Liz Blazer’s opening paragraph for Chapter 2 was both inspiring and home-hitting. She explained that anything is possible and anything goes in the world of storytelling. She expresses, “Storytelling breaks the rules of gravity, tosses aside the space-time continuum, invents impossible worlds, and takes your audience on a journey simply with shapes, sounds, and colors.” I like that she gives multiple perspectives and touches on some of our five senses, sense of sound, sense of sight, sense of touch, sense of taste and sense of smell. Eliza also briefly touched on “history” in her opening paragraph. History is such an interesting variable in storytelling. You can tell a story from the past or the future no matter what date of time it is. There certainly is a lot to love about storytelling as Liz Blazer mentions, your imagination is the limit.

After the first paragraph of Eliza’s storytelling chapter she started to get into the subject matter deeper. She introduced two story telling-models that I was unfamiliar with, Standard Storytelling Model  and the Non-narrative Story Telling Model. She emphasized, “The great challenge is more about disciplining yourself to reel it in and be intentional about your storytelling choices.” Meaning, it was more about how much discipline you exercised in limiting your choices than creating a mind-bending world. I was determined to use this piece of advice through the process she walked us through next on the Standard Storytelling Model  and Non-narrative Story Telling Model.

Liz Blazer Three-Act-Structure was a lot of fun to read about. Learning about the Three-Act Structure within the Standard Storytelling Structure was both informative and inspiring. I noted the steps that Liz provided below for keeps and areference.

Three Act-Structure:

Step 1 – On a stack of (15-30) cue cards, go ahead and write down/sketch out all of the moments that move your story along until the conclusion. (Each card should represent an active step or beat in the storyline and can be both physical and/ or emotional.)

Step 2 – Place those on the wall in chronological order in three separate rows. These three rows represent a traditional three-act storytelling structure,

Step 3 – (Three-Act Story Structure) – 1. A character has a problem, 2. The character works towards a solution, 3. The character solves the problem, usually in a surprising way.

Step 4 – Next, create a fourth row of “additional beats.” You’ll put cards here that either don’t fit into your structure or that you simply don’t yet know what to do with (and which you may never use).

Liz Blazer’s Chapter 3 is all about building your visual script. Your visual script also known as storyboarding is used to solidify your story before animating. Liz Blazer mentions that Walt Disney uses storyboarding to save more than a few bucks and it is suited for Mr. Disney’s natural showmanship. I enjoyed reading how Walt Disney used storyboarding during the beginning of Chapter 3. I thought it was nice reading that the Disney sketches excited people from the team of artists to potential investors. I can see how this can be an essential process. Liz Blazer says, “ Storyboarding is your opportunity to work out the visual elements that best suit your story.” Storyboarding will save time, money and get will get your team excited.

Thumb-nailing – Are the first rough sketches of your storyboards. They help you work out the sequencing of your “shots” and provide an opportunity to establish important aspects of staging, framing, scale, and transitions.

Storyboard Recap

1. Vary Your Shots Responsibly: Utilize different-sized shots to enhance narrative logic and drama.

2. Framing & The Rule of Thirds: Keep shots interesting by placing subject off-center.

3. Staging: Block elements to create visual and conceptual hierarchy.

4. Spatial Continuity: Make sure frames are consistent with the physical world you’ve created.

5. Temporal Continuity: Make sure frames are consistent with the story you’ve been telling.

The tutorials Professor Golden supplied for Module 2 helped me understand the steps necessary to create a strong and successfully composed cinemagraph. A cinemagraph is a technique of blending the effects of images and videos together. It was introduced by Jamie Beck a New York fashion photographer, in collaboration with motion graphics designer Kevin Burg. I started my cinemagraph journey by analyzing the cinemagraphs at cinemagraph.com.  Most of the cinemagraphs at cinemagraph.com used liquids such as wine pouring out of a bottle, light such as a fireplace or wind to create a cinemagraph. I found some pretty cool ones under the Travel category that used the foreground, background, Professor Golden talked about in our Module’s overview video. I was also pleased to find an assortment of inspiring cinemagraphs on fixel.com, gallereplay.com and dribbble.com. It was not until I did some digging for the artists behind the cinemagraphs at cinemagraph.com that I realized these beautiful cinemagraphs belonged to the inventors of the medium Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck.

Prior to watching the videos for our Module I had a lot of ideas for our “Create” phase. Such as, playing fetch with my dog outside, running on a treadmill.  Don’t get me wrong these ideas can be accomplished to make a cinemagraph. However, after understanding the requirements of a cinemagraph my perspective has changed. One of the biggest things I learned was that a cinemagraph is only a few seconds long and MUST loop. If those two requirements are not met your cinemagraph may appear to be a long video clip, rather than a cinemagraph. Given the fact that a short clip that loops is a necessary component for a cinemagraph, I decided to think smaller in secs rather than large. What can I record that loops repeatedly and would be original?

By Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck. (Inventors of the cinemagraph medium)

This cinemagraph does a great job capturing the foreground, middle ground, and background, Professor Golden talked about in our module video. The imagery/video quality is also very well done. You can tell that the cinemagraph artist thought a lot about the composition before executing the shot. The cookie and hand does not show any signs of being masked or cropped to blend the effects of the imagery and video together. I think that this is a very good example of a successful cinemagraph. Knowing more about the process of a cinemagraph has made me appreciate these simple yet well designed cinemagraphs. This cinemagraph was created by Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck. (Inventors of the cinemagraph medium)

I came across Vega Bund’s (@Vega.bund) levitating pancake cinemagraph on YouTube. It was unlike any cinemagraph I came across during my inspirational cinemagraph hunt. The combination of fantasy and cinemagraph worthy syrup made for an excellent composition. It was really neat to see how Vega completed his cinemagraph from beginning to end. Inorder for him to capture his pancakes and syrup floating above the plate, he manipulate his images/video in Photoshop using the masking tool. With the masking tool he was able to remove the clips, books, bowl and box he used to prop the pancakes in the air. As you can see from watching his video there were no clear strings or clear clips holding the pancakes. Everything he used to hold up the pancakes was edited out of the shot quite easily using the masking technique. After watching Vega Bund’s tutorial I decided to give the levitating food cinema graph a try for myself. Scroll down below to check it out. You can watch Vega Bund’s tutorial above to learn how you can levitate syrup and pancakes too.

Drones, drones, drones. Something that was on my mind a lot during my research phase. Can a drone capture video and photos to make a cinemagraph’s? Surprisingly they can. Thanks to ever-improving control technology it is possible to fly your drone extremely stable in the air. Drones  are build with gyroscopes in them that you can program to stabilize the drone. This video by We Talk UVA shows how he used his drone to capture video and still shots for his cinemagraph. I found the information about drones and real life cinemagrph examples very inspiring. My dad owns the DJI Mavric Pro. He was nice enough to allow me to borrow it for this project. 🙂

On Quora.com I came across a thread discussing the most popular cinemagraphs on the web. There were a variety of cinemagraphs on this list that redirected you to Reddit to see the enlarged cinemagraph and viewers comments. Some of the cinemagraphs on this list I saw earlier on fixel.com, but there were a few I was unfamiliar with. In particular the “Empty and Waiting” cinemagraph caught my eye. The quality of the cinemagraph wasn’t the best, but the subject matter and loop was very well executed. Something like a spinning cup (on its side) and a spinning coin (in the background) is a very challenging composure to loop. Since a cinemagraph is usually only a few seconds long and must loop this animation shows that you can create a seamless loop while controlling a physical objects motion. It is apparent that this cinemagraph had to be very well timed and shot in order to make this into a successful cinemagraph. You can check out “Empty and Waiting” by @Lenn_eavy here.

Arron Nace from PHLearn is an excellent teacher. I have watched his YouTube tutorials when I started my education as a graphic designer in college. I stayed pretty up to date with his latest posts over the years, however have not seen any of his tutorials on cinemagraphs. I was thrilled to come across this inspiring video of his on cinemagraphs. The video was very basic, but it outlined all of the important steps from taking footage to exporting your cinemagraph properly in Photoshop. I found that this tutorial was a great piece of inspiration to fall back on if I was experiencing any trouble with my cinemagraph process.