Alexandra Whitford
Breathe
The Creation
From a young age, I have been fascinated with plants. I would sit in the car with my mom discussing all of the whys and hows of plants: how the dew formed in the mornings, why sunflowers follow the sun, diseases they get and how they heal. I would play with the frost on the grass in the mornings and watch the leaves change. I would plant bulbs and wait for them to grow. I would look up to the tops of the tallest trees in the forests wondering how they transported water hundreds of feet into the air. I would always count the rings of tree stumps to see how long they lived before their lives were cut short by humans, not knowing that the rings were layers of vascular cambium that appear with each new year’s growth. But until I came to college, I didn’t realize the depth of my appreciation for the natural world about plants and watching them was second nature to me. It never occurred to me that the rest of the world didn’t share my passions. I thought everyone wondered about the mystery of nature and the world around us. In high school biology, all my friends hated the plant chapter because they were “so boring!” While I pretended to share their disinterest, I secretly enjoyed learning about the wondrous feats plants were capable of accomplishing, such as photo- and gravitropism (the ability of plants to grow toward or away light and gravity, respectively).
I hoped college would be a change of scene. Yet even within this thriving academic community, I noticed a similarly disconcerting lack of interest in the world of fauna. None of the people I met wondered about the dew on the grass or the rings in a stump. They looked at a flower and saw a pretty object where I saw a thriving metropolis of nectar and insects and growth with a life just like anyone else’s. Thinking about the workings of plants was so ingrained that I never realized how “weird” it was perceived by my peers. I had always been the nerd, and came to college without that stigma, but quickly regained the reputation as the “bio nerd.” I finally realized that one of my greatest passions was my fierce love of plants. Thankfully, a little self-reflection has allowed me to recognize this and explore it more in depth. I started to realize through this love that plants could save the world. All I had to do was get the word out. This project has allowed me to further explore this passion and combine it with others I have discovered during my journey, specifically the human body.
Through my reflections, I kept circling back to one concept: how vital our environments are to our bodies. Being a Division 1 varsity swimmer, my environment is the water, but only recently have I noticed the importance of air in my environment as well. It is integral to our survival, and as an athlete, air is crucial to my livelihood. I rely on it to get me through practice and, as a swimmer, I have come to relish the few breaths I get during intense sessions of hypoxic training. Furthermore, I have struggled with asthma in the past few years and that has made me realize even more how much I rely on air and my ability to breathe. Recently, during work out, we were practicing our underwater kicks. My teammates and I would kick the whole length of the pool underwater and were only allowed to breathe at the wall. What struck me was that first breath after being deprived of air. It was so invigorating and intense. In that moment, the need for air was so overpowering nothing else mattered. That desperation that comes with air deprivation is at the core of human experience, but most never have to overcome the innate reflex of the breath. Every day, I force myself to forget that I need to breathe, keeping my head in the water, and ignoring my screaming lungs.
It is this intense urge that made me want to bring attention to what it really means to breathe. I wanted to draw my audience’s attention to each breath they take and focus on the air going in and out of their lungs. I wanted them to think about the implications of each breath and question it further. I wanted them to feel each breath and the air that composes them.
After reflecting on all of the above and having many, many discussions with my friends and classmates, I finally decided that I wanted to do a project focusing on air and the plants that produce clean air for us. Now all that was left to do was finalize a medium.
I had come in at the beginning of autumn quarter with the idea of doing some sort of photography project. But as I explored my newly chosen topic, I realized I needed something more to fully express what I wanted to portray. I wanted to be able to capture more than the photography I had previously done. Luckily I found a YouTube video on the making of stop motion animation. I thought this was the perfect medium for combining my love for photography and the fantastical images I had in mind. I had found my project.
The Hope
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not”
– Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
This quote has been the driving force for this project since the beginning. No matter how I was feeling about my video or if I was struggling with ideas for the next scene, I would pull out The Lorax and read. After, I would always feel that same inspiration that I felt the first time I read this book. Even though The Lorax is a children’s book, it resonates with me more than most other propaganda about pollution. It makes me realize that as a population, we are just coasting through life, ignoring the consequences. We do what makes us happy in the here and now and don’t worry about what happens later. Our motto has become “YOLO” (you only live once), the modern day version of carpe diem. We don’t think about how the world is affected by our actions. We don’t think about the future. And because we don’t think about the future, we don’t think about how our actions affect the world. Most of us are not actively trying to make our planet cleaner or make the world a better place for future generations.
But The Lorax gave me hope. Hope that one day we will be able to restore the natural wonders of our world. Hope that someone will be able to reverse the harm that has already been done. All it takes is just one person to decide that something has to be done and to do it; one person to decide that future generations deserve better than what we are providing for them. We work hard to provide our children with better lives and more opportunity than we had growing up; it’s the American dream – to move up in the world. But in the process of making a better world for the next generation, we are creating a worse environment. We wouldn’t want to live in the world we are creating, but we are forcing our children to live in and deal with it.
The Lorax also gave me hope that our population will become aware of the fact that plants are also living, breathing organisms that share this world with us. Though we may not realize it, what we do and how we treat the world affects those organisms as well. By damaging our environment, we endanger those organisms, therefore ultimately hurting ourselves as we decrease the amount of plants that produce air for us.
While browsing social media during my research, I stumbled upon a quote:
“Imagine if trees gave off wifi signals, we would be planting so many trees and we’d probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe.”
To me, this sums up the problem with society today. We brush off our health like we don’t have to actively protect it. We take our environment and safety for granted. Because we can’t see it, the air isn’t there. But when the air quality becomes so bad we can actually see the grime, it is already too late. Then we are doing harm to our lungs. We care more about technology and the future that comes with that and ignore the outdoors. Children sit inside and play video games rather than getting fresh air and playing outside. If society were to take a look at what creating this technology is doing to our planet, I would hope they would start caring more about the quality of air.
My hope with Breathe was to bring attention to the fact that society as a whole doesn’t pay attention to trees. I wanted to bring attention to the fact that we care more about production and convenience and our technologies than the planet. If society could think of air pollution as a problem as immediate as finding a good wifi signal, our air pollution problems would be solved.
The Animation and The Doubts
Learning to do stop motion was a rollercoaster. I was super excited when I first downloaded the software. But I soon encountered my first obstacle. I realized my computer didn’t have the right system requirements for this software, so I had to find different software. I was finally able to start animating. My first attempt was a fun animation of candy and was a lot simpler than I had initially imagined. This made me eager to start my video.
My next step was to plan out my screenplay. This proved to be a lot harder than I imagined. I had big ideas for what I wanted, but when I went to start animating my ideas, I couldn’t seem to find the right materials. I started to get really frustrated with the whole thing. I finally came up with a few seconds of animation. When I went into my first workshop of winter quarter, I was not happy with what I had. I was considering finding a new medium. But then my class loved what little I had. They were so amazed and so thrilled by the ideas that I had that I couldn’t scratch the project then. I was rejuvenated. I wanted to go home right then and start working.
Unfortunately, this feeling of euphoria slowly started to diminish as I continued to work. I started getting frustrated again. I was starting to finalize the materials I wanted but was now having issues with lighting. It was hard to maintain the same light settings between sessions. But the more I worked, the better I became at matching the lighting. I set up a station in my room that took up my whole desk all of winter and spring quarters. I found the right camera settings. And I learned to make slight alterations that created the perfect light. And again, the feedback from my classmates rejuvenated me.
It soon became clear to me that stop motion was an intensely time consuming and frustrating medium. Every session had to last at least 3-4 hours for me to get 10-15 seconds of usable material. And if I thought of a new idea in the middle of a session, I would have to go get the materials that might work to enact it. If something wasn’t working to my liking, I could be working at the same scene for upwards of 6 hours. I had not been expecting this sort of time commitment. And as it turned out, less of my ideas worked as well as I had imagined them. This led to a good deal of readjustment to my original plans. My video was metamorphosing before my very eyes and I couldn’t really do anything about it. I felt as if my project was defining itself and I didn’t have any control over the outcome. But every time I brought it into class, the feedback of my peers rejuvenated my desire to create a great video. I may not have felt like I had control, but that was something that made the work worthwhile. A great project was transforming and coming to life and I was the puppet master. I realized that you don’t always have to be in control to produce something you can be proud of.
As the exhibition drew nearer, I felt my frustration growing. The feedback of my classmates was helping less and less. Then, halfway through spring quarter, I felt the need to scrap the project. I was feeling as if the video wouldn’t be good enough quality to present at the exhibition. I felt like other people had these incredible projects and mine was not on par with theirs. I felt like I should just present some of the actual photos I had been collecting on my own time throughout the quarter of Muir Woods, Lake Tahoe, and other natural phenomena. But I knew that I couldn’t scrap it now. I had put so much time and effort into this project that I wanted to see it through. I wanted to keep the message I had come up with as well. I reworked a couple of my scenes and finally had a project I could be proud of.
The Reflections
When I took on a stop motion project, I had no idea what I was in for. I knew I would be able to produce a cool product, but I had no clue what that final product would be. My initial thoughts were fairly close to my final storyline, but many of my original scenes were too complex for a burgeoning animator like me. My original outline called for a pair of lungs transforming into a tree. It was more a commentary on the affect pollution has on the body and how similar trees and humans are. I had imagined a simple tree. Slowly, the leaves and branches would fill out and begin to rotate. As the tree began to flip, you would notice that it had a vaguely familiar form; it would be reminiscent of a pair of lungs. The lungs would then begin to expand and contract. You would realize they are breathing. They would breathe in and out until the tree fully transformed into a pair of human lungs. The trunk became the trachea and suddenly, a breath of air escaped through what was moments before the roots of the tree but now was a human mouth. All of a sudden, you realize that trees and lungs are more similar than you ever would have realized. I had wanted this to make people realize that by hurting trees, we were not only hurting ourselves, but flora as well. I wanted to raise awareness about breathing and the air around us, which doesn’t just entail a simple breath, but also the quality of air contained in that breath.
I had intended for this project to be a stop motion film following the breath of air described above through the world showcasing the interconnectedness of humans and plants. It was going to focus on how the human population has polluted the air and how much we rely on trees and plants to filter our air to make it breathable. The film was going to follow a breath of air through the lungs as described above, as well as through different sources of pollution. These were going to include, for example, a smoker, a car, or a factory. The breath of air accumulated the dirt and grime from these sources as it made its way through the world. Finally, it would come to a tree, which was to be the air’s “medicine”. The tree would clean the air as it passed through and the air would come out clean again, just in time to start the process over again.
Many of these ideas transferred to my final project. I was able to show that trees were necessary to help clean and filter the dirtied air. I included only two sources of pollution – a car and a factory. And I was also able to show that this polluted air affected human health. My final film focused more on the breath of air than the interconnectedness of humans and trees. I was also able to add another element that I had not expected – the ability of younger generations to change the future. We will be relying on this younger generation to clean up our mess if we don’t take any action now.
I am glad I was able to include this last message. It took me the whole year to find it, but in the last few weeks I finally realized what I wanted to portray. It was a message to all, including our children: air pollution is a serious problem affecting our population now. We need to keep the air around us in our thoughts with our every action. If we don’t take action now, the problem will only get worse and will eventually be more than we, or our Earth, can handle. It was also a call for people to think about the air we are breathing and how it affects the human body. I hope it made people think and ask questions.
Before this course, I hadn’t realized how much I personally cared about air and air quality. Now, it is never far from my thoughts. My original ideas were all fairly shallow and boring, and more importantly, purposeless. Finding stop motion allowed me to broaden my thoughts about what I was creating. I was constantly asking why. Why am I following a breath of air? Why am I using stop motion and not doing straight photography? What am I trying to say with this piece? This last question was the hardest. I went into it without a clear message. But working through the obstacles forced me to consider this over and over again. Each time, my answer was different. But each time, I realized there were certain themes that were always present. I wanted to raise awareness about air. I wanted people to think. And what was the best way to do that? The best way was to showcase the negative aspects – pollution.
These questions are not just applicable to this one project. They are questions that should be asked every day. Ask yourself, “Why am I doing this work? What do I want to get out of it? Is there a greater purpose I want to accomplish and am I working towards that?” I am glad I was able to take this journey. It allowed me a safe space to think and explore my mind. It allowed me to ask questions and take risks. Most of all, it showed me that it is ok to ask for help. Communication is key and there is no such thing as too much communication. You have to be honest about where you are at and what help you might need. You are allowed to struggle. The struggle turns out to be a great learning experience. I have always been one to play the fake-it-til-you-make-it game, but that is not the best way to be the best I can be. Honesty and communication will get you further.
The Future
This summer, I am fortunate enough to be traveling through Europe. I hope to practice my photography and meet some awesome new people. Then next year, I will be back at Stanford for the coterm program in Biology. I hope to find some work to do while taking classes but for now, I am enjoying the ride.