Comments If you have any comments or wish to contact me click the link above. There are also comment links after each entry in the blog. I will add selected comments to the blog. Links: StopMotionAnimation.com StopMoShorts Stop Motion Works Trikfx Stopmotion- studios and independents: Nick Hilligoss Mind Over Pixels Animateclay.com Zombie Pirates Angry Puppet films Juergen Kling Tatu Pohjavirta Kuvastin (Reflector) Carrot Kid Ron Dexter Screen Novelties Tennessee Reid Norton Private Dick plog Notes from the Box- Misha Klein Downtime films- Tom Gibbons Webfilm sites: Atomfilms IFILM Slamdance Anarchy Archive.org Undergroundfilm.org ZeD-Stopmotion The New Venue Suppliers- lighting/grip: Setshop Stage Lighting Store Theaterfx-Par Cans Star light and magic Musician's Friend-stage lights Suppliers-tools/materials: McMaster-Carr Smallparts Harbor Freight Northern Tool National Balsa Mister Art Tutorials/resources: Kathi Zung-foam latex 101 video/DVD Atmosphere in stopmotion Animated cartoon factory Quicktiming.org Flicktips

Old News and Updates: or ...Welcome to my Blog archive April 29, 2005 Let the sketches begin! Sketch 6 click here for a larger version Here's sketch #6... the first one even halfway worth posting. Not something I'm real proud of, but I'm showing my work warts and all in here, and hopefully there will be some progression and growth. This one is just a rough; I intend to do a more refined version... correct some of the mistakes and expand on the ideas this one sparks. To watch it again, click on the image to select it and then hit your space bar. You can hit the space bar again to pause, and then watch frame by frame using your left and right arrow buttons. I had a fit with that rope... especially because I failed to plan right. next time I coil it so it unwinds from the top! After wrestling with the rope I decided to try to feed some wire into a section of it. After 45 minutes and a few rope burns, I had inchwormed the nylon core out of a 3 foot section of clothesline and was able to feed some thin aluminum wire through the hollow rope and hotglue the ends shut. Now I'm ready... tommorrow night I put it to work. also, I've decided to hold off on finishing the Klingature for another day or two because i found some cool foam tubing and surgical latex tubing at McMaster Carr that I hope I can use for the neck and wrists. I made the hand armatures and hotglued them into the ends of the arm tubes the other day, and fitted the head on. I'm using hotglue for these, in hopes that when a wire breaks, I can pull things apart fairly easily. I know heat will damage the resin head, but I've heard that rubbing alcohol softens hotglue.... definitely worth testing! Here's the finished armature: Here's a great article on Aint it Cool News about a behind-the-scenes visit to the Corpse Bride studio in England. This is really starting to sound great! I'm more excited about it now than from the trailer. Comments Hooray!! Mike, this is so exciting. The sketch is great. It gives me chills to see that you actually animated! Well done. The best thing of all is that you are doing it!! Bravo!! Shelley Noble Heh, yeah, I'm pretty excited about it too. It's amazing how hard it can be to get it done... so many obstacles (mostly mental). I had all the excuses ringing in my head; "The puppet isn't done- he doesn't even have hands... I'm just not ready yet... there are so many other things I should be doing..." Just setting up before I could animate took almost 2 hours, and then to maintain the intense concentration for the entire shot (took me a few hours, that's with breaks). My biggest problem with these is the same as with pencil sketching... when you sit down to work, you need to have a plan before you start, or you're just clashing your gears. I tend to start with only vague notions. I need to clearly envision the action, and act it out a few times. Next time... next time.... Mike April 28, 2005 Kent Williams site update coming soon! When I began this blog, I wasn't expecting this, but it's become to some extent self-sustaining. I really appreciate all the great links you people are sending me, you're making this easy! And now, when I thought I was going to have to sit here and work up each entry myself, instead I find these great, thought-provoking articles and websites waiting in my email. Ya gotta love the internet! Here's what I found yesterday... sent by Tom Muller, who I assume is Kent Williams' webmaster: Kent sent me the link to this page. His site is currently (well, the project has been going for a while now) being redesigned/rebuilt from the ground up. The new site will be a massive improvement giving Kent the tools to update his site on the fly (we're building a pretty big admin system), and the site will contain several (constantly updateable) galleries, news feeds, diaries, built in store, etc,... . Its a pretty big project that unfortunately has taken more time than planned but the site will launch very soon - to be the only online destination for Kent Williams fans. Now this is exciting! You heard it first here folks... a Darkstrider exclusive (well.. unless you heard it somewhere else). The part that I think grabs me the most... diaries! Kent is always exploring and testing out new ideas... often I think he uses some of the comics and GNs as almost sketchbooks to try things out, and I love seeing it happen. It would be so cool to get a(nother) glimpse inside his head, to see the gears turning as it were. Oh, and continually updated galleries and a store aint bad either! Here's the site: KentWilliams.com; bookmark and keep checking. I'll let you all know when the new site arrives. (Um... and if I'm not paying attention and someone discovers it before me... I'd really appreciate a heads up!) *** I just clicked that link to check it, and there's a brand spankin' new painting front and center on the main page! This is different from anything I've seen before by Williams... he's playing with scale... it's a sort of Gulliver concept. Very intriguing. Who else liked to mess with scale, and in fact did a Gulliver.... oh yeah, that would be Harryhausen. ; ) See, I'm telling you guys... there's something inherently similar in these apparently different fascinations of painting and animation. Now this is really hardline... Also in my email was this incredible link from Kelly Mazurowski: Notes from the Underground Heh... I thought I was a tough critic! Jean Detheux has been a painter for 40 years, and had to give it up because he developed severe allergies to the materials. So now he works with a computer and creates abstract animation. He's extremely critical of mainstream American animation, which he notes is throttling the life and the creativity out of the indies, who more and more tend to imitate the giants. He has a lot to say ranging all across the spectrum of creative thought and expression, concentrating largely on seeing and the way the act of seeing is conditioned not only in art schools, but in society itself. This is powerful, heady stuff, and should be required reading for any animator... make that any artist. But be warned... he apparently doesn't believe in the human figure, or any figures at all, and instead eschews complete abstraction, or very nearly complete. Still, though it applies more to 2D and computer generated animation, it stimulates thinking even for us stopmotionists... especially his thoughts on narrative storytelling and how it obscures the real magic of animation. He never mentions the Quays, but I suspect he would approve. Here's a little excerpt to whet the appetite: "Trying to summarize what these articles were/are about, I come up with the following incomplete ideas: while being a fabulous medium, loaded with potential, animation, for the most part, leaves me totally unmoved, and hungry for more, for something "other." It is as if artists, whether they be animators or not, have distanced themselves from their own experience and entered a realm where everything is fabricated, forced, puffed up. So much work done today boils down to technical "tricks," or technological prowess. So few of the works we see in animation today stem from one's inner core, and seldom find/manifest (as in "make visible") one's 'little music'." He also says "trust your inner darkness", meaning let mystery and ambiguity exist in the work as they do in life... and isn't mystery always associated with the most transcendent moments? This is a series of 6 articles he wrote for AWN magazine, and it takes some time to read it all. You might want to bookmark it or just print it for later perusal. It's definitely a keeper! Comments I just re-read what I wrote and the site is not gonna have a diary section, its going to have a newsfeed though... (was a bit optimistic!) Tom Muller Ooops! Oh well, thanks for clearing that up. I know Kent isn't exactly considered a motormouth, so it did seem a bit strange for him to be posting a diary online. would have been cool, but then his sketches basically are a diary. Mike Just reading your blog about Kent Williams site(great news) and thought you might like Marshall Arisman's work(that is if you don't already knwo about it). Here's his site: www.marshallarisman.com Yeah, I've seen Arisman... great, sort of scary/icky stuff... like a modern Francis Bacon. Thanks. Mike April 27, 2005 Tying it all together I got two comments today that are so cool, they're going to form the basis of today's blog. The first, from Kathi Zung: It's funny, I got an email from K.Williams, who is actually a friend of mine, telling me that we both had links on this one website, which is a first. And imagine my surprise when it turned out to be yours!!! : ) And the second from Shelley: Holy Smokes!! What a find!! How wild it must have been to see another animator speak about all the varied, disparate interests you hold as well?! Well, maybe that's it, maybe these concepts aren't so disparate after all. Ok, first.... struggling very hard here to control my giddiness. KENT WILLIAMS has seen my site! Alright.. I'm better now. I want to address these comments together because to me, the ideas are interrelated. Well, not the idea that Williams was here, but of his artistry and the inspiration he provides for me (and so many others). I feel a long ramble coming on... I'll do my best to keep this succinct. Animation, like any art form, is many things to many people. To someone like me, it means a serious exploration of form and movement and ideas. The same has been true for other animators... Svankmajer, the Quays, Yuri Norstein, Paul Fierlinger, and too many more to list. And serious artists tend to seek the forefront of contemporary science and literature. The story of modern art is a succession of small dedicated groups who were inspired by Freud, Einstein, Kafka and the like. There's just a certain kind of mind that's drawn to that stuff, and expresses itself through art. Going back to classical times, alchemy and philosophy were pre-scientific attempts to understand and control the underpinnings of nature and matter and the human mind. Same idea, different century. Thanks to the overbloated, decadent nature of mass media today, serious exploration is squeezed into the margins in favor of the hip, cynical self-referential nastiness that forms the basis of all the 'reality' shows, and has infected all major entertainment starting as far back as David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. I swear, the moment Johnny Carson gave up his scepter to Dave, it ushered in the ugly nasty media world we have today. Don't get me wrong, I love SNL (the classic early seasons mostly), but as a certain lone wolf stopmo icon is so fond of saying, it's a shame when one approach takes over and leaves no room for the rest. Well, he would have thrown in a few references to "studio suits"... but you get the point. We still live in the aftermath of the mighty wake cut by Frank Frazetta and Harryhausen, who made fantasy bigger than life and twice as tasty. They showed us how it could be done... how it should be done. They were artists of unparallelled power and vision, and each utterly transformed the media he worked in, spawning countless imitators and creating a new fantasy-oriented media. But unfortunately there aren't enough artists of anywhere near their caliber to fill that media with content, and the job went to their imitators and followers. And thanks to the 'cheaper faster' mentality of mass media, most of what followed was pretty embarassing and cheapened the genre. Now that kind of lusty full-blown fantasy seems ridiculous, and we've shifted to a cold cynicism.... from Geddy Lee to Kurt Cobein. In this kind of milieu the easiest thing is to mock and ridicule rather than try to say anything serious or meaningful. Williams is one of a handful of serious artists working in this hostile environment and honestly carrying the torch. I see his little group.... consisting of artists like Jon Muth, George Pratt, Dave McKean and the likes, as contemporary equivalents of the Expressionists. In art school I was fascinated with the idea of tracing the 'line' of art history, trying to understand its development and figure out where it was heading. Well, what I learned was disturbing. With the onset of post-modernism, apparently the 'art line' disintegrated. Figure painting is supposedly dead, and now what constitutes Art is some pretty bizarre stuff, that often doesn't involve any training or skill. But I noticed that there was a sort of hidden undercurrent through art history.... each generation would stand everything on its ear by rejecting the hidebound traditions of its predecessors. Each new group... be they impressionists, post-impressionists, abstract expressionists, or what have you, always began amid a storm of controversy and ridicule. The staid traditional "Art World" always rejected them until they were well established. This tells me that artists are ahead of the "Art World". In fact, it looks to me like the most exciting art these days is being done completely outside that envioronment (except insofar as it embraces people like Williams and other figurative artists). Art happens where people make it happen through sheer will and desire... sometimes in surprizing places (like "comic books"... or "cartoons"). It seems to me that art... at least the art I like the most... the powerful figurative stuff- has moved outside the confines of the galleries (occasionally popping in there) and into popular culture. The comic book has grown up into the graphic novel, and yesterday's B movie is today's multi million dollar blockbuster. The line in fantasy painting has passed from Frazetta through Jeffrey Jones (his most talented follower and contemporary as far as I'm concerned) to Williams. On my Gallery page I posted two of my Frazetta emulations, which represent my attempt to capture my own 'classicism'. Frazetta is our Michelangelo, and the fantasy boom of the sixties and seventies was our Renaissance. I figure, beginning with Frazetta, I could then move on toward the more expressionistic techniques. All the great expressionists and surrealists began as highly skilled traditionally trained figurative artists. But I hope to do something similar in stopmotion. I'm hoping all this diverse inspiration will help pull me away from the powerful trap that is the Quaystyle (how many amateur animators have fallen in there?) Comments Bravo. You speak so well on these subjects. I love the idea of your animations being expressionistic riffs on your figurative inspiration. I might have a wholly different renaissance point in my art thread analysis myself, but I really like how you looked at it like that and then found your place in the thread. I'm fond of thinking that people do what they want and then find or make up philosophies that support them. Even if that cart is in front of that horse having a mental clarity and sense of purpose is so gratifying, thrilling and guarantees a great life. I say we all should do what we truly want*, or even must do, regardless. *keeping in mind to never hurt anybody else. Shelley Noble April 26, 2005 Sorry... no philosophical dissertations tonight. Just a quick message to say I've added a Guest Book on the index page. I'd love to hear from all my visitors... please take a moment and carve your initials into the rail. Oh, and while I'm at it, here's a pic of one of my Klingatures under construction: Hold the Presses!!! Just when I said no philosophical dissertations, I checked my email and found this incredible link, sent to me by Larry Dehaan: Piotr Dumala's Philosophical Stone; an article posted on the AWN site that closely echoes pretty much all the points I've been pondering concerning stop motion and alchemy. How deeply vindicatring it is to see my own thoughts, carried even farther, and stated so beautifully by an accomplished animator. Here's an excerpt: "Animation is alchemy. For if we admit that the world is revealed to us through motion and change (even Buddhist texts say that change is the essence of existence, that nothing is permanent), it is the animator who finds his way to the mysterious machinery from which all motion results; it is the animator who employs that machinery to his own ends (...). The real world enters the realm of change and is transformed therein. Using motionless pictures in lieu of elementary particles the animator builds the kind of motion that has never happened in reality but is now revealed to us on the screen due to a visual illusion. In a live-action movie the camera registers real motion, 'fishing out' of its continuous flow the necessary number of phases. In an animated film it is the other way round: the author builds motion from individual, motionless images and it is only the viewer who provides the impression of continuity. The emotions and feelings present in such an animated picture, as well as the extreme condensation of time that occurs, make it very intense; although the viewer may find that intensity exhausting, it helps the author put a lot of substance into a surprisingly short projection. Of course, I am only concerned with films in which the author takes himself, his subject and the viewer very seriously. Commercials or movies of little artistic value, made as an entertainment for children or adults, can be likened to stands in a market where charlatans traffic in their cheap wares." Not only does Dumala relate animation to alchemy, he also works in subatomic particles AND silent movies! Just about everything I wrote about on the first page of this blog. Sheesh.... Comments Mike, You may be the first philosopher/animator. I appreciate you distilling these concepts here so I wouldn't miss them. The Ahab coat is fantastic. Have you seen Noel and Pat Thomas' miniature works? They are without peer in terms of ability to re-create age and actual reality in scale. I have articles on their Pipin Hill toy shop that is my absolute standard for mind blowing detail and realism of age. WARNING: Their web site DOES NOT indicate their pure genius, horrible photos that reduce their works to common rubbish, when they are in reality the most rarified handi-work I've seen. Here's an interesting link of their how-to tips that is filled with great advice for all manner of fabrication: http://www.thomasopenhouse.com/tips_howto.html They also sell a special solution that they developed and use to age their buildings and props. I believe it to be more than just the metal patina chems sold on Canal street in the metal shop for $5/bottle. Famous Thomas Bug Juice, an 8 oz. bottle of our versatile weathering formula which grays unpainted woods, and rusts tin. Directions included. $22.50 ppd, 2 for $41.00 Shelley Noble Hey Strider, Just stopping in to say hello. good stuff everywhere. How's Capt. Ahab doing? K Zung Wow, how cool is this... 2 of my favorite people on the same day! Kathi, great to hear from you, the Puppet Mistress of Celebrity Deathmatch. Ahab is fine, and sends his best to you and your "little puppet"! And Shelley, my #1 fan (sounds weird saying that, cause I'm also your biggest fan... well possibly aside from your husband Paul)... I'll check that link out. Hey, a liquid that actually turns unprotected wood grey and rusts tin... is it called water? ; ) April 24, 2005 Alchemy cont. Back on the first page I did a bit about alchemy, tying it into stopmotion. My thinking has deepend on the subject, and I'm here to share.... Svankmajer is undoubtedly the Grand Wizard of alchemy in stopmotion. By using real objects and materials with powerful texture or form, he is able to evoke sensations that he just couldn't get using all plasticene or foam latex. He does sometimes use plasticene, but always with the intention of evoking it's full presence... the strong smell and the oily feel, as well as the heavy body of it and its dense solidity. That's the kind of thing Svankmajer does so well.... evoke other senses besides just sight and hearing. He believes that objects become the repositories of feelings or emotions... and that they have a sort of "secret life". His films tap into associations with the power of various materials or objects... the smooth rounded coolness of river stones or the warm comfort of an ancient wooden desktop marred with scratches and dings. If you check his website he's got some text pieces and poems that show the same affinity for evoking textures and sensations.... the stuff that dreams and childhood experience are made of. People often think of movies, and of dreams, as being a combination of sight and sound... but in reality it's a much more subtle and complex mix than that. A movie can never be what a dream is... dreams contain thoughts and memories and ideas, which are things that can't be conveyed on screen (well, yet anyway... give it a few more years and let's see what kind of virtual reality stuff is coming out). Movies are able to evoke some small portion of the spectrum of experience, through association. By showing a pleasant sun-dappled plazza with smooth cobblestones for instance, you can make people think of what it would feel like to be there. Well, Svankmajer goes a bit farther. Rather than using those subliminal sensory cues simply as support in a linear narrative, he puts them front and center, gives them complete authority. As in dreams, it's the fleeting impressions and sensations that are important, mixed with fragmentary, half realized ideas that drive what plot there is. A lot of people dislike Svankmajer's films... and in my experience they tend to be the kind of people who don't like to let go... who want to be in control of things. The people who love his work tend to be the ones more open to the world of inner experience... of dreams and fantasies.... the ones who are still close to childhood experience at whatever age. Even sound is used for its evocative power in his films. You could close your eyes and just listen to a Svankmajer sound track and it would be nearly as compelling an experience as seeing the film. Sounds are so powerful they almost take on the dense reality of objects. We had a discussion on the SMA message board a while back about sound design in animation that touched on something called Musique Concrete, or the manipulation of "real world" sounds by actually cutting and splicing tape together in various ways. This is the way some film sound tracks were done, including Forbidden Planet. There's just something very powerful about sound like that... something that computers for all their power and abilities can't duplicate. Now don't misunderstand... I'm not talking about sampling... I mean electronic sound, produced entirely by a computer or electronic device. Computers are great tools for manipulating sounds and images that were created in the real world, and when used the right way, CGI can be breathtaking and perfectly appropriate, but you just can't create something entirely on a computer that will actually evoke the real sensations... like the smell of fresh cut grass and damp soil or the texture of heavily scaled rusting steel. Nor can sculpted plastic or clay props do this, though simply because they are real objects, they carry more "reality" than a computer generated image. By using actual objects a filmmaker can evoke some of the power these things carry. I'm trying to tap into some of this power (and to hopefully avoid the powerful black hole that is Svankie's inimitable style, which sucks in the unwary) by using real objects and materials whenever possible in my films. So far all the clothes I've made have been fashioned from gloves. Ahab's jacket is the most telling piece... since it's actually made from an old pair of well-worn leather work gloves and had a really great texture to begin with, it has a "lived-in" sense that I couldn't get by using fresh cloth. I'm also using real ropes and cord, as well as real wood where possible (I had to sculpt and mold barrels, and some other props). I have a piece of burlap that will serve as a folded up fishing net... even though the scale is wrong, and people will immediately see it's burlap... that's not a problem. Those controlling types (who don't tend to like dreams, by the way, which makes me suspicious of them right off the bat) will say "Well, it doesn't look 'authentic'...." I say it's far more authentic to let it look like burlap than to make it resemble scale fishing net. I'm making no effort to hide the fact that the puppets are exactly that... puppets, made of metal and plastic and wood and whatever else I could scrounge up for the purpose. There's a similar power in non-animated puppets.. marionettes and hand puppets, especially ones made in the traditional way with wood and paper mache or other "real" materials. Here's a shot from one of last night's little stopmo sketches that captures a sense of the alchemy I'm talking about: *** The armatures I ordered from Animate Clay came in today! Really nice workmanship... great job Jurgen! I'm calling them Klingatures in honor of their creator. And as I had hoped, it looks like I'll be able to use some lead wire, which has less memory than aluminum, so less 'spring-back'. Pics coming shortly. *** I added an old test clip called Busted to the on the table page, way down near the bottom. It's the only one that doesn't feature Ahab... it'll be easy to spot. Aside from being the darkest clip on the page, it features one of my early attempts at making an armature... this one from sculpey and wood, with some nice rusty screws in it. Here's a direct link. Comments Hello Mike, My name is Larry DeHaan, originally from Waukegan Il. now living in San Diego CA. I discovered the Darkstrider website about 8 months ago, while searching for surrealist related films, and some how came upon your site. I now refer to it at least once a week. I was thinking, you must be too busy with your work, to have much time to respond to everyone's emails. As, I said I am interested in surrealism; also I'm a big fan of the German silent 'expressionist' films of the 1920's. After viewing your generous video clips, something was awakened in me that brought back all those childhood memories of Harryhausen films and those of Trnka and Starowicz, though I never connected those films with the directors names. Needless to say watching your clips I became hooked on Stop motion animation. The very first DVD I bought was the collected shorts of The Brothers Quay. I was also aware of Svankmajer through his association with surrealism. I have looked at your work (clips), and hope it makes it to DVD one day soon. It's very impressive work indeed! Thanks to you, I have discovered a whole new world of stop motion animation. I bought the Kawamoto dvd from Japan, fortunately it is region free. I don't have an all region PAL to NTSC player yet!!. I also bought the 4 Vols. Of Masters of Russian Animation. But it is the clips of Barta, Klimt, Zeman, and others that are so inspiring. I am not an animator myself (I wouldn't know where to begin) So I guess I can't offer you any valuable technical support, but do keep up all your work. Thanks for getting me on my way to collecting to what seems to be fantastic world of stop motion animation. Yours truly, Larry DeHaan Wow... thanks Larry, for one of the best emails I've recieved through this site! You've really made my month. I'm sorry if I inflicted the collecting bug on you... it can get addicting and expensive, but what a rewarding world it can open up. Oh, and you said you wouldn't know where to begin to become an animator.... it's at StopMotionAnimation.com. (just kidding, I know it was just a rhetorical statement ;) ). Thank you so much for the comments on my work... it really means a lot to hear it. Mike April 22, 2005 Ahab film V2.0 I like to do things the way I created this site... start by just slapping something down- a rough concept in its raw form, and then gradually refine it and let it begin to find its true form. An important part of the process is to take some time away, work on something else, and let the ideas stew under low heat on the back burner. Then when you get back to check them later, you'll often find they've mutated into something better. That's exactly what's happened with my ideas for this film... though I don't have everything worked out yet. As this blog progresses I'll reveal bits and pieces of the concept (but I'll save the really good stuff for the final release). Everything I've done toward this film in the past was just beta testing... I got my first experience at making setpieces, props and puppets a while back and did some animation tests with it all, but since then the concept has undergone radical changes... in fact it's grown into what I feel is a very strong film (assuming I can make the movie I see in my head). Back then, it was mostly about ideas, and I wasn't sure how to get them across... the animation I pictured was kind of crappy and amateurish... what I felt like I was capable of at the time. I just saw it as a short festival film with a sort of twist ending... almost like a punch line. But over the last few months I've drained several ball point pens scribblin up new outline drafts and pages full of notes, and the idea has developed into something much stronger. I've also come up with a few strong visual ideas that will lend themselves well to stopmotion. This is a new casting of my carpenter's head. You've seen pics of the original... it was pocked with some really ugly holes so I made up a new one and smoothed it out with a few coats of gesso. I've never painted over gesso before, and I was amazed at how well the paint reacted on it compared to painting directly onto resin. Hey... somebody should let the secret out... this stuff is a great painting ground! Anyway, it's not much but it's a start. More to come. *** Here are some really cool sites where people are also laboring away on stopmotion epics. These all look fantastic. Mosambi Pictures is the digital domain of Anna Gawrilow. She's in Germany and attended Bauhaus University Weimar, where she made WO BIST DU? (Who are you?) in 2004. It's a fun, twisted little flick featuring some charmingly stylized puppets made in the european cloth doll style. Very nice. She has another film, PUBERT & DENISE on her site as well, which has a strong Nightmare Before Christmas influence if you ask me. But what's really cool is, she's currently working on The Music of Erich Zann, my favorite Lovecraft tale. Van Sowerwine has a beautiful trailer up for a film called Clara. Many thanks to Shelley Noble for cluing me in on this one. It's from Australia, and looks absolutely awesome. And, scavenged from the last Weekend Edition update at StopMotionWorks.com, comes the haunting work of Rachel Johnson- The Toll Collector. Again, do I detect the influence of Tim Burton's design from Nightmare, at least in the long legs of the main character? *** I got the Kent Williams book yesterday, and let me tell ya, it's impressive. Selections from his sketchbooks, and I recognize alternate versions of a lot of familiar paintings and illos. I'm utterly amazed at the way he carves form out with those crisp lines. I noticed the book was published by KentWilliams.com through the company I bought it from... Cafepress.com. Intrigued by this, I checked out the Cafepress site. It's one of those websites I've heard of before where you upload your clip art and have them print it on coffee mugs or cheap t-shirts, and they'll let you sell it through their site. I always thought of these sites as cheap-o lame-o, and they certainly are for the most part, but I wasn't aware they printed up books. I actually got goosebumps thinking about it... it means anyone can have books printed up... if you're a budding artist, writer, poet, or just love crossword puzzles or something, here's a perfect outlet. Unlike a "real" book publisher, they print them up on a per-order basis (I think... haven't read through everything yet). What you do is prepare your artwork or manuscript as a PDF file- they even have a link to a freebie online site that you can use as an alternative to Photoshop- and then send it to them and specify the format and size of the book you want. Then you offer it for sale through your website, and anyone else's who will help you out, with a link to Cafepress. When someone orders a copy, they'll print it up, bind it, and ship it off. It's not coffee table quality, but perfect for something like a sketchbook or comic book or anything short of a major treatise on the migratory habits of warbling bananna-beak chimney wrens. This is just another sign of the changing times we live in... if you're 'jacked in' to the wonderful world wide web, and if you know where to look, you can get around the restrictions of the old-world system, where a writer needs a publisher and an artist needs an agent and a filmmaker needs a studio. Of course, your product won't get the worldwide distribution of a hollywood blockbuster or a Random House bestseller, but depending on how well you've managed to get your name out there (and how good your reputation is) you'll be able to reach your small target audience. Comments Comments Next page Ψ