Internal.gif

Artist Statement
This piece titled Internal.gif is a motion piece that touches on Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development. In this self portrait my face breaks apart and opens up to reveal each of the stages that Erikson developed. I created this gif because I became interested in the stages of development when i read them for class. I enjoy creating motion pieces so a gif was the first thing that came to mind. I have always wanted to create gifs so i felt that this  was the perfect opportunity. I have always been fascinated with psychology and the development of the mind throughout different stages in life. It is interesting how different stages in your life can affect how you develop and how it shapes the person that you are.
Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development stages is a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory that identifies a series of eight stages that a healthy developing individual should pass through from infancy to late adulthood. Erikson's stage theory characterizes an individual advancing through the eight life stages as a function of negotiating his or her biological and sociocultural forces. Each stage is characterized by a psychosocial crisis of these two conflicting forces. If an individual does indeed successfully reconcile these forces (favoring the first mentioned attribute in the crisis), he or she emerges from the stage with the corresponding virtue. For example, if an infant enters into the toddler stage (autonomy vs. shame and doubt) with more trust than mistrust, he or she carries the virtue of hope into the remaining life stages.(Cain)
I first took a photograph of myself and brought it into photoshop then bitmapped it. Once that was done I cut out my head and created a grid for my face to cut out the different sections. I then separated the sections of my portrait  into layers and imported it into after effects. Once in after effects added the motion and set the timing of the initial video and rendered it through the media encoder. The next step was making the gif so I imported the mp4 into photoshop and saved for web. Finally The gif is uploaded and ready for use.
I believe that my self portrait is a great way to reveal the different stages of development because the gif loops and hides the stages and reveals them over and over again. I feel like revealing certain personal things is hard for me to do, but like everyone there is still a feeling of wanting people to know, i feel like this gif reflects that perfectly.
Works Cited
Crain, William C. Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.