Artist Statement
I can honestly say that I have no idea how I came up with the idea for this project. I had originally thought of it at the beginning of another class project, and had tried to make this image 3D, but the birdcage was just too difficult to construct in that dimension, and it would have left out a lot of the full story if it was a single image. I’m glad I saved it for the animation project. I call this piece “Freeing Your Mind.”
To make this animation, I duplicated the cage layer, and masked out the back bars. I then put the front bars in front of the bird, so that I could manipulate its wings without messing with the bars each time. The ones that were supposed to be in front of the bird would stay there, and the bird would be in front of the back bars of the cage. To make the bird’s wings move, I selected the outer half of the wings and tilted them down, then eventually tilted the entire wing down, step by step, masking some annoying spots. To make them flap back up, I copied the layers and ordered them backwards. On the key, something you can’t really see is a text layer that says “Memories.” I turned the key into a 3D object when I made it turn in the lock so it looked more realistic. When the cage door disappeared, I added clouds around the bird, shrunk it, and applied the filter “liquefy” so that the bird looked like it was turning into smoke, and then had the smoke float through the opening in the cage.
Though it may seem odd that the cage needed to be unlocked for smoke to pass through the bars, I did this 1) because I couldn’t reconstruct the bird to look like it was realistically flying out of the cage, and 2) because it suggests that a person has to purposely unlock his mind in order to free it, memories won’t just float away without that person letting them go. The clouds and liquefaction represent a transformation of the mind, and that once someone lets those memories go, those memories are no longer substantial or have meaning.
Works Cited
Bird https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Bird_in_flight_wings_spread
Birdcage
http://www.creativecrash.com/system/photos/000/213/379/213379/big/BirdCageThumb.jpg?1336709476
Face http://hdwallpapers.cat/wallpaper/jude_law_face_man_black_actor_people_hd-wallpaper-1895699
Key
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4013/4407416750_878ec38e96_b
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