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At first I was really attracted to a lot of different things happening in the area around me. It was hard to choose something.

I seem to be attracted to scenes which make me imagine stories, and wonder about what happens there, almost in a movie-like-inspired-way.

A collection of houses drying their clothes outside

My selection of 3 images

I was especially attracted to the abandoned infrastructure & the environment in which the people of Ecuador lived.

Eventually throughout my Dérive I ended up in this small city called Nueva Loja in Ecuador, South Africa.

I found out that the city, Nueva Loja is quite a dangerous city, tourists are told to not stay for long in this city and due to the fact that it's close to Colombia means there's a lot of smugglers.

I took too much on my plate, so I decided to take it easy and research a small aspect of the things I found and liked in the country

I really like this small aspect of these small villages, mainly because it's a very common thing. It is also really cute and really gives me a welcoming family feeling.

It also gives me the feeling that someone 'lives there' which I quite like

I'm really interested in the colours and sizes of the material, which are very interesting to me.

I thought I was drifting too much away from the topic I enjoyed so much in the beginning, so I took a step back going back towards the life of the people in villages.

Why do I like these so much?

SO WHAT CAN I DO WITH THIS?
I think it would be a lot of fun to experiment in 3D programs like; maya & unity to experiment with colours, textures & animation.

In a way I would like to study the textures of fabric.

Maybe create a 3D animation, through which the viewer feels the same home & cosy feeling I feel when looking at these houses.

Or try some interesting photography with fabrics. maybe

VISUAL & CONCEPTUAL INSPIRATIONS

"Video Surgery" is about cutting and pasting existing parts of video and animation into new moving images. The film is the result of a three week workshop given by Niek Pulles and initiated by Design Academy Eindhoven.

Zeitguised statement on the piece:
"Shifting between auto-eroticism and material fetish, ‘sim | stim’ proposes a cargo cult of sensual nano-alchemy. It celebrates temporary mummification of the body by engaging in an erotic relationship with shape changing clouds of synthetic material.
Touching on the topics of body enhancement and death through preservation, sexual attraction is being conserved in floating silicone bubbles; flesh is suspended in ersatz aspic, comparable to an ‘inverse boob job’."

What I like about this artwork is that (of course it's super well done and high end) but also that they merge certain elements to confuse the viewer & you can see the texture of everything, but also how this could never happen in real life is what I like.

I really like this video because it's a new way and manner of using video editing. Collaging and video are almost merging together. & it would be impossible to recreate in real life.

“Void Season” is a digital fashion design project.

Part dreamlike theatre, part lateral cargo cult hustle, a succession of bold garment designs acts as an ersatz runway show. In a minimal set of solid backdrops, radiant colors and oblique choreography second the exquisite design of costumes that have been entirely artificially generated.

A wealth of custom procedural surface detail emphasizes the uncanny rift between the realistic presence of the guises and the abstract vacancy of the digitized human movements.

We are confronted by conflict on a daily base. It's hidden in our daily routines and often exposes itself in many different emotions like: a dilemma, a doubt, a misconception, disgust, pain, regret and so on. But it is this energy that thrives us to push forward. It's the constant getting rid of the old to replace with something new. It's a mechanism that forces us to choose side and by doing so we keep in motion of renewal. New formats and points of view form along the way as we are being pushed into the future by the power of conflict.
by EDHV

I think it's really sick how they made the fabric look so realistic & I just love everything about this. I definitely want to try out more stuff in 3D programs in the future & distortion.

I've done my internship at this studio and I think this just looks so sick, they distorted the images in such a way that they are unrecognisable, except for some elements which makes the viewer think about what they are seeing.

Some other things which I really like visually.

I also found this website of a person who traveled through Ecuador and recorded some environmental sounds & background sounds.

This is where I was dropped

Instead of focussing on smaller details, as I've noticed with a lot of my classmates, instead I seem to be attracted to a complete, almost cinematic scenes.

I ended up in this village when I searched around for more Jamu Lodge buildings and I somehow ended up in Ecuador

In the area where i was dropped there was one building named ' Jamu Lodge'

In Nueva Loja there were a lot of interesting things happening that attracted me to stay in the surroundings.

Here are a couple of images which really inspired me from this area.
(I couldn't post everything due to some hotglue storage issues, but I've showed them during class)

I chose this image as one of my favourite dérives because it really showed how the people in Ecuador live. Schools are one of the most basic things we grow up with (or how we grow up in the Western world) It is interesting to see that these things which are normal in my world also exist here, but in a completely different way.

I really liked this image. Mostly because the people who are living in this barely liveable house had a lot on clothes on display, while they were drying. It also conveyed some kind of emotion in me when I saw this image. The city I found it in is quite poor. It’s called Nueva Loja and it’s quite a dangerous place to live in. (close to the border of Colombia, which causes a lot of smugglers to travel through the city.)

I found this Fridge Graveyard in the small city; Nueva Loja as well. I immediately felt like this was such an urban & interesting thing. This would never happen in the cities I lived in, which made it very interesting to me.

I tried contacting this person but they didn't reply to me reaching out, sadly enough. They put some really nice soundscapes online.

VISUAL EXPERIMENTS & TEACHING MYSELF HOW TO MAYA

My first experiments simulating fabric in maya.

This looks more like what I want to do!

Learned how to add fabric texture & use the materials.

Flag! fabric simulation experiment!

I taught myself how to render, because I had no clue how to do it. This is a test render, because rendering takes a long time.

My laptop crashed a lot during this assignment which caused me to waste a lot of time. Due to the corona regulations I was only allowed to be at school for 2 days, which to my disappointment really delayed me & my working process...

I taught myself how to use maya in a week with limited resources (no computer, just a laptop)

I wanted to use maya for a long time already so I'm happy I was able to find the time and the right project to teach myself this program. I would definitely love to use this more in the future! I think there is a lot of potential in this program.

Even though for me, it feels as if I haven't accomplished that much. There is no big, impressive end result, I learned a lot in the meantime and I really enjoyed working on this project.

It was also a challenge to try something completely different from what I usually do, which I think was quite important.

I looped the video and created a screenbased digital experience when adding the soundscape created by Lang Elliott into the video to show people how I experienced Nueva Loja.