this is my idea of swirling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhheiPTdZCw

I used some pictures from a smoke video and, in gimp, made it transparent and put some marbling behind it. This might be good for getting an idea of the look of the final project. Oh yea, and it's all black and white.

I think this mesh looking grid is made of balsa wood, but I could use the same idea to connect rubber in a more "swirling" pattern. (and obviously not rectangular). it would be flexible and be semi reminiscent of smoke

Ok guys throughout the day I think we came up with a really cool idea between all of us.

We can combine the 3 ideas that we had started out with. Here would be our process.

1) We would do some marbling - http://marbleart.us/
2) We record smoke telling a story - http://sensitivelight.com/smoke2/
3) We mask the smoke on top of the marbled background, as in the animation would be the movement of the smoke, but the shading would be the marbling. Heres an example of animating the mask while the background is different- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GgJ8w3TvY4

So for the animatic. The 3 of us will make 3 different animatics trying to communicate something with abstract smoke-like shapes.

Denise- Does that kindof make sense? Let us know if you like the idea and if you got any concerns about anything. The only thing is that it's not going to be straight swirly like you were saying. It'll be smokey and stuff :) But if we go with this then that means you have a starting point

http://www.101prints.com/tutorials/abstract-smoke-art-tutorial/

inspiration

These are the reference images I found on the web for our first meeting.

Here are some marbling that gave me a few ideas.
What if we have a background marble with traditional animation on top. that way the traditional animation whouldn't have to be intricate because theres already something goin on in the background.
or
have several marbling papers and mask them with shapes in after effects or flash. Then we could animate those masks. Like this but more abstract :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlItj3nlkqo

Here are marblings with masking and paintings on top
http://marbleart.us/Kiwi.jpg
http://marbleart.us/Jeff.jpg

Found this for the smoke concept

http://vimeo.com/4281374