LAND by Masanobu Hiraoka

Monsanto Hiram animation video mostly because of how much I enjoyed watching it. The first time I viewed it I could not concentrate on the important graphical elements or how well the animation was done; The first thing did, was enjoy the mixture of the amazing colors moving and transforming Into shapes on my screen with the perfect sound going along with these moving colors. The many more times after that I watched it I kept getting impressed on how well everything is made and this is what I will discuss in this essay.

Monsanto Hiram Is both an Illustrator and animator born in Kyoto, Japan. He created his first animation projects during graduation year at his university. His videos have a great Influence on Japanese culture and artists like Tattoo-u Amounts and Daisies Garish. He doesn’t work for any studio but does a lot of commercial work besides his artistic projects, which he creates for fun. The artistic style of “Land” (released September 2013) Is very similar to his past projects but Its easy to observe how his recent millions have improved a lot.

I think the concept of this video was just to create a wonderful imaginary world were a boy can walk through it and mess around with the metamorphosis of different objects. Primary and secondary imagery and effects make this composition very complex, uncluttered and Interesting. Its obvious where the artists wants us to look, he leads our eye to the most important subject the whole time but, everything around it never stops moving. This method keeps the imagery from looking flat because not much depth and dimension is used in the animation.

The mood of this piece Is generated from three principal elements: the music, the colors and the shapes. Shapes start flat and are being transformed the whole time, they are even converted into geometrical objects that look as if they had a third dimension. The colors change through out the video but never go out of a specific color palette. The colors vary from pastel blue, green. Pink, white, yellow, etc. This makes the animation feel natural and not aggressive as If It were to use Blvd reds.

Colors are amazingly coordinated with the music. Most of the time it makes you feel relaxed and happy, there are no dark and sad shades of color and the tone of the music never changes drastically to keep you in the same mood. The music was created by a Spanish girl named Lamar Molder and makes you want the video never to end. I noticed that the video also utilizes some of the animation principles. Here I will discuss a few of them: Squash and stretch – we can appreciate this principle since the first seconds of the film.

Forms are being squashed and stretched and give the ewer a sense of Hewlett and flexibility which make It more appealing to the eye. Anticipation There is not much anticipation except when there are repetitive patterns, but mainly, the artist prepares its audience to be ready for anything unexpected to happen. Staging – Hiram uses staging through out the whole animation. He makes you look at forms by making them move, isolate, pop, change 1 OFF through – This principle is shown by objects that keep on moving until they are out of frame or transformed into other visual objects (metamorphosis).

Slow in and out – Every single wave of color has a smooth way of appearing and disappearing. Arcs – objects move sometimes following the laws of physics and sometimes not, but in general the animation has a continuous arc movement that makes the objects look realistic by how they move. Secondary action – Even though we are following a main subject the whole time, objects around it never stop moving. Personally, what I most found impacting about Hooray’s work in “land” was that I did not need a message or complete story structure to get hooked.

After watching a few seconds I was expecting anything to happen. The planning for this must have been really difficult and for a long time. Every element in the frame matches with the next one that is coming in and with the one that Just left. If I could think of any recommendation to make the piece better, it would be to play around a little bit more with depth and different dimensions to give the moving objects more distance from one another so the frame does not get crowded at any time.