Introduction

The goal of this unit was to portray and tell the story of a group, person, or idea. Before starting our own research, we looked at other examples such as ones from the book, Seeing Silicon Valley. In our own research process, we gathered background information from trusted outside resources about our subject which we could use to formulate questions to ask our interviewee. Through our interviewing process, we were able to gather unique perpectives from people directly involved with our research subject to get a better understanding about it. After gathering all of our research from interviews and outside resources, we wrote our research paper in English and used the audio for an animated short in Animation.

Process

The subject for my documentary was my oldest sister, Madison Ivy. At the time of interviewing her, she was a soon to be college graduate at SFSU and wanted to pursue a career in art or photography. During my interview, I explored what it is like being a soon to be college graduate looking for a job in a field such as art along with what it was like to explore different career options while in college.

This subject is not only close to me because I was interviewing my sister, but also because: I’m going to graduate high school soon and getting to know what a full 4 year college experience is like is very valuable to me and also because art is something I want to pursue in college and hearing someone’s first hand experience is important to me. When Madison first started college, she thought that she wanted to pursue journalism due to her being interested in it in high school after having an internship at the Los Altos Town Crier and being apart of Mountain View High Schools Oracle (student newspaper); in both she primarily focused on photography. She later had a loss of interest in journalism but still pursued photography. She continued taking photography classes at school and took a class where she learned how to develop pictures in a way that made them all blue called a cyanotype.

Madison had some of her pieces presented in exhibitions at on campus galleries such as the Martin Wong gallery and in the Stillwell exhibition. She presented work twice in the Martin Wong gallery; the first one being the Unattainable Blue Exhibition and the second one being for her own installation titled Where is My Home? in both exhibitions she presented cyanotype pieces. In the Stillwell exhibition, she received Best in printmaking for her cyanotype titled Ocean Beach and also featured another cyanotype titled Spilled Milk as well. What’s especially interesting about her Ocean Beach print is that it was originally a photo taken on a camera, then later engraved on a wood block, then she took a pictured of the laser engraving, and finally developed that final picture as a cyanotype.

Animation

In my animation I was very inspired by the monochromatic style of cyanotypes so I decided to make my animation in all blue to mimic that similar style. I animated the part of my interview with Madison where she describes her process of creating her Ocean Beach print, the difficulties she had with it, and how she was able to overcome them. I think it’s really interesting to get to know someone’s process of creating art and what they had to do in order to get to their end result.

When I was choosing what from the interview I wanted to animate, I was stuck between the story behind her Spilled Milk and Ocean Beach pieces, I even tried combining the stories together but ultimately decided to go with the story behind her Ocean Beach piece.