haircut. by justin simoni

Please make sure you have the Flash 5 Player If you'd like, you can see the entire series alone.

One day I decided to cut all my hair off...

I had grown it for 2 years. I dyed it crazy colors; blue, green and blue and green. It made people look at my hair and say, "wow, hair! it's wonderful!". I loved my hair. One day I got tired of it and tired of my life. So I reinvented myself. Besides, the girl I grew the hair for didn't like me anymore. While I was cutting my hair, or just before, I felt scared, I felt like I was about to jump off a very large cliff into very cold water. When I was cutting it, hacking it, burning it with lighters, looking at it in my hands I felt resolved, in control, almost erotic, a bit essentric when I cut the entire lot off, but very happy. I also took some pictures.

The original haircut book

This photo series was actually the forth project for a Photo 1 class, the project was to make a book. My book consisted of the 17 prints, mounted on pastel paper by just cutting 45 degree slits in the four corners of the sheet - no tape or glue required. Pastel paper was just what I had laying around. I wanted to use some watercolor paper I also had 'laying' around (I guess not everyone's room looks like an art supply store, blown up real good), since it's much more sturdy, but I didn't have enough sheets. The prints are on the right side, the text, on the left. I ripped the printed text up into squares to fit on the paper and glued them on, just like you do in second grade.

For the cover and back, I used a cardboard pizza box. I actually ordered a pizza just for the cardboard. It was a pineapple pizza. It was snowing the day I made the book, so finding dry cardboard to use proved difficult, thus the pizza ordering. I painted the cover and back white with cheap acrylics I found under my bed and used another torn piece of computer printout for the cover text. I bound the entire book using extra skateboard bolts I had. The book is at my house. Come over, I'll show it to you. I knew someone in the class was going to use the most luscious and expensive paper and bind it oh so nice. I thought there was no way to compete with that, so I'd take another route. When it came to show the books, a girl came in, also with a cardboard-bound book, unpainted and even burned in places. I thought that was pretty fab.

The text itself are three short stories, mostly playful dribble about constants, routine and boredom. I wrote them at a coffee shop. There was a guy that kept smoking by me and coughing horrendously. Smoking and coughing. Smoking and coughing. The smoking and coughing guy does not appear in any of the stories, by Christ, think he'd find a connection.

Ideas behind the animation

I wanted to put the book online. It was a triumph in the critique and people actually wanted me to publish it, so I thought putting it online was the most feasible way to do this. I started by scanning all the pics in and scanning the text side of each page, thinking I could use my Photoshop skills to make the ripped text on screen look nice and be readable. I wanted at first to capture as much of the book's feel as possible. After a while, I came to realization that doing this would make the online version look like I took a book, scanned all of it's pages, and slapped it up online. So I did something completely different.

Different but still using similar ideas pertaining to the book that is. I wanted the book to be semi raw, if you notice, the prints get more and more grainy, more and more scary. How do you make something on a computer... raw? The basic thing that makes up images on your computer screen are pixels. Pixels are sort of like the grain you see on photo prints close up. What I can do on a computer that I can't do in a photo print is movement. So why not have the raw pixel orchestrate everything?

Using some techniques I've developed after attending talks with Mark Napier and Ben Benjamin using Flash and even some Perl I used large squares of gray to make transitions between each print. If you look closely, each 'curtain' that hides the print until the text has come into place maps the average color values of the part of the print it hides. This curtain is actually a clever pre loader that gives you something to look at as the image itself loads into the movie and the pixel curtain zooms out of the way.

This effect allows you to be surprised when the photo is actually shown, but also prepares you for the print itself. How? The curtain itself gives the boundary of where the photo will be. Again, if you're looking closely at the animation, you'll notice that there's four different placements the photo can take. Since the pixel curtain is almost like a very low resolution version of the actual print, your eyes remember these values and the entire print can be interpreted as to where the light and dark areas of the photo are, without showing the actual photo and giving away the surprise of the photo itself.

To make a 'cover' and 'back cover' I used similar pixels that move either left or right to show the title of the piece, since the title is colored the same dark gray as the background of the movie, the title itself only appears when the pixels move under it, giving you pieces of the title a little at a time. This roots the idea of cutting pieces of hair off, which is what the photos are all about. I didn't want the animations itself to overpower the actuals subject, so there job is to come in, hide, leave and a mad rush.

All these black and white and gray squares reminded me of piano keys and I found a song called I Still Miss You by Arab Strap to set the correct mood. Music only plays in the beginning and end of the animation, since the music isn't mine and the movie itself takes a good deal of time. You don't want to listen to the same loop for seven minutes. The music does add more richness to the movie and I thought that would do to give the cover and back cover some more meat, something more to bound the book together.

About Me

11/26/01

My name's Justin Simoni. I'm 20. I have no hair. Sometimes I attend the University of Colorado at Boulder, trying to get a Bachelors of Fine Arts. I live in with my two roommates and a dog. I plan to be a rock star in some way or another. Get in touch.