DAY IN, DAY OUT

Sumikko Gurashi

Day In, Day Out is a reflection on how things tend to get weird and weirder, no matter how much we stay “normal”. The animation is a piece done for the Design Decameron exhibition organised by the Cercle Cité in Luxembourg. The exhibition was an online exhibition that took place in 2020, during the Covid-19 confinement period in Luxembourg. Ten artists were asked to create an original art piece relating their view on the (then) current situation. As I was the last artist to be shown, a lot had already happened out in the world that put everything in perspective. Lockdown had already happened and ended in several places, riots and protests were happening globally, murder hornets were a thing for a brief while. All in all, it seemed like the world had completely gone to shit, and being a pessimist by nature, I kind of felt like this would be what I wanted to show. That no matter how hard we try to stay positive and develop healthy patterns as individuals, everything else still tends to plunge into madness and we never know what’ll come next.

It’s a bit of a heavy theme, so I wanted to keep it light visually, and instead of showing real life scenarios, depict scenes that are absurd and surrealistic. The piece is a 1-minute animation showing what starts off as a normal room, going through a day night cycle. The first few days start off normal enough, but slowly, odd occurances start to happen and the television starts to become vaguely menacing.

The animation was done in After Effects, while the scenes were prepared using Illustrator. It was definitely a fun project to work on, especially since I don’t get to do motion design pieces all too often these days. (Which is a shame, really…)

The 10 projects can still be seen on the Cercle Cité website. Click here to access the archive, there’s some good projects in there.