Iterative Artist’s Statement-Week 4

At this stage in my project, I would say this piece is about alienation, exclusion vs. inclusion, and the invisible forces that might affect the understanding of one’s place these social spaces. It will be a two minute long, non-narrative piece.

I have only recently arrived to the point where I can concisely summarize what my project is about, and I’m hoping it won’t stray too far from what I have now as I continue working on it. Animation gives the creator more artistic liberties than almost any other medium of filmmaking, except for the fact that it is extremely time consuming and labor intensive, so in this case, time is really the only thing working against you. Ultimately, it came down to a realistic assessment of my abilities and what I would be able to accomplish in the next few weeks. There were a lot of different themes I was working on tackling; I wanted to explore expressions of power and domestic life, but eventually ended up needing to do something more stream- lined. Because the themes I have now decided to work with don’t rely on depicting multiple characters having confrontations, it’s far simpler on paper. And it will still feature lots of dogs.

As a sort of state of the union I am: Finishing story boarding and will be doing intense animating for the next few weeks!

Something that I’m working through right now as I work on this is the fact that it’s personal—it isn’t about me, but on an more interactive level, alienation is sort of a personal subject and I can only speak to my own experiences. Other than that, my project isn’t grounded in a historical framework and it isn’t a call to action—its not really about anything other than these subjective experiences. So I’m wondering if it will be critically engaging in any way/ figuring out how to make it more critically engaging/ wondering if it matters that it is.