Expertise: Media Encoder

Possessions of a Randomly Acquired Mind is an animated video piece that matches closeups of biological and mechanical processes to outline drawings of men in motion. The video, which also yielded a series of prints, illustrates what the artist calls the multiple axes of sensation, emotion and cognition. Movement is easier to depict than thought, of course, but Smallwood’s handsome renderings neatly juxtapose micro and macro.

Titan is the story of this cycle, illustrating the interplay between several of its permutations; a cloud of krill, a whale, fisherman, and their environment.

Currently in development, this film will combine traditional as well as 3D animation, 2D fx/compositing and digital illustration. It is the most recent product of my ongoing musical collaboration with programmer, musician and artist Walter Harris. What began solely as an attempt to rebuild a functional musical partnership through the internet eventually yielded the process by which Titan was imagined.

Interestingly, the inability to physically play in the same space, combined with the flexibility of digital audio production strengthened our desire to compose, and much more time was spent actually discussing the ideas and emotions to be expressed that traditionally would have been developed through jam sessions in a practice space.

This process lent itself to becoming increasingly visual as well as narrative to facilitate communication. We eventually found that developing narrative structures was a key motivator in our mode of production. Narrative inspired composition is certainly not new, as many bands have often cited such inspiration for their work. What may be unique for our process in this regard is that developing visual and thematic ideas outside of a practice space was the only way to energize the creative process over such a distance.

Media and Communications Studies 100, also known as Digital Storytelling, is an introductory course into utilizing basic video production and editing techniques, as well basic narrative development. I first taught this course in the Fall of 2010.

WhoWeAm is an online blog and research project, developed by the Imaging Research Center, that focuses on better understanding human behavior through aggregating contemporary scientific data along with documentary film making. It seeks to find common threads between our best scientific understanding and the reflected thoughts of individuals. There has been many iterations of this project over the last few years, and I have contributed to various aspects of production including media research, creative direction, 2D animation/compositing and most recently as a cameraman and lead editor. Some of the films I have edited are shown here, but additional media may be found at whoweam.com.

The See Intuit booth was commissioned by the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Science for the first annual USA Science and Engineering Festival at the National Mall in Washington D.C. The booth was designed with two goals in mind, to highlight contemporary scientific research on intuition, and as an interactive puzzle to help realize the implications of said research. More information can be found here.