Amanda Potts

This project explores the ideas about escapism through layering and masking. To show this there are a mixture of shots of locations in nature and a indoor also a variety of pictures of the mannequin and some books. Mixing books with the mannequin and shots from various locations is meant to give the illusion of alternate worlds being explored, either by reading or writing. Although the mannequin is literally diving into books, people dive into other worlds generally through their minds. Our minds tend to warp things which is why some if not most of the videos are altered. These are meant to be worlds that don’t exist mixing with places that do. The audio quiets down when the mannequin dives as it is meant to show the outside world being blocked out when someone escapes into a book. During the more obvious video distortions the audio warps along with it to encompas the feeling of a warped idea of a world.

Try out color keying in premiere. I also was using masking. I highly recomend not using masking in premiere as it would not mask were I actually put it. I got quite fustrated by it after a view tries. It can be finessed but overall its not a good mask, in comparision to masking in aplications such as photoshop.

As an artist, I am constantly around inanimate objects designed to look like living beings. The mannequin is the inanimate object I focus on which I show as if it was an artist. I show what this mannequin might do if it had its own will and seen canvases and an easel. I started off showing the objects going in and out of the frames then follow it up by showing what the interactions the mannequin has with the supplies. The sound is the ambient noises heard in a studio space. Most of the sound is simple background noise that comes from the ventilation and peoples movement inside the space. Some additional sounds being a paper cutter being used and pages being turned. The main idea for this was to turn an inanimate mannequin into an artist.

Enter into the garden but be careful as vines grow to block you in. In a way to explore my own drawing as well as some stop motion I created this video. Most of the inspiration was simply from modern gardens i’ve seen online but the vines element was my way to show things being blocked off. Given the time we are currently in I thought it was an appropriate topic.

This is a youtuber that I used to watch a lot of. I only stopped because I began to focus on games and other artists. This is interesting to me as it has no voices or direct story descriptions. You don’t know whats going to happen until it happens. None of it appears real but you still get engrossed into the world. I think i’ll use this as a reference to the lighting and possibly use my own hands in this as the artist does here.

Artists tend to surround themselves with humanoid objects that they use in their work. I am one of them so I decided to use this mannequin to represent an artist. This artist is picking which kind of canvas to use than trying to get comfortable at the easel. Although this artist ends up falling back onto their back their canvas(artwork) comforts them. Generally the same work that drives and artist up the wall will be the art they are the most proud of.

For this I am getting used to working with stop motion to create a story. The focus of this story will be on the mannequin but I also want to point towards the people who generally have these mannequins which are artists so I’ve made this mannequin and artist.

For this project my focus was on how nature is there even though there are human dwellings. This was shot at Wildwood which is a metropark in Toledo Ohio. The audio is taken at the University of Toledo Visual arts building. There is a stairwell that whistles which I included. My main idea for this was to show the difference between nature itself and show the dissonance I feel when seeing a human made structure inside an otherwise natural setting. Tall grass in the wind is serene but if you look you can see a large former home in back which takes away the feeling. This is a metropark meant to preserve the native species yet it holds multiple buildings and playgrounds in order to keep humans coming and funding it. Nature is beautiful but not fun to live in without the commodities of the urban setting. Although this place is created and used with good intentions there are still some aspects that were not thought through. The ramification of the the building and other structures added aren’t as big of a worry as I feel they should be.

Why does the vertical nature of something dictate the way we view it? Compare a short tree to a tall one. Do you feel something different for each? Looking at a skyscraper and comparing it to a one story home do you feel something different for each? If no to both then forget about it as you don’t see the world the way Bachelard assumes you do. As people we view the world partially the way our brains dictate and partially the way the we were taught. So if we are taught that the sky’s the limit and that we should reach for the stars is it not clear why we associate the vertical with the better? We are taught from a young age that the higher up we go the better. We view positions in the workplace as the higher up the more power there is. We seem to view the world in a vertical manner but do we? Is it truly a vertical nature or does it have a form? Is our world in a straight vertical line or is is more of a pyramid? Do we have more of something at the bottom and less at the top. Are there viewer people in higher positions? Do we view the attic as something more limited than a basement? This is all very literal in its meaning but even if we view the vertical nature of something in a more psychological way it still gets us to the same assumptions. The conscious mind is what is always around and somewhere deep inside ourselves is our subconscious. Even our views of non physical parts of our minds/bodies are viewed in a vertical hierarchical scale. Why do we think of things in this way? Why do we force our thoughts and locations into these scales?