The Making Of Liberation

I've ever invented stories, but rarely have worked them out to some extension. Funny is that I've invented most of my stories in English as homework of my English courses, which mostly have been short stories. Some teachers found them weird some interesting, all found them somehow confusing.

The story for my final project may again be confusing. Not for me, naturally. I thought about making what I often had to think about the theme of my final project. All my life I've asked for support to develop  my skills in the visual arts and music., yet rarely got some. They paid enormous sums to educate me as a skilled worker, an engineer, a programmer, a project manager ... but whenever I've asked for support for doing artwork they simply looked at me pitying. Of course I could not mind thinking about this. Most of the result of my thinking you can find in my final project "The Long Way of Liberation".

To make my points clear in just a short story I've used exaggeration. Creativity and artwork are not just disapproved, but severely punished and highly despised.

I started with a government's disinformation about creativity. The totalitarian city government I've imagined needs production which enlarge their power. They blame creativity for not having enough workers for this purpose. This is a visual design assignment of making a poster from two or more photos which message is shocking. I realized it in Gimp.

Next I take the challenge of finding some artwork and according to this creating a gif from a video which has a deep relation to the artwork. For my story this means a picture on an event announcement and a gaze into a forbidden creative world.

They spy after the heroine of the story and I illustrated this by an animated gif which shows attentively and disapprovingly looking eyes and the ear of the spy. The assignment idea suggested to let the viewer know from the eyes what the character is up to.
I looked up a video, made single pictures of the passages I needed and combined them to the gif.

I further did some audio, where the heroine is detected and pursued by a police officer. For this I had to record my own voice, but was not really impressed by this. I rather added some sound effects, too. The original assignment motivated to simulate an emergency call, which I've slightly altered.

For the next part I've created an assignment idea myself, which is to rotoscope some action, this case a dance. I took a video of and dance took some parts of it. I further made single images which I used to outline the action several pieces of paper. I liked the animation style more then some real dancers.
For my story this means to illustrate a group of dancers who have been arrested.

The plan in the story is to rescue the group from a highly secured prison. I've used the assignment idea to take the sound of a movie and to change the meaning of the story. I did. In the original the arrested people were the bad guys, in my audio piece the prisoners are meant to be rescued, which I tried to make clear by the introductory passage, which describes the way into the prison and by that also the way out.

The last part of my final project are six animated gifs arranged in a table, which show part oft he plot and character issues of the heroine. In the story this is a report the heroine has just finished after her long way of liberating herself from other people's expectations.

I didn't like taking the story as I originally sketched it. It wasn't very fluent and with the fact that the viewer has to take some action which might take him away from the flow of the story I rather just added some  direct speech. I even think this way the text is more the illustration of the media than the other way around.

I also thought a bout the title of my original sketch and decided it should be more motivating to go a creative way. "Never free to go" is too depressive for this purpose and I rather titled the story "The Long Way of Liberation".