Lurk
Narrative GIF
This is a hybrid of the known and the unknown. We see a common scene at a live music performance, but no faces are familiar. We see an entity that is iconic and memorable, but in a manner that reverts it back to any ordinary monster horror.
I used footage from a concert I attended and wanted to focus on the musicians. However, the presence of the audience member beside me seemed to be full of energy. The more I watched the movie the more I agreed on using him as the subject as he serves to be an interesting focus. Adobe Photoshop made it incredibly easy to create a composition and crop the rest of the video.
I wanted to show how the presence of music can bring out our most inner emotions, but the hard part was figuring out how to incorporate a narrative into it. I played around with some blending modes on various colour layers, and settled on red due to how its stark heat contrasts with the regular blue hue. I made the red layers visible on only when the stage light fills the screen, and that was when I thought of the idea to make something appear in its intensity.
What if we were able to see a vision of this person's true colours? I chose to go with something gruesome, as though we were watching a horror movie emerging from the seemingly comforting scene at a concert. The idea of placing H. R. Giger's Alien design - one that is simultaneously terrifying and mesmerising - in the centre of this little story excited me.
At that point, it finally came together. Whether the monster seen in the GIF is figurative or literal, it provided an ominous layer to the narrative which gives plenty to speculate about.
In response to the reading, "[t]he goal of the animated GIF ... is to employ as few frames as possible, in order to keep the file size small and the download times speedy" (McKay). My narrative GIF tries to find a balance between the jerkiness of GIF frames and the smoothness of cinematic footage. If the video was completely imported into Photoshop, it would result in a more seamless sequence but at the cost of a smaller and more manageable file size. I opted to remove just enough frames so that the monster's appearance is limited to one frame at a time. The original video was at 1080p resolution, but I chose to shrink the GIF to 640 x 360 pixels to further shrink the file.
Reading:
McKay, Sally. "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills) | Art & Education." Art & Education. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2016. <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/>.
