This week we entered a darkened room with a few sandpits of light. My intuition told me to wave my hand over it (as designed by the artist), and as I did it made the sand animate. I played around with these for a while and learnt about the process it took to create it, the artist behind it and what it was for. After this fun and extremely interesting introduction to the day we then all proceeded to go to the makers space to experiment with Arduino (https://www.arduino.cc/) – an electronics hardware board that can read inputs to make a variety of things happen from turning an LED on to activating a motor.
I felt excited and intent with this session of creative play. It was fascinating observing the animations of the sandpits and discovering the process of creation. Learning the story the creators went through was inspiring as it gave me an idea of the sort of journey I could go on to create something similar or perhaps even totally different. When it came to getting hands on with Arduino however I did feel lost at times as electronics and coding aren’t my forte. It took a while to wrap my head around the mechanics of what we were doing but I was determined to learn and engaged in the activities. I don’t think others shared my enthusiasm for it though as they were still asking the same question of ‘how does this relate to animation’. Towards the end of this session I began seeing the full potential of how something like this can help with Animation, but whether I’ll develop it further and use it in projects is something I’m still unclear on.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with my group for this session as we all started in the same place – lost and confused. What I enjoyed however was the process of discovery. We all worked together to begin to slowly understand the mechanics of what we were doing and we all felt a sense of accomplishment when we finally got a motor running. While it was certainly challenging it wasn’t a brick wall. We may have all felt frustrated with the non-cooperation of Aruduino at first, but like a wild dog we eventually managed to hold it down and start to be able to control it. This felt very satisfying to everyone and it only pushed me to see what else I could do with it. Unfortunately though there wasn’t enough time in the day to experiment further.
Looking back on the experience I took one major thing away from it – not to run before walking. When we first got our hands on Arduino we opened the instruction book, turned the page to something complicated involving coding, and then attempted to input about 18 lines of code to make a noise go off. Of course it didn’t work, and when we eventually gave up on it and moved on to making a motor run we had wasted the beginning half of the day. I wish we had just focused on making something nice and simple to help us understand the very foundation of Arduino instead of jumping straight in to the complicated stuff. We accomplished nothing and had to return to the basics also having learned nothing about the software. It was time wasted, and when we eventually returned to the simpler stuff we learnt far more than before. The one positive to take away from this however is that I’ve now learnt to take new things at a pace and to not get too ahead of myself. In the future I’m only going to learn the basics and mechanics of something before I start delving into the unknown. I may also have to return to my tutors to get some extra help in developing my skills with Arduino.
Overall I had a very fun and interesting lesson in which I learnt a lot, and it really helped open my mind up further as to the full potential of animation. It doesn’t have to be restricted to the screen, it can be a living breathing thing in a 3D environment. I plan on researching into Arduino and other ways to animate further to broaden my knowledge on the capabilities and forms of animation.
Joshua JM 