creation

Thought behind the Thought
What is the starting point of creativity? Why does one create? And how? This is surely something that every creative person, who has experienced the agony and ecstasy of creation has gone through!
The process of creating is a complex series of events, or rather, bursts of activity in the creator's mind. A process that sometimes completely takes over the peaceful world and replaces it with a compulsive, chaotic, pulsating, complex world where emotions run high, and satisfaction runs low. A process that agitates, as well as stimulates.

About the art
The short film below takes one on a journey into the creative process, made by Mikey Please. The animator and director makes movies using mostly styrofoam. The familiar packing material  turns out to be a fabulous visual material, at once crisp and soft, an unusual, but exciting material to explore for animation.

Marilyn Myller, the 6 minute short takes a satirical view to artistry. The title character, Marilyn Myller, has great powers of creation; like Please, she crafts whole worlds out of glittery white foam. But to get anyone to notice her, Myller must turn a spontaneous moment in the studio into a neutered, replicable presentation. It's an arc any art student should recognize... that is if they can pay attention in the midst of all that magical styrofoam.

Source and Credit for Information

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30/styrofoam-stopmotion-video_n_5631322.html?ir=India

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUQ5oRkZbk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5ypBy_Bk0

hands

Thought behind the Thought
Hands are magicians! They create, they make, they mould, they shape. They seem to have a mind of their own and go on creating endlessly. I wonder at times, if hands are more powerful than the mind, for what the mind can only imagine, hands can actually bring into reality!

Art, Craft and Design
Handicrafts celebrate and showcase this amazing power that hands possess. All cultures have their own handicrafts heritage. In India, we are fortunate to have a rich and diverse crafts tradition, that brings out creativity from the most ordinary people working with the most ordinary materials. Ordinary, not in the derogatory sense, but in the sense that hands have been creating such amazing works of art from seemingly everyday material.

Watch the film and follow this very interesting journey of the creative hands of India!

Source and Credit for information

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozMXZORhBJk

comfort zone

Thought behind the Thought

We have been working on 'designjatra' for just over six months now! What began as a spontaneous mad cap idea has blossomed into something so meaningful and enriching for both of us!

It all started with the two of us writing notes to ourselves. These were then converted to graphics, and followed up by research in art, craft and design that was in tune with the note/quote of the day.

And we thought, why not share it with people we know? Seemed like a very good idea, and we went ahead and formed a group of people who would end up becoming the building blocks of designjatra! 

We take this opportunity to thank each one of them for there enthusiastic response to every quote that we put up in the last 200 days ... in the form of additions, discussions, debates, poems, philosophical musings, musical renderings, and what not!

So addicted did we become to this daily dose of enrichment from within our small pool of around 100 people, that we totally forgot to look beyond ... for a while. But now, we have dissolved the self made boundary. Now we expand our world, with the support, confidence and continued comfort of our 'DJ group' as we all fondly call it.

And wish we meet many more brilliant people and many more brilliant ideas in the journey ahead!

An inspiring work of Animation that resonates with the quote we wrote for ourselves:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8tHIi5ebEM

love's residence

Thought Behind the thought:
Birthday gifts are always an eye-opener. They basically are indicators of how the world perceives you and is trying to tell you how old you are! Cards and chocolates for the teenagers, diamonds and dresses for the young ladies and from there on it just goes tumbling down the hill. Winters are here and so while I was looking for a moisturiser on my dresser I found this “age defying cream” gifted to me last year by a well meaning friend! The bottle claimed that would rejuvenate and restore me back to my youth. Question is I am ready for it? Do I want to? Every wrinkle, every worry line is a reminder that thanks goodness; I had something or someone to worry about. It means that love has been visiting me and it has left behind a mark to remind me. Do I really want to erase it?

About the art:

Love visits all of us in one form or many. How, when and for how long are things that are out of our control. When love visits it leaves behind marks to remind you of its presence in your life. They could be laugh lines and crow’s feet from being blessed with laughter or wrinkles and bags under the eyes from sleepless nights, worry and anguish. Whichever way you look at it these are the physical indicators of love. Love resides in these little crevices and nooks and crannies. Here are three examples of famous love stories from cinema that talk about love and how one is blessed to have it in their lives.

When Harry met Sally

The first scene from “When Harry Met Sally” is a couple’s interview where different couples talk about how they found each other. It is a celebration of being together, about longevity in a relationship and the joys of it.

Titanic

The second scene is from the Titanic where Rose meets Jack for a very brief time. She finds love that goes beyond the realms of time. She is able to take him ahead with her despite losing him. She lives her life to the fullest, confident that she was loved only fleetingly but by the best man she could ever find. She says she kept him alive in her memory and he remains with her till she is alive.

The Notebook

The third scene is from The Notebook where both the husband and wife are physically present but the wife suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and forgets herself. The husband then reads their own story to her each day not just to remind her of who she is but what their love was.

Love has no shelf life. It’s beyond everything else and it exists even if we don’t. We earn these lines after a hard long battle. A struggle that can consume a lifetime. A heartache that fill you entire being but it is the best feeling in the world. Whether to have it for a day or are fortunate to spend eighty years with that person, you are still blessed!

Credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzi2G68CMiE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvFw8huQPUc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAAxIckQWM8

the unsullied river

Thought behind the thought:

The Ganga Project came into mainstream news in a political gathering in the United States recently. The main thing that came to mind is how are we treating these glorious rives once they enter cities. They are neglected and derelict and are mercilessly sullied before they exit the cities. The quote is an attempt to understand how vulnerable a river might feel before she enters a city.

About the project:

“Ganges” is a three part documentary series by BBC in collaboration with Travel Channel and France 3. The river Ganga originates at a glacier on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, some 14, 000 feet above sea level. She travels about 2000 kms till she reaches the sea. Thousands of species of flora and fauna are dependent on her existence. Ganga has always been more than a river to Indians. She has been worshipped like a goddess, revered like a mother and nourished civilizations for thousands of years. The Ganga has mystery, mythology and tremendous enigma attached to her. “She”, is a goddess and one who bathes in her holy waters, rids himself of all his sins. We need to understand that she does not belong to us humans alone. We need to think of how  we are treating our rivers our mothers? What can people do to play a proactive part in maintaining her honour? Ganga you belong to all. We are indebted to you forever.

Credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM9aPy7H534

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5kbFLrq_tw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEu6TUwOTNU

seeing our thoughts

What if we could peep inside our mind? Artists and scientists working together visualise the scenarion in the'Allosphere'. It is indeed difficult to classify this as either art or science, and it shows how the two disciplines can effectively come together for futhering human understanding and knowledge!

source: http://www.ted.com/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere

Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara.

Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin works on the Allosphere, one of the largest scientific and artistic instruments in the world. Based at UCSB, the Allosphere and its 3D immersive theater maps complex data in time and space. Kuchera-Morin founded the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) and has been the director since its birth in 1986. In 2000 she began work on a Digital Media Center within the California NanoSystems Institute at Santa Barbara. Her fascinations include gestural interfaces for performance and the expression of complex data in nontraditional forms.

snoring

source: https://archive.org/details/popeye_shuteye_popeye

Popeye the Sailor Man is a cartoon fictional character, created by Elzie Crisler Segar,who has appeared in comic strips and theatrical and television animated cartoons. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929; Popeye became the strip's title in later years.

Although Segar's Thimble Theatre strip was in its tenth year when Popeye made his debut, the sailor quickly became the main focus of the strip and Thimble Theatre soon became one of King Features' most popular properties during the 1930s. Thimble Theatre was continued after Segar's death in 1938 by several writers and artists, most notably Segar's assistant Bud Sagendorf.

In 1933, Max and Dave Fleischer's Fleischer Studios adapted the Thimble Theatre characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. These cartoons proved to be among the most popular of the 1930s, and the Fleischers—and later Paramount's own Famous Studios—continued production through 1957.

Over the years, Popeye has also appeared in comic books, television cartoons, arcade and video games, hundreds of advertisements and peripheral products

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye

play

A pioneer in research on play, Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults — and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age. (Recorded at Serious Play in May 2008, in Pasadena, California. Duration: 26:42.)  source: http://www.ted.com/speakers/stuart_brown

Dr. Stuart Brown's research shows play is not just joyful and energizing — it's deeply involved with human development and intelligence. Through the National Institute for Play, he's working to better understand its significance.

The National Institute for Play is a  non-profit public benefit corporation committed to bringing the unrealized knowledge, practices and benefits of play into public life. It is gathering research from diverse play scientists and practitioners, initiating projects to expand the clinical scientific knowledge of human play and translating this emerging body of knowledge into programs and resources which deliver the transformative power of play to all segments of society.

They envision a near term future where all existing scientific research related to human play — currently scattered across a range of scientific disciplines and only partially identified as human-play-related — is integrated and the field of Human Play is a credentialed discipline in the scientific community.

source: http://www.nifplay.org/

unexpected holiday

An unexpected holiday can change your life ... at least for that day! And who can know it better than someone who is stuck up in a routine that they don't quite enjoy?

Watch Audrey Hepburn, the princess who runs away and lives her life all in one day in the film Roman Holiday (1953) directed and produced by William Wyler.

The day she enjoys in the company of reporter Gregory Peck, does come to an end, and she goes back to her world with a heavy heart, but also with the small piece of happiness that the day brought to her.

borrowed time

We are all living on borrowed time! The whole world... we have so many time bombs ticking away as we read this, climate, deforestation, nuclear warfare....

In this multimedia artwork, actually a time-lapse video, created by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, we get a literal birds eye view of all the nuclear explosions that have been carried out between 1945 and 1998. 

The artist brings out, without the use of words, the scary reality involved... and leaves us to think what best we can do 'on borrowed time'!

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY

winter

For a detailed account please visit the website
http://blogs.disney.com/insider/articles/2013/10/29/making-it-snow-in-disneys-frozen/

prosperity

Action Against Hunger and ACF International is a global humanitarian organization. It is committed to ending world hunger and strives to work to save the lives of malnourished children. It core focus is also on providing communities with access to safe water and sustainable solutions to hunger. The Sharing Experiment was conducted to remind us that kids have a lot to teach us. Global hunger may be highly complex but we know what to do when someone needs nourishment. The video and the campaign were undertaken to broaden awareness and understanding of deadly malnutrition and generate support for the cause. How prosperous these kids are. They know how to share.

Credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUPzr2MGKMs

http://www.actionagainsthunger.org/blog/sharing-experiment

moving on

No write up for today’s pick. Pixar marvels as usual. There could not be a more apt piece of art to go with today’s quote. Moving on before you actually got there ! The video really talks about "moving" in more ways than one. Watch and enjoy. Geri’s Game is an animated short film made by Pixar in 1997. It was written and directed by Jan Pinkava and was the first Pixar short created after the 1989 Knick Knack. The film won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1998.

credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYRC7g2ICg

all I want ....

Eliza Dolittle, a simple flower girl, who has literally nothing much to go by sings of all she wants in the 1964 American musical " My Fair Lady". The film was an adaptation of the Lerner and Lowe stage musical of the same name, which in turn was based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, the film stars Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in the lead roles, and is remembered as one of the greatest musicals ever.

for more, visit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady_(film)

reality

The immensely popular Harry potter books and movies have situations galore where reality and imagination merge seamlessly into each other. The vivid imagination of J.K.Rowling has created an unreal world which seems imminently real and believable. The above scene from the movie Harry Potter and the deathly hallows questions the very definition of 'real' and 'imaginary'

decisions and repurcussions

The accompanying image shows artist Ivan Albright at work, painting the title portrait for the 1945 film "The Picture of Dorian Gray" based on Oscar Wilde's novel of the same name. 

The novel, very controversial for its time, told the story of Dorian Gray who sells his soul in exchange for everlasting youth. The moral degradation that he brings upon himself is reflected in his portrait, while he retains his youth and beauty. 

Ivan Albright was an American magic realist painter and artist, most renowned for his portraits and character studies. His realistic, but exaggerated depictions of decay and corruption made him very well suited to undertake such a project.

reference: tsutpen.blogspot.com,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Albright

celluloid

Celluloid is really several pictures strung together especially in the case of animated movies. Character development, sketching, visualization and continuity are key elements for an animator to imbibe.
Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence.

The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at Walt Disney Productions during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Walt Disney and other animation.

information and photo credits:

http://animationtidbits.tumblr.com/post/74387430941/frozen-paul-briggs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard

the doorway of imagination

Alice in Wonderland, the animated film from Disney, is based on Lewis Caroll's classic of the same name. Alice, bored and with nothing to do, slips in to a fantasy world of her own imagination, populated by strange characters and bizzare happenings. Her fantastic world has gripped the imagination of children and adults alike, for more than two centuries.

also watch the video at   http://youtu.be/sdWYzMgpGPA

inside outside

Mary Poppins, a musical fantasy film that combines live action and animation is an immortal classic, loved by one and all. The magical nanny in the story, uses a chalk drawing on the pavement to create a gateway to an outing in the animated countryside. The outing is interrupted by a rainstorm, which washes away the chalk drawing and returns the travelers back to reality.