.

I then decided to create some GIF’s using an app I had downloaded on my phone. I took a variety of photos of my shoes from different angles in a couple of different poses and positions. These were a few of them.

Using these, I was able to create my most successful videos, as well as experiment with others. I’ll first present my experimental ones, before showing the progressive one I created.

Starting off with one that is quite different to my ‘final’ outcome, I created a GIF of my shoes walking outside on my balcony (that notion of trying to escape comes back into play here). Using filters, I enhanced the saturation of the video to really make the coloured elements of my shoe design stand out and also added the words “Move” and “London” to the video, which I didn’t wholly love because they were quite straightforward and slightly affected the clarity of the video. I think redoing this particular video without the wording would have worked a little better, and maybe a couple of more added filters to jazz it up as well.

For the next couple, I was really just playing around with the apps I had installed and wanted to see what features they had, so these next couple of GIF videos are purely more experimentational that directional in any way.

Now to my most successful outcomes of this task. Originally, I started off with GIFs that were just sped up, faded a bit with a crayon sketch filter applied over the top, with still images of my shoes added over the top of this as well. I had posed my shoes on my window handle with their laces tied together, and as I live in a flat, you can see the outstretch of the buildings in out the window. When I posted these to Padlet, Carlyn asked if I could readjust them without the still images, to really show the speed of the video behind them.

After getting this advice, I took out the still images and created a video that was half of the shoe crayon sketch filter, and half just a normal GIF of the shoes.

I still wasn’t fully happy with this, so I then took this video and ran it through the same app again, inverting the colours for half the video, making it black and white, while keeping that speed. I really love how this final one turned out, as the colours of my shoes show so amazingly, as well as the map design and the wording I had written on them. All the best elements of my shoes were displayed, but I also felt with the colours being so vibrant and graphic, I was able to stick to remaining relevant to my artist, Ed Ruscha.

I’m overall super pleased with what I’ve gained from this class and think that learning how to create these short videos that could potentially be used on social media as part of an ad campaign is really inspiring and goes to show how so little can do so much with just a bit of creativity and intention. I learnt a new skill using these apps and I really hope it’s something I can use again in a future task or project. I also feel like I found a strength in communicating a link between my designs through media and was successful in showcasing my design in a way that is relevant to the work we’re currently doing. I hope this flood of creativity and inspiration continues throughout the rest of the course, and I look forward to more media classes to see what new skills I can apply and learn.

Update 9th of January 2021:

It’s been a few days since this session, but I discovered some extra filters on Instagram and thought I would try them out on my existing videos. These are my outcomes. I like the ones that really inject and display the colour elements into the videos, but I just think how the lines flicker in general in these videos is really interesting and visually appealing to a younger, contemporary audience.

Update 10th of January 2021:

While playing around on Photoshop for a completely separate piece of work, I discovered being able to play around with the hue of my still image. I thought it looked quite interesting so I took a video of it to show how it could possibly be a short video, however the quality isn’t great as I had to record on my phone as I can’t record directly from my laptop.