Hothouse 7: Simplify

The following is a guest post by Andrew Hicks.

My original intent  for Hothouse 7 was to use an alternative animation technique, by using audio to directly effect a particle simulator, while providing some sort of narrative structure for an audience to follow and not be completely random. When I finished my first pass of animation, it had too much going on, had too much of a traditional narrative structure and left my concept of using audio waveform based animation irrelevant. This, of course, was not my original intention for Hothouse 7.

After thinking it through and talking it out, with mentors and fellow hothouse animators, I went back to the drawing board. Now, I’m back on track and have audio as the performance within the ending of my piece.

I believe I was trying to evoke emotion out of ‘action leads to reaction’- a more literal read for an audience to engage in. This is a challenge to walk away from, provided that it’s everything I have always understood about narrative structure. Now I’m back to my intentions and simplifying my animation. It is not solely by hand anymore, but animation as facilitation of physics, such as gravity, wind and turbulence by turning a knob, putting code here and there, while paying attention to visual and auditory composition.

Later folks!