Outcome
Product
As the intention says, we've animated a few Rorschach ink blobs morphing into one another, before finally looping back into the original blob as required by the assignment. We found 3 specific Rorschach blobs online and did the animation by drawing the intermediate phases on Photoshop CS6.
We also found some spooky sounds to add as BGM for the animation, which we cut together and mixed for an unsettling atmosphere.
Perceptual Illusion
Pareidolia, or the phenomenon of recognizing patterns where none exists. This is strong tied to the Rorschach test, where subjects' perceptions of relatively symmetric inkblots are recorded and analysed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both (as described by Wikipedia). It is more effective when patients are unwilling to speak directly on the topic that concerns them.
The human mind is very adept at finding patterns in a given stimulus, so one can often imagine seeing certain common shapes in clouds, or faces in a coincidental arrangement of features. This is what pareidolia is about.
The Tritone paradox, is an illusion where two Shepard tones (a series of notes which seems to infinitely ascend or descend) are separated by tritone intervals. It is heard by some people as ascending and descending by others.
Context
We kept coming up with ideas and discussing the plausibility of executing of each idea. The original idea was to morph the shapes of our images to make them ambiguous ( pareidolia ), and then we came up with the idea to use Rorschach images, as the reasons stated below.Process
For the visual part, we found 3 appropriate Rorschach images to serve as the base images for the animation, then drew in the intermediate frames by hand. We had considered other ways to animate the phenomenon of pareidolia, but could not find a good way to do animations in a smooth and clean way - clouds and faces, for example, would be too difficult to animate in such a short span of time. The idea to use Rorschach inkblots came quite suddenly out of nowhere, but it was easily accepted as the idea we would go with once we proposed it.
We had to choose inkblots that looked relatively similar to one another, such that animating them was possible within the few seconds we were allotted. Hence we rejected images that were overly complex, of varying colors or values, and instead went for simple black/white pieces with good symmetry.
The biggest challenge was dealing with learning to animate, since we haven't got too much animation ability. We split the process down into drawing out the mid-point frame, then the quarter-point frames, and so on to have the closest frames nearby for reference.
For the audio part, we selected a spooky music as the source. We listened to the music again and again to select the parts that have 'some' relationship to the images and combine them together to make a new 3-second soundtrack. The loudness of the soundtrack was adjusted so that it did not directly tell people what it was but more as a spooky ambience.
We used that spooky soundtrack to go with the theme of change and uncertainty, and added a tritone paradox overlaying the BGM to add to the idea of paredolia. Since paredolia is the idea of finding patterns that don't exist, we thought that using the tritone paradox, which has different people hear different things (either ascending or descending notes) would be the most appropriate way to add color to the animation.
Critique
It's actually somewhat unsettling, especially since we used some frames that would dither back and forth a bit to increase animation time. The effect is a somewhat pulsating sort of blob, which at best can be called "interesting", if not flat out disturbing. I imagine the music would very much set the "tone" of the experience. The point though, is that most people are distracted by their recognition of Rorschach blots and associating them with psychology and finding images within the blots that they don't realize that the images themselves are patterns that are made by their minds. Hopefully, with the music and the changing form, the audience is forced to analyze how they look and think about patterns in ink.
Reflection
Making the animation let me get more comfortable with using Photoshop and creating animations from there, as I am still somewhat unfamiliar with CS6. Our process was quite logical, so I wouldn't change much there - but I did make a few mistakes while drawing out the intermediate frames, so if I could do something different, it would be to have been more careful in keeping track of which frame I was at so that I could have executed the process more efficiently.
-- Azer
Doing the animation made me appreciate animators on a higher level. The intense amount of detail to maintain smoothness between frame to frame was very difficult and relied on several hours. If I could do it again, I would do more research on animation techniques and how to keep track of the frames so it would be a much smoother process.
-- Sarah
Editing the audio part made me more familiar with finding sources and using tools. Since the visual part was made first(really cool!), I had to find music that corporates with the images well. As a beginner in audio making, I did not have too much intuition of what kinds of audio I should use, so I just listened to every single piece and imagined how they would work together with the images, then chose the best one as the source. The audio making process was not bad, but I still have a lot to improve. For example, the joining parts of two separated music is not smooth enough, and the loudness of different elements should be adjusted. Since our images are morphing, I don't need to adjust the exact time of the music to the shapes, but only a rough timing. Michelle added the tritone part and I really liked it. The spooky audio now works as the background, giving people a sense of uncertainty.
-- Mingquan Chen
Putting together the animation with the audio given to me was pretty refreshing, as I got to see how the audio and visual parts matched up and could fix things if there were issues. I also got to share things with the group, see how they liked things. Like Ming, I am also not a sound person, but taking the spooky BGM Ming made and mixing in some tritones and Shephard tones was an interesting experience, though next time I think I will tone down the decibel level of the tritones. Figuring out how to incorporate tritones so they fit the images with Mings spooky sounds was a challenge though.
-Michelle Zhong
Attribution
Wikipedia
Rorschach images as signed, from google images.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwFUwXxfZss Shepard Tones and how they work
Audacity
You can upload files of up to 20MB using this form.