A duflo (p. duflangus) is a speculative microorganism that can unlock time.
Behavior is based on motions observed, recorded, “scored,” and programmed by a human proxy.
The score, recorded in your codex duflangus, serves as the blueprint for their forms.
To conjure a duflangus, you open a portal simply by pausing to observe motion.
The act of stopping and truly looking marks the beginning.
This is when the first piece takes shape.
Set aside pages in a sketchbook reserved exclusively for this project
as your codex duflangus.
Your archive for scores and observations.
Six to nine scores are needed to create enough components for a successful duflo.
You can start constructing your duflo’s parts on the same day you score them,
or wait until all your motion studies are collected.
Let your curiosity guide you!
Prioritize the non-human.
Attend to motion that unfolds without regard for your observation.
Invent a system that makes sense to you.
For a path, consider a sequence of dots on a line.
Timing: The space between dots
Force: Weight of the mark
Direction: Line trajectory
Acceleration/Deceleration: Taper or spacing
When you draw motion, you are not drawing the object.
You are drawing the essence of its movement.
Capture what you sense and observe.
The duck moves with abrupt acceleration and a long deceleration
as he glides across the pond.
How do you visually show this?
Perhaps with a waveform?
Velocity can be shown with a taper.
What happens when the mallard sticks its head in the water?
Do the legs come up?
How do you note these secondary characteristics?
13 students pass a point on the ground at different intervals.
This might be represented by marks that cluster over your observed time.
Some are on the phone, some are talking to each other,
maybe some have their arms crossed and are tired of the grind.
Maybe one of them is clumbering.
Each of these observed elements describes a moment in time.
It is all data for your motion.
The same logic applies.
Though you might choose to observe only gray cars first, then red ones.
How do you differentiate one moment from the next, despite their similarity?
A crow can be observed in a number of ways.
The number of caws in a one-minute span.
The number of flaps vs glides.
The number of crows.
Each type of data provides you with interpretive material.
This guarantees, in theory at least, that each student’s organism differs from each other.
The form follows the motion.
Because you already know how it moves, build a body around those motions.
Your organism is microscopic.
It is fictional.
Beyond that, you decide.
Let the observed rhythm guide the morphology.
The motions you collected tell you what the creature looks like.
Modeling a microorganism that moves according to a random score.
One part moves at random like traffic;
perhaps this is how it bends in the middle.
Another component is the number of caws you observed at odd intervals,
while an antenna has 9 hairs that all move back and forth
according to foot traffic patterns on Draper.
And the whole thing spirals according to the sinus
of a drake mallard’s glide across the petri dish.
The marks on your map are the animation’s keyframes.
Artists have long used scoring as a generative tool.
Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit is a book of scores.
Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings famously used instructions for others to execute.
In making duflo, you have a dual role:
the score is the work, and your execution is its interpretation.
Each result should reflect the unique fingerprint of its moment.
Six to nine motion scores, hand drawn.
Turn in images of all pages on Canvas by Sunday March 22.
Sketches of your duflo with annotations connecting each body part to its motion source.
A diagram, not a beauty drawing.
One creature, modeled, rigged with FK, animated in Maya.
Looping motion.
Clean Outliner.
Each body part carries its own observed motion study.
540×540.
24fps.
5 to 10 seconds looping.
Arnold render, PNG sequence, GIF in Photoshop.
Under 8 MB.
Posted to Discord.
Due Saturday March 29.