Print Design:
First Place, Most Creative

Alex DeArmond
California College of Arts and Crafts

Somewhere Today

Artist's Statement: This video came out of a semester-long project focusing on a single theme after exploring a physical site in the San Francisco Bay Area. A pedestrian bridge that spanned an eight-lane freeway which became a symbolic space for contemplating the choices we make in life. Through mirror images, sporadic typography, signage and sound, it tells the story of imagined other lives. It is intended to be optimistic and strange to say we can transform wherever we are today and whatever we do today into something completely different at this very moment. Remember: somewhere you are an airplane pilot and today you are flying to Reno.

This video was produced using After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. To create the footage, I used a disposable camera called QuickSnap Golf by Fuji. The camera takes eight pictures over the course of one second and exposes them on a single negative. Every picture you take becomes a sequence of eight small photographs, and I took numerous shots of the same scene to create longer sequences. The prints were then scanned into Photoshop, cut up and animated into individual frames. I multiplied sequences over themselves in After Effects to create a "fake" double-exposure, then duplicated and flipped the entire sequence to create the mirror image. The effect gives the scenes a dream-like quality. Typography and arrow animations were created in Illustrator as single frames, output, and scanned in through multiple sheets of vellum to give them a blown-out softness.