For this project, I had to create a motion mandala made from photos and videos in After Effects using the mirror effect as well as the rotobrush tool. I focused on themes of life and death, as well as time and cycles in my piece.
When looking through research, I really liked Eric Dyer’s work. At first, it was hard to tell what his footage was, but once I realized that they were bullets and shot gun shells, it was clear to me that it was a piece about war, and how war is inevitable and cyclical throughout history. This inspired me to speak to cycles with my project. My concept for this project was to create a piece that expresses themes of life, death, time, and the cycles within those themes. Each component in my piece speaks to these themes.
The rotating bones are a symbol of death. Their composition resembles a clock, and they rotate clockwise. This represents how moving forward in time brings us closer to death. The red flowers are a symbol of life and how fragile life can be. As they bloom and unbloom, they resemble growth through life. The hands reaching and almost touching represent our interactions with other people during our lives, how these interactions affect our time in life, and how life and death can bring us closer together or farther away from each other. They also represent life and death as two opposing forces coming together but never quite able to touch. The mirrored footage in the background is drone footage from a highway. This imagery shows life through travel and how we move through life. The spinning record in the center (which is actually original footage that I took) represents how life moves in a cycle, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Many of these components communicate with each other. The bones and flowers are obvious opposing themes, highly contrasting each other. The mirrored footage in the background speaks with the hands, representing how time moves differently when we’re stuck in traffic or commuting, versus how time moves when interacting with someone. The hands also communicate with the red flowers, representing romance in life and how it affects time.
I wanted to add music to go with the spinning record in the center. When looking at the composition alone, all I could think of was Romance, which is a song I’ve been playing on guitar for years. After looking it up, I decided that it was perfect because no one knows where this song came from or who wrote it. It’s a Spanish song with many names that has been around since the late 1800s, but no one knows who wrote it. The song has been given life and it will not die, despite no one claiming it as their own. The recording I found was too clean for my piece, so I added some record popping sounds on top to make it seem as though it was coming from the record.
Halfway through my piece, the background, bones and record slow down and come to a stop, and the music changes pitch. The background begins to move again and the bones and record begin to move backwards, counter clockwise, back in time. With this, the music goes back to its original pitch, but this time playing backwards. This changes the tone of the song entirely. This change represents how when looking back at the past, everything seems different from what it was before when you were there in that moment and how looking backward can alter your perception of a memory.
