flYing through antArctic heaVEn

This fall semester at USC promises to be interesting for many reasons, one of which is my Visual Music class. I, like other students in ANDA, took "Introduction to Animation", a course which exposed me to visual and experimental animation. That brief taste of animated music experimentation had quite an impact on me. While I'm still primarily a character animator, I enjoy manipulating the moving image to mirror the emotional cant of music. It's also a good chance to stretch my editing and directing skills without worrying too much about the bounce in a walk cycle or expression on a mouse. I can start focusing on the bigger picture and hopefully apply what I pick up to my thesis in progress.

Here's our class's first assignment which I titled "flYing through antArctic heaVEn" or FTAH. We had to take stock footage and music provided by the teacher and jumble it up into something new. I'm pleased with how FTAH turned out; it has that ethereal quality I was aiming for and surprised me more than once with accidental genius. The hardest part was not throwing everything I had into it. I could probably make 50 more movies in a day just from fooling around. When I get some genuine downtime, I might just.

flYing through antArctic heaVEn from Erin Siegel on Vimeo.