Tan Dun - Setting up the animation

Tan Dun is famous for his movie soundtracks, but his more interesting and forward thinking work takes form in his water and paper concertos - pieces created with water and paper respectively. Its the paper concerto that has inspired me to create a piece using Origami, the art of paper folding originally a Chinese art.

I decided to animated an origami lotus flower over say a crane or a swan as I think the Lotus flower has a greater sense of symbolism.

The lotus flower has a unique characteristic in that it blooms and sheds its seeds at the same time. In the context of Buddhism, the theory of karma says that, just like the lotus flower, our life is made up of cause and effect. Every cause -- be it action, word or thought -- will imprint an effect that can be seen in this lifetime or in future lives.

Cause and effect was something i used extensively in the Eno animation - the Music was the cause, the animation the effect - and John Cage was heavily influenced by 'Ching' - the Chinese book of changes, a symbol system used to identify order in random events, explaining a cosmology centred on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change. By using a Lotus flower I hope to link all three artists with the notion of, random chance and cause and effect.

Previous post show the research onto how I could set up the animation. I decided wall mounting the paper with masking tape and blue tack would be the way to go, as at the time i didn't have a tripod set up.

The image below shows the set up i used.


At 12 frames per second I opted to have the animation consist of around 240 photographs for a 20 second piece. I took about 220, the remaining 20 frames were left to allow room to create reversed animations on some of the folds. after a few test shots





The end result.

tj -x-