Meaning and Motion

My Meaning + Motion project is about the Czech Art Nouveau artist, Alphonse Mucha. While he did work with jewelry design, set design, and narrative painting, he is most famous for his posters. I chose to focus on this aspect of his work and hone in on some of the most common motifs. His style is a staple of Art Nouveau and is widely known and mimicked, even if many people do not know his name. The style sheets and a large portion of the graphics were made in Illustrator while the video was made and animated in After Effects. The goal of this animation was to share a taste of Alphonse Mucha's artistry and approach to art with those unfamiliar with his work.

 

I wanted to capture the salient qualities of his version of Art Nouveau, so I focused on spiraling vegetal forms, hand-drawn techniques, and the female form. I also made an effort to include Mucha's distinctive dense, mosaic-like background patterns, often in the form of halo-like circles resting behind the subjects of his work.

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Although this project is supposed to be a biography of the artist, I did not feel that 30 seconds was enough to create a proper biography. Additionally, we were not allowed to use photographs in the project, greatly limiting the depth of detail I could include. As a result, I chose to focus on informing the viewer of what Mucha created and give just a taste of the artistic elements of Mucha’s most famous works.

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Mucha tends to use pastel colors, but as we only had one spot color, plus grayscale, I felt that true pastels looked too washed out. As a result, I chose a slightly paler red, picked out of an image of one of his posters. I also had planned on including more words to describe his work, along with another simplistic recreation of his work (see style sheets, page 1, slide 3), but I ran out of time to add it in effectively before the project deadline.