Thesis Documentation

In some of my grandmother's stories there are characters called Ifrit. These Ifrit are beings that are responsible for mishief, the fantastical, and mostly the unexplainable events in her stories. I decided to start making Ifrit shadow puppets for her stories.

I made the shadow puppets out of white paper and fishing line. I haven't started animating them yet, but will do so using stop motion. I created them white, but I wanted to try color-keying them out, and not use them as traditional shadow puppets.

Posted by Yasmin Elayat at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For my thesis, each generational narrative will have it's own distinct aesthetic, so I've been making different types of characters, sketches, etc. I've created a puppet rig, since one of my narratives will be told through stop motiion animation and puppets.

I created my first rig using wire and sculpey, and I've experimented with a few techniques. I've played with hand-drawn animation for the facial expression and real video overlay. I'm still trying out different techniques until I find an interesting one.

The rig face closeup:




The dress I'm making for the puppet:




One experiment with techniques:

Posted by Yasmin Elayat at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the main problems I was facing for my thesis was obtaining good quality audio of my grandmother and mother telling stories about their lives. While I was in Egypt, I tried to get some audio recordings, but I wasn't properly equipped with a good microphone, preamp, etc. I did some research, and I asked around, until I found someone in Cairo who's an Audio Engineer for fun (it's not his day job).

He offered to go record my grandmother, my great aunt, my aunt and my mother speaking about their lives, the political climate they grew up with in Egypt, my mom's emigration, and so forth. He emailed me saying he had approximately 3 hours of audio between them all together. Because they're uncompressed raw wav files, I have to wait until they're uploaded, and then I can download them and start editing.

There is progress!

Posted by Yasmin Elayat at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Documenting our family history has been an interest of mine for several years. I’m going to follow three generations of women in my family - Egyptian grandmother, Egyptian-American immigrant mother, 2nd generation Egyptian-American me – through stories passed on to me orally.

I want to document this oral history in a digital format that would adequately convey the collective, non-linear narrative structure of my family’s history, and, by implication Egypt’s modern history.

Most stories, animations, movies, etc. have this reliance on an omniscient narrative, but history is never objective, it is actually collaborative and generational.

Our family history covers three generations which consists of three separate narratives. Inevitably something is lost over the years in an oral tradition due to generational, cultural and language gaps.

I want to reconcile my vision with the other truths, and see our history as my grandmother, or as my mother sees it. Furthermore, I want to eliminate the omniscient narrative completely and follow a model that is true-to-life.

Posted by Yasmin Elayat at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)