1 Month in Winter - Animation

1 Month in Winter (Taos County) - 18’52” - (2023)
1 Month in Winter is Part 1 of Seasons (Taos County) an interactive installation, it can also be shown separately.

Credits
Animation and Music: Kiri Hargie

Display: 1920x1080 - 50” monitor w/ media player (USB) on stand with headphones or powered speakers. Can also be projected larger.
Requires electricity

Inspiration

My goal in this piece is simple, how can I compose a love letter in animated form to Rio Grande textile artists and their long history of storytelling in color and pattern in one month? Colors, patterns, and tradition born, bound, and inspired ultimately by nature.

I imagine that weaving is often as tedious and repetitive as animation. I also imagine we are both always hunting for shortcuts, novel ways, and updated methods of working our mutual madness. However, no matter how much we search to simplify, our final creation is always at the whim of one line of weave, one frame of animation, repeated over and over and over.

1 Month in Winter (Taos County) is a moving snapshot of our natural world created from 1.5 minutes of video footage filmed each day from 13 Dec. 22 – 13 Jan. 2023. These are the colors of winter in Taos County, as seen by the camera, composed by a programmatic sleight of hand and edited together with some simple video editing.

How was this animation produced?

Animation is almost never 'minimal' to produce, so I'm always looking for ways to make it less tedious and time consuming. Each still produced for the final video was about 2 minutes of actual work, and then ~1 hour of post-processing per day on the computer. I think by tweaking the ffmpeg script programming I could make the post-processing faster and even less hands on.

On each day for one month 2 videos were taken on an android phone, one that is ~1 minute long, one that is ~30 seconds long. Videos are time dilated and processed using a ffmpeg script to produce 2 stills for each day. The stills are then animated, time dilated once again, and some simple video editing is done to combine and complete the final video. Music was composed and recorded using Ableton Live using "abstract" (a nod to the theme that initially inspired this project) as the major chord progression a-A, b-B, s-E, t-F, r-D, a-A, c-C, t-F.

Video Production Tools:
Android cell phone
ffmpeg
Adobe Premiere and After Effects

Music Production Tools:
Ableton Live Intro
M-Audio Keystation 49

Stills: