(Un)Frozen
Pushed on by the beauty industry, humans are caught in the idea of staying young forever. On the market, there are anti-aging creams, facials, supplements, and cosmetic procedures. These are consumed in hope of freezing time and giving the appearance of youth.
Inspired by Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, this project explores the inevitability of aging in life. Symbolically, human life is represented by live fruit and our attempts to keep our youth is shown through the ice cubes. Naturally, these ice cubes melt, demonstrating the natural cycle in life.
Despite being thought of as something we are running from, aging is just as beautiful as life itself. We are people moving in a fluid cycle together, and aging is a sign of experiencing life. There is irony to the way we think about aging, where the more we live, the more we’ve lived. As we grasp onto youth, we, in a way, are trying to live forever. However, aging is the natural sign of living and progressing.
To illustrate this process, I created several stop motion video pieces. I first prepared the fruit by cutting the fruit in thin slices and freezing them overnight. I made different versions of these cubes in order to have some variety in the scenes that I planned on shooting. I made larger pieces and smaller blocks of ice and also prepped some fruit to be just frozen as smaller pieces in the composition. I brought home a piece of large scrap plotter paper in order to shoot over. I have never shot a stop motion video like this before, so I read online to figure out the most efficient and high resolution way to use my DSLR camera to achieve this. I set my camera to take photos in intervals of every 5 seconds in the span of 2 hours in order to record real life motion in these melting pieces of ice. In my process, I tried to try as many different versions to push the idea further. My goal was to try out new versions of technology that I have yet to try. This included projection mapping in After Effects and trying out Touch Designer. Starting out in creating visuals in Touch Designer, I followed several tutorials on Youtube to try to build a wave motion of colors flowing. I followed the tutorial by PPPANIK, which was really helpful in getting me started. After creating the motion I wanted, I made an output in Touch Designer to export the footage. The final project is a documentation of the two videos, one created from touch designer and the other of my stop motion video clip. These two clips play next to each other on their own projector. Projecting onto a flat surface allowed for the strongest impact from my work.
Original Photos
Booklet
Documentation