Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Jodie Mack

Please add a comment about the presentation of Jodie Mack.  Select a work and describe what you saw.  Comment on how you reacted to this work and why you chose it.

18 comments:

  1. Jodie Mack's stop motion piece about yard work was part of a very extensive and long thesis project. The piece incorporated magazine clippings and draws that were layered and moved about to tell a narrative about a couple that participated in yard work with their neighbors. I found this piece to be very interesting because of how she incorporated such variation in the pattern of her materials and then accompanied her work with a self-written song. The repetitions of the chorus in the song reflected the repetition in materials used for her figures. Additionally, the breaks in the song signified a change in scene in the stop motion and therefor complimented the visual aspect of the piece quite well. I enjoyed the fact that the medium of the animation (magazine cut outs) complimented the quirky and light hearted nature of the audio that accompanied it.

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  2. The piece I am talking about is the excerpt we saw from her musical "Yard Work is Hard Work." This piece is done in all paper cut-outs collaged together into a stop-motion animation. This piece is a musical. It had all of the paper figures dancing in unison to songs that she had friends perform. It was really interesting to see how she worked with the style. Jodie purposely wanted to make it obvious that these subjects were not real. and although she accomplishes that, she also allows the subjects to be known. There wasn't anything confusing about what was going on. you could tell that the figures were dancing although, all she had to do was cut out two separate dancers and switch them back and forth. in the real world this wouldn't make sense, but in Jodie's piece it for some reason works. The songs in this piece were very fun too, especially the way Jodie has her subjects reacting to the music. I chose this piece because of all of her pieces I think it was the most original, and she worked the hardest on it (over two years.) Overall the experience was just very fun.

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  3. I thoroughly enjoyed Jodie Mack's presentation. She was so vivacious, full of life and interesting to listen to. Yard Work is Hard work really took me by surprise. It was extremely visually interesting and humorous, however it puzzled me as to why she would devote two years of her life to that project. Perhaps I just missed the overall message but I can not help but think that I found this piece very surface level because it was lacking meaning and depth. I must watch the entire thing, for I doubt the segment she showed us does the piece justice. I was intrigued by the fact that she refereed to the piece as a musical. The fact that she composed the songs is very admirable and added to the childish and playful quality of much of her work. Her innovation in materials and her desire to do things the old fashion way was also admirable to me. I often struggle with moving forward technologically and love to do things by hand so it was refreshing to see an artist who is recognized for her distinct low tech style of work.

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  4. I really enjoyed her piece about yard work. I thought the song she had created for it was very clever and her landscape was well thought out. It almost seemed as if the characters were cut out of magazines themselves. I believe that she had cut them out and then made connections at the joints to give them movement. The main reason why i chose that a piece is because I like the amount of effort that goes into creating a song and she was more than willing to do it. It was very aesthetically pleasing although some of the other work was quite cluttered and intense.

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  5. Jodie Mack was a very entertaining presenter. Her process as a film maker is creative and and fresh, and I loved listening to her journey as an artist. By combining paint and film she creates one of a kind pieces that are very beautiful and uniquely quirky. But she also does other kinds of movies, that require different processes. The work that I enjoyed most watching yesterday was her piece 'Lawn Work is Hard Work' In this excerpt from a larger piece, Mack created a musical created about neighbors doing their chores. I thought this piece was really fun and it created a landscape that I had never seen before in a movie. She did this by combining real life photographs to magazine cut outs. My favorite part of this piece was when she used the dancers that dance along to the music. I also thought it was awesome that she wrote the song and produced it as well.

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  6. Jodie's work for the song, "August Song" particularly stood out. In this piece, she created a music video using her collage, stop motion technique. It began with the the sky, moved to a house, then traced the adventures and dreams of the house cat to end up back at the house and previous images. This work stood out (not just because I love cats) due to the technical and craftsmanship aspect. The movement of the cat was so swift and smooth, and yet it was changing patterns every frame. I was amazed with how much effort and care was put into each frame... not one shot was out of place or skewed in even the slightest way. It was also interesting how she seemed to place the objects of the stop motion over another image, like a photograph or physical material... I am still wondering how she did this.

    Another technique not used in this piece, but still interested me was her work with film and painting on the reels of film. After painted, she then scanned multiple strips of the film, creating one larger, bright and colorful image. It is something that I would definitely be interested in experimenting with in the future.

    Katelyn

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  7. Jodie Mack's presentation was very well organized and conveyed her overall theme of her work in a matter of one hour. Her films use collage to explore the relationship between stop motion and the art of story telling. Her piece "Yard Work is Hard Work" stood out to me the most out of her presented pieces for various reasons. This piece combines an informational song with handcrafted images that flow into one another. The song written by Mack required a lot of additional research and the viewer is able to see how much time and effort went into writing it. I enjoyed the fact that every prop or image was handmade by the artist and that she was able to talk about her struggles along the way. Jodie Mack let the audience know that all though cutting out each individual piece used for the video may have seemed like a project that she could take on, she struggled night after night with this task. Her decision to share with the audience that she had some rough times along the design process inspired me to push myself further in any future projects that I take on.

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  8. One of my favorite animations by Jodie Mack was "August Song", which was the music video she did for her friend's song. Before she showed the video, her inspiration was the idea of what life is like from the viewpoint of a cat. The video was an abstract narrative of a cat journeying through different magical scenes. I like in this video how she blended different elements of collage, digital imagery, and photographs. One element I was particularly drawn to was her photographs of different fabrics she used as a background for some of the scenes. It looked rich, colorful, and had a lot of depth on the screen. The fabric blended seamlessly with the other materials. Overall, this was one of my favorite videos because it seemed very thoughtful and unique. Whereas I feel that some of her other videos seemed trite and not well thought out.

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  9. Jodie Mack's presentation was one of the most interesting presentations in this class, especially with her unique sense of humor. The piece of her that I like most is "Unsubscribe No.4: the Saddest Song in the World." In this piece, she used scrapes from junk mail cutouts to make a collage of geometric forms in motion. The vivid colors, changeful shapes, and movements working together with the music created a lively, joyful, and fabulous piece. I like how she stated in the beginning that "motion is not dead." And this piece shows that animation can be done in an abstract way, where the colors, shapes, motions themselves will bring in their own meaning.

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  10. Yesterday in the lecture i was very interested with Jodie Mack's work.All of Jodie's pieces inhabit a unique style of animation. One of the pieces in particular was "Yard Work is Hard Work". In this work she incorporates tons of magazine clippings, which are all recycled. Theses clippings are layered on top of each other and staggered to create the animation. The piece is about a couple that i s going to be doing yard work with their neighbors. I found this piece the most interesting not only by her process but the finished animation. I also thought it was amazing because of the great difficulty it would take to make a thirty minute piece like this. I really enjoyed the style of this piece along with her others because it is fun and upbeat. Her music and sounds in the background of each pieces has a vast impact on the overall mood of the piece. I would definitely love to see the entire work.

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  11. During Jodie Mack's presentation, i found "Yard work is Hard Work" to be the most interesting piece. The piece was constructed with drawings and pictures, and then was accompanied by her own made music. The piece was basically a "music video," if you will call it that, about keeping your yard and your environment tidy. What i found interesting, was the fact that there were multiple scenes that the video would go back to, like for instance, the hoes and rakes standing up against the fence was a reoccurring scene. The way that Mack interacted with aspects of her yard were extremely interesting, using trash cans as moving and dancing type subjects that follow choreography. I thought the piece was extremely interesting, straying away from what she likes to call the cliche "drawing cartoon rabbits" type of animation. The music is really unconventional and acapella, which makes the piece that more enticing to listen to. This piece helps the viewer to be in tune with the up keeping with the environment at the same time that it serves as entertainment and is aesthetically pleasing.

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  12. In "August Song," Jodie Mack creates an animated music video using collage for her friend's band. In the video, a cat wanders through lands, with the cat and other items rapidly blinking through a myriad of patterns. This is a technique Mack has appropriated from her other, more avant-garde, films. While this effect could potentially be overwhelming, its floating aspect coincides very well with the synthesized, dreamlike song. Together with Mack's visuals and her friend's music, I was put in a happy, tranquil, yet almost triumphant state. An example of music and image working together to achieve this is when Mack created fireworks to go off at a particularly triumphant, expressive part of the song. Another great example of the two working together was when, as the song continued to build up and get denser and denser in one part, Mack's dancing figures continued to multiply on screen, and there was completely harmony between sound and sight. I particularly responded to this piece because it put me at ease with the simultaneous floating of the collaged patterns and the song, and I felt like I could happily drift away in the experience.

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  13. Jodie Mack is an abstract animator, working with paper and painting to create avant-garde pieces as fine art. One of her works, titled “A Joy,” features direct animation on stained-glass contact paper, ink, and acetate. She dyed every frame cell of a strip of film to create shapes running in time with the featured song. The colors and shapes are intricately timed to appear and move in coordination with the changes in tone and rhythm of music. The image flows extremely well with the sound, producing a captivating cinematic experience. I chose this piece of Mack’s because it is most what I would like to do with my career, which is creating visual art pieces along with timed sound, or music. This piece was stunning because of the accuracy of Mack’s editing with the music, along with the creativity of the shapes and movement of shapes through the frame during the song. Both the song and Mack’s animation were distinct, but merged together to create a really breathtaking short film.

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  14. The work that Jodie Mack presented that most struck me was her most ambitious film to date, "Yard Work is Hard Work." I really fell in love with her whimsical, almost impulsive style of animation. The cutouts that she used to create her scenes were taken from a wide variety of materials. By pairing these contrasting materials, she made a whole new, entirely unique world. I chose this work because its pairing of experimental animation and musical theatre was something I had never seen and that really intrigued me. I really appreciated the way that Mack took on all creative components of the film by writing the lyrics and music even though she did not have much experience as a musician. Mack told us that she saw animation more than only as a method of storytelling, but as a study of motion. Her films, whose motions always seem to mimic the movements in the music they accompany, make this view apparent.

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  15. Zoe Allen-Wickler

    Jodie Mack's work is bright, colorful, and quick - she focuses on a combination of abstract, experimental animation and narrative character animation. In her piece "Yard Work is Hard Work," she created motion to music, working collaboratively with some of her friends to provide her own music to an animation made with cut-outs. Though there were characters, figures that expressed their emotions, there were also abstract portions with the gardens and with bits of yard tools. I felt that this work was especially well-developed, and the blend of abstract and narrative animation really appealed to me, along with the music she wrote. I'd like to mention one other of her pieces: Mack's first work which she made by painting and drawing on an actual film reel. This is something I've seen a little of and have always been curious about - I love that she uses old media to tell her visual stories. It adds a dimension of reality and documentation of all the work behind it; this willingness to take risks, enthusiasmm and dedication is visible in all of her pieces.

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  16. Jodie Mack created a piece called "Unsubscribe #4 The Saddest Song In the World" in 2010. During the summer, she received a bunch of junk mails and this led her to create an animation with the scraps of the papers and mails she had. So I thought it was very interesting that she uses everyday objects that she found as materials for her works. When I first saw this particular animation, it was very interesting to see the movements of the two dimensional objects, which actually seemed to be very moving and realistic. She also talked about this piece that she wanted to create the moving objects as fine art. As these colors, patterns and objects move in time, it created the feeling of avant garde. Although all of her works were very eye-catching and fun to watch, I chose this particular one mainly because I thought the movements of each objects were very smooth and it didn't look like they were series of multiple photos. As I was working with the papers and two dimensional drawings, her works including this one, inspired me a lot and made me to focus a lot on the details of each colors, patterns, and shapes of the objects, or "characters" as she named, and the smooth movements of them,

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  17. In the lecture, we saw Jodie mack's works and it impressed me a lot. Her presentation was very interesting, and it made me want to listen to the whole presentation. She usually works with collage, and her works are stop motion. One of many, I loved "the saddest song in the world," the one she showed us first. I did not know what her style is, but I guess I was expecting some colorful animation from her, and I was right. I could see her joyful personality in "the saddest song in the world." I saw bunch of pretty papers becoming all kinds of shapes. I did not know scrap papers can be that pretty! When title, "the saddest song in the world" was shown in the last, I think it was very funny, because it was ironic to have a title like that since the film was very pretty and colorful, even though the song was telling about stealing someone else's' boyfriend. I really enjoyed her every work, and I was inspired to make some great animation for the still image project.

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  18. I never really thought film would be a medium I would like to work with, because I never thought I'd be able to capture my ideas through film. Watching Jodie Mack's presentation inspired me incredibly; I loved her visuals as well as the music that was tied along with it. The piece that really impressed me was "the Saddest Song in the World". I thought the colors and movement of the objects were very eye-catching, and I liked the repetition of the continuously collapsing heart. I also thought they tied along really well with the music. This combination of visiuals and audio in this piece actually inspired ideas about adding my own music to potential film pieces. That as well as the fact that she incorporates her own music as well! Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's presentation.

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