Braille Institute - Shape Exercise

This past Wednesday at the Braille Institute, the teacher led an exercise teaching students how to recognize when other people are nearby. He walked in a shape, making a monotone noise and the student had to guess the shape based on his sound. I tried guessing with my eyes closed a couple of times and it was tough! I could tell the difference between a circle, line and triangle, but squares and circles were much harder to differentiate from one another. Here is just a little sketch, thinking about those concepts.

Visual Development, Part 2

I did a new batch of sketches, trying to work out the details of the visual map and establish a design for the "characters". Even though there isn't necessarily a story with characters, I still wanted a consistent look for the people.

The Map

Here is a first draft of a visual map for my entire film.

Game Plan

April 3

We did some very useful exercises for developing a schedule for the next year. After some sketching, here is my refined schedule at the moment.

Motion Test

March 27

A very rough, very early test of some design in motion.

Inspirational Animations

March 20

Some animations that have been very inspirational



I love the way scene transitions are used in this film. Especially starting at 1:04. The way the point of view moves as people are walking through is mesmerizing.

Walking is inspirational because it is so successful while not really following a narrative. Basically the film is a collection of vignettes that all connect somehow. I'd like my film to be successful in the same way.

MacLaren is obviously a master at visual music, and since this will sort of be a visual music piece, I've been watching a lot of his films. I love how the visuals follow the audio in this piece, especially in the transitions.

UPA has always been a huge inspiration for me. The Jaywalker does a fantastic job of graphically representing a city street. Visually, this will be close to what I'm trying to do.

Visual Development

March 20

Some early visual development.

My process so far has been: Walking down Los Angeles street with recorder on, recording 10 minute chunks of audio, listening to the chunks and piecing together images based on the sounds. So far the main noise has been passing cars, no matter where I walk in my neighborhood there is a constant sea of this noise. Other more sharper noises appear and disappear above it, horns, people talking, engines puttering. This is pretty much what I was trying to capture in the first image.

The second image is inspired by my first day at the Los Angeles Braille Institute. I was assigned to assist in a 'Sensory Awareness' class. The instructor conducts exercises that meant to help the visually impaired become more aware of their environment through sound and touch. I followed the instructor as he took a student around the building. We stopped in each room, the instructor would clap and we would listen to the sound echoing around the room. The student would then try to guess where they were based on the amount of echo. Anyway, as I was following along I was imagining how voices echo through rooms and how the intensity can grow and distort based on the size and location the the listener.

When first thought of this project one of the first sounds I immediately thought of was beeping walk signs. The third image might be what the end of the film looks like, a symphony of walk signs beeping like crazy might be a good note to end on.

Visual Development Sketches

March 18

Los Angeles Braille Institute

March 14

After some thought and meeting with the volunteer coordinator a couple times, I started volunteering at the Los Angeles Braille Institute. I don’t really plan on making this project about blindness, and the last thing I want to do is attempt to ‘visualize’ how a person with vision loss might experience sounds. I only hope to glean some inspiration from this experience, and maybe I will learn a thing or two more about environmental sounds.

Street Sounds

Late February

I've been walking around with the zoom H2 Handy Stereo Recorder, collecting sounds in the Silverlake and East Hollywood neighborhoods where I live. So far I've been walking with the recorder on, picking up whatever noises happen to pass by. Here are a couple of my favorites so far.

Observational Sketches

Feb 13

Some early sketches drawn from observation. I sat down outside for a morning and just watched people walk. This is the first time I’ve really just observed people’s movements for a good chunk of hours and it was very informative. One of the locations I drew was outside of the Los Angeles Braille Institute, which gave me a new idea for a direction my thesis could head in…

Early Inspiration

Jan 24

The past month has been Thesis warm-up. I’m starting with the vague idea that I’d like observe and animated people from observation. I want to create a city symphony of sorts, take observed movement and combine it with sounds recorded in the environment. I’m leaving the project open-ended at this point as I’m not really sure what my summer plans will be. Ideally, I’d like to go on a cross-country road trip, collecting sounds in each city and combining them to make a more general “city symphony piece”


Radiolab episode with very interesting examples of creating music out of sound




Joris Iven's Rain is the classic example of a city symphony. Using days of footage he creates a single experince through editing. I would like to do something similar with animation.

Masters Thesis - What's Been Happening

Hello, this will be my thesis blog. A lot has been happening the past three months. I've been keeping track in analog journals, and will be dumping the past three months of research, thoughts and work here. I'll be maintaining this blog for the remainder of thesis (the next year!) with research, inspiration, animation and art.

The following posts will be catch-up, dated entries of my thoughts and work.