Seeing Movement
- Gözde Efe
- Apr 14, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 29, 2025
8 Weeks, Small Groups, Fully Equipped Media Lab, Register here
Wednesday or Thursday 4.30pm-5.45pm
Photography is still. Film moves. GIFs jump.
Seeing Movement
How do we see, perceive, create and play with movement?
Gathering 1: Is It Still or Is It Moving?
Where does motion begin? And when does it stop? In this opening session, we look at the difference between stillness and motion — or perhaps how they work together.
We’ll do:
Look at images and sequences across forms: photographs, film clips, loops, and GIFs
Reflect on how each captures time
Create a short storyboard that's about movement
Gathering 2: Flipbooks, Illusions, and Handmade Animations
What tricks the eye into seeing motion?
A few drawings, a little paper, and suddenly something’s alive. We explore the earliest forms of moving image — simple, tactile, and strangely magical.
We’ll do:
Make a flipbook from scratch
Try our hands at basic animation using paper, found photos, or tracing
Play with tools like zoetropes and spinning illusions
3. Loops and Gestures – The Language of the GIF (graphics nterchange format)
A glance. A hand wave. A flicker. This session is all about capturing movement that loops — and how short cycles of motion can hold feeling, rhythm, or tension.
We’ll do:
Record simple gestures or micro-movements
Turn them into looping GIFs using basic software
Experiment with what makes a loop feel complete — or incomplete
The Moving Image – Fragments of Time
Video is time stretched out. It can be narrative, abstract, observational, or all three. We dip into video as a way of letting images breathe.
We’ll do:
Shoot short moving-image studies (no dialogue, just motion)
Explore handheld movement, still shots, and slow pans
Reflect on editing as movement, too
Clay and Objects in Motion – Stop Motion Experiments
What if the world moved one frame at a time?
We return to touch. Clay. Paper. Hands. In this session, we animate materials to understand how physical movement becomes image-based rhythm.
We’ll do:
Use simple materials (clay, paper, objects) to build stop-motion shorts
Work frame-by-frame using a phone or stop-motion app
Think about movement as something built, not just captured
Photo Animation
Can a photograph move — even just a little?
Here, we explore motion within stillness. A shifting layer. A flicker of wind. A cinemagraph. A slideshow that plays like a memory.
We’ll do:
Animate photos using layering, transitions, or subtle motion
Create a “moving still” piece — something that sits between photo and film
Reflect on the in-between space where stillness almost vibrates
Collections of Motion
In between sesssions, we will fous on creating a small body of work — a flipbook, a series of GIFs, a stop-motion short, or a sequence of images that move in unexpected ways.
Formats:
A projection night
A collaborative zine or online showcase
A photo loop gallery with sound and motion
