Bridget and I came up with “Cringe Chronicles” on an evening Discord call. We were interested in creating some type of archival work that’s both fun and reflective of social cultures and attitudes today. We went on a tangent about awkward online conversations we had and decided that this was the perfect topic for our zine.
Over the course of the week, we messaged all our friends to collect screenshots of painfully awkward exchanges. We received screenshots from all sorts of platforms – Messages, Hinge, Instagram stories, Gchat, you name it.
As we reviewed our materials, we discovered common themes of social relationships like romance, family, friendship, and work. Some screenshots crossed those barriers and we figured the best way to capture them was through emojis.
We hope people get a good laugh from reading this. The Internet is forever!
For my generative print, I was interested in working with simple shapes like circles and squares. I wanted to go for a design that feels a little 3D, in the sense that it’s popping out at you. By constraining myself to two colors (orange and blue) and two shapes, I experimented with rules that alternate between concentric circles and squares with inverted colors. I also included random stroke widths for the internal circles or squares. Lastly, I had a random function for rotating the inner squares, so that some appear like diamonds.
When printing, I encountered several misalignment issues. I decided to keep one that really made the pattern pop out to me. Though be warned- staring at it too long might make you a little dizzy 🙂
If I were to revise this, I’d try adjusting the algorithm so that more blue square backgrounds would pop out. There is a random pattern emerging with orange as the dominant background, but I think it’d feel more balanced if there was more blue.
First contact sheet for May Be Unholy opening sceneSecond contact sheet for May Be Unholy opening scene
For this animation assignment, I chose to work with the opening scene of a short film I directed, May Be Unholy. This was a film I worked on while I was a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Barnard College’s Media Center. This project was especially memorable, because I got to work with my friends and we were a team of women and non-binary filmmakers.
This was my first time ever printing with the Riso. I actually used a different clip originally, which was the last scene of May Be Unholy. I used cyan and red as my print colors and grouped the warm and cool channels separately on Photoshop. Unfortunately, the printer kept jamming and whatever managed to print came out as a big blob. I think this happened, because the footage itself was quite dark and I didn’t think to brighten it in Photoshop.
For my second attempt, I switched over to the opening scene instead (the one shown above). I brightened the footage in Premiere and further readjusted the levels in Photoshop. I grouped the channels the same way as before, but I used magenta and green inks this time around. This was because most of the outdoor scene was greenery and I wanted the heart-shaped sunglasses to really pop out. This attempt was much more successful!
Reanimating the frames in Photoshop was fascinating. I had no idea how everything would come together with just the frames from our physical contact sheets. I was surprised by how misaligned and washed out the contact sheets were. Thankfully, the color correction and frame alignment tools fixed a lot of it. I was also surprised by how much the frames differed in size; in class, I learned that the sheets must’ve been converted to 11” x 17” at some point in the prep process, throwing off the original 10.5” x 16.5” dimensions. In addition, the process of resizing individual frames to flow slightly better became a tedious process, though I think it was definitely worth it.
In all, I think the final animation is really cool, even if the output is really grainy and jumpy at times. Plus the overall process wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. I shared the GIF with some of the folks on set and they all loved the animation!
