Old News and Updates: or ...Welcome to my Blog archive Aug 24 2006 No, I'm not really dead... Wow, it's been a looong time! Hopefully most of my readers have managed to find my new Darkmatters blog by now, either through my sig over at SMA or through the links posted on some of my friends' blogs. I sincerely apologize for leaving this page unattended all this time with no word.... something happened all of a sudden and I found myself utterly unable to connect to my site through my FTP. It happened right after I posted that last entry.... way back in May! I still really don't understand what the problem is, something to do with firewalls or security breaches or something... it's all greek to me. I've been going back and forth with the service department of my webhost, and haven't been able to sort it out yet, but I did download a new FTP software that's able to somehow circumvent the problem, so here I am. Meanwhile, I decided since I couldn't get through here anymore, it was time to go over to Blogspot and create a real blog, with self-posting comments and everything! It's been sweet.... no longer do I have to go through my email manually and paste in each comment with the appropriate code around it! But I do miss this old blog. I like the wider format... I can fit more text and larger pictures here than on the new blog, and somehow this one just looks better. It feels more like home to me. But for now anyway, I'm going to stick with the new blog, and I'll be experimenting with trying to port it over here or something. Anyway, just wanted to pop in and report what's been going on! Um.... SOMEBODY has been on my case lately to get in here and clean up a little (cough*LIO*cough). Comments May 26 2006 Why I hate Jeffrey Roche This guy is really pissing me off!!! (And I mean that in the art school way, it's an admission of jealousy) Click for video clip ...You see, didn't I just say recently that I know there's a way to make stopmo films that's easier than what I'm doing and looks better? Well here it is! And this guy is a complete newbie... he's been into stopmo for a few months! Makes me want to just quit. He whipped this up yesterday because he "just wanted to animate something". Bastard. I'm stuck in realistic mode.... I labored so long and hard on Buster, and I tried to make him really cartoony looking... I thought he WAS.... but looking at him now compared to Nola, he's realistic with the proportions somewhat altered. That's all. The animation I've done with him isn't funny, it isn't all that entertaining. And it was a lot of damn hard work! ....And just wait till you see what I'm getting ready to tackle next! Silicone research I've been looking into ways to make the bodies for the Radke puppets, and I've settled on silicone. Hey, if it's good enough for Corpse Bride..... There are a lot of great special effects silicones and products to alter them for making prosthetics and puppet skins, but it's a bewildering maze trying to figure it all out. There are weird lapses of key information on all the websites... you almost have to be involved in special effects to get an "in". But I did some mind-numbing research (and my secret weapon was Toxic Papa Ralph Cordero at the Scululptor's Forum, who has forgotten more about silicones than most people will ever know) and what I'm leaning toward now is Dragonskin with Dick Smith's Theatrical Deadener added, which reduces the viscosity to a soft gel. This stuff was designed to impart a realistic (there's that word agian!) fleshlike consistency to silicone... in fact it's used for medical prosthetics as well as makeup effects. The way it works is kind of like silly-cone boobs.... you make a skin of slightly softened rubber and inside that you fill with super-softened stuff. It creates a skin that moves like real flesh, it doesn't wrinkle too much the way foam latex tends to do. And Dragon Skin is a lot easier to work with than foam latex, no precise measuring and scientific foaming schedules... you just eyeball it and measure out equal amounts. I won't bore you with technical details... if anyone is interested I've detailed most of my research on this thread. Grant Cross Gallery Here's my latest discovery, which I stumbled across in my silicone research quest, believe it or not! Grant Stockton Cross is a California artist who draws and paints these crazy little things he calles Hobnobs. He's got loads of 'em, and they're AWESOME!! Very much in the same vein as Scott Radke. Man, would I love to have this guy do some concept art and then turn it into animation! Comments May 19 2006 Ready to get started (making puppet heads) I'm not sure what to do with Buster at this point. A few weeks ago I said I could have Race the Wind done by the end of the week, and obviously that didn't happen. As is so often the case I find myself torn, or rather feeling trapped between various alternatives. There are 2 ways I could approach finishing the film.... I could make the movie that I was planning to submit to StopMoShorts, with the goofy trick ending, or I could make it longer, turn it into more of a complete film. This way however would require making more sets and possibly puppets, and I don't have any ideas for the screenplay. And then there are these Scott Radke heads sitting here staring at me, demanding that I devote my full attention to them. I don't want to tkae much longer to get started on that film. It feels like it would be a great relief to just put Buter aside and start fabbing up puppet bodies... but then what of all the work I did to create Buster and especially that running rig? It would be a shame not to make a film with it all. Ahhh, the pressure..... It's things like this that sometimes put me into stasis. I feel like whatever I do, I'm doing the wrong thing. But this stasis is getting old, and I'm tired of not accomplishing anything... I'm ready to get to work on something. So what I'll do is first post up a little mini-tut on my method for sculpting puppet heads, which is similar to the way I imagine Scott Radke made these little guys, though I believe he uses Creative Paperclay whereas I prefer a Supersculpy/Premo mix. This will be the first installment, after which I'll start showing my progress on making bodies for the Radke puppets. And if I decide what to do about Buster, I can always pause on the puppetmaking front and get back to Buster. Maybe by working on something else I can relieve the pressure that I've cooked up in my mind around this Buster project. It all starts with a simple loop of wire. This is aluminum armature wire, brand name Alamaloy. You want to make sure you use an actual armature wire sold in sculpture shops because it's annealed - a softening process that makes it flexible and supple. As any athlete or dancer can tell you, flexibility = strength... that which cannot bend breaks. Aluminum wire sold in hardware stores is brittle because it's subjected to an anodizing process to make it corrosion resistant. I start with a 3 foot long piece of wire, so when I bend it in half I end up with a foot and a half. This wire needs to be long enough to become the armature for the entire puppet after you're done sculpting the head. Here I've added another single strand of wire alonside the loop, resulting in three strands laid side by side. I like to have three strands for the neck, it's just my personal preference. It would probably be easier to use 4, so two go into the spine and 2 go into the arms, but I like 3 because it gives the right amount of strength to the neck. Actually, because Scott's heads are quite a bit bigger than I was expecting and because the creative paperclay is pretty heavy, I might regret only having 3 neck wires. In this pic I've begun to twist the end of the loop around to make a sort of knot that forms the basis of the core of the head. I try to twist it in such a way that the three wire strands are firmly interlocked together, so they form one solid unit which will then be locked in place when I put epoxy putty on it. Normally you don't want to touch your armature with pliers or anything that can nick the aluminum... any nick is a weak spot that will very quickly break under the stresses of animation. But this knot will be inside a ball of epoxy putty and doesn't have to bend, so it's ok to nick it up here. I use needlenose pliers to pull the knot tight and clamp it down until nothing will wiggle. Here I've put a ball of epoxy putty in place and I'm making score lines with the edge of an X-Acto knife so the polymer clay has something to grip onto. I've tried sculpting with polymer clay directly over a wire knot, but after a while the polymer clay seems to develop a sort of hollow space inside and the entire head starts to shift while you're sculpting... far from an ideal situation, in fact it's kind of like tryng to sculpt fine details in a moving car on a bumpy road. The epoxy putty core eliminates this problem. When the epoxy putty has hardened I knead up my polymer clay and rough out a basic head shape. I use Supersculpy blended in a pasta roller with Premo, which kills the translucency of the supersculpy and makes it opaque so you can see the surface details much better. It also firms up the clay a little, making it less "squishy" and you can mix your own custom colors. I wanted this guy to be a big bully, so I went for the sort of gorrilloid look. You can also see in this picture that I wound some thin wrapping wire around the wires to hold them together. This just keeps everything easier to handle, so it all acts like one wire rather than splaying apart and going in every direction. Another early shot, before adding ears or doing any detailing. At this stage I'm just looking at the basic head forms, paying attention to the shadows and trying to get interesting shapes from them. Added the eyes and some forehead wrinkles. Also started to block in the ears. I decided with this puppet I don't need to make eyeballs for him, because he's just a secondary character only onscreen for a few seconds and he has this really strong squint that hides the eyes anyway. I was planning to just paint black inside the eye slits. I always have trouble sculpting ears. I haven't yet made ears on puppets that I really like. It's hard to decide how much detail to include, or how realistic to make them. I like the way the shadows define the planes and forms of his face. He has that "mean but good-natured dumb brute" look that I wanted for him. A face-off with Buster to show how much bigger and more apelike this bully is. I never finished this puppet... I made all this progress many months ago and really screwed up when I tried to make his neck. Since then I re-wrote the Buster film so it doesn't include this character... in fact, as I tried to make it for Stopmoshorts, Buster was the only character in it. By posting this mini-tut I hope to jumpstart myself out of my current spate of inactivity and hopefully the next installment will be some progress on making a few Radke puppet bodies. Or maybe I'll post something about that running rig I keep meaning to describe. Comments Fantastic tutorial, Mike!! Such useful information and education. The sculpt is great! It really does look good-natured yet gruff. I hope you'll keep going with it, both for the tut and for the Buster film. Maybe these projects simply require more patience than we have? After all, in reality time doesn't exist, right? I hate to hear you be hard on yourself about the stasis. You know I know what you experience there! Let's both be kinder to ourselves and simply move one step ahead. Heck, you've already done that with this post! Well done. - Shelley Noble I'm not sure about finishing this puppet... I pretty much decided it's not possible to make necks as big as his would need to be using my current method... I'd have to cast one in latex or silicone or something... or maybe use the pantyhose method ala Shmiminashie. I did this as a "speed puppet"... trying to see how fast I could make it, and it was fun and a great experience. But the character has no reason to exist now... his place was taken by the wind... a much easier puppet to make! And about my little stasis outburst... it's actually a good sign. This is how I burst through it. I go into stasis and just eat pizzas and veg out for days or weeks (or months?) until suddenly I get mad at myself for it... that's what it takes to break free. Doesn't always work, but it's about the only thing that does. I think it's also something larger though... growing pains. I'm dissatisfied with the kind of movies I'm trying to make... I know there's something that's easier to do and looks better at the same time, and I know I'll find it. It's just gonna take some ugly episodes to get there. I understand completely. On all fronts. As usual you articulate difficult emotional concepts with a lilting lucidity. I hear you on it. I still want to see this character and the finished silent Buster movie tho. The bricks look so great. And the tumbling after the hat. Couldn't you do a set of 4 silent movie gag vignettes? Seperated by the iris closing and opening? Just the payoffs? With a thick piece of K&S tubing pipe over the wire for the brusier's neck? Not pushing, just a fan. - Shelley Noble Hmmm... vignettes separated by iris shots... now there's an idea..... hey man saw your recent post. put those heads in about and focus on what you were originally working on! don't let them distract you and don't think i am being impatient or anything like that. by the way the other head next to buster- kick ass. i LOVE his mouth! - Scott Radke Thanks Scott! I'm glad you look at my blog now and then, that's cool! And thanks for saying that to let the pressure off. To be completely honest though, I really do think working on a different project (like ours) will take the pressure off on the Buster thing. Sometimes that's what it takes. I'm thinking I might jump back and forth between the 2, make a few puppets, then shoot Buster some more or whatever. Trouble sculpting ears?!?! That Brute's ear looks fantastic! In fact the whole head sculpt is pretty amazing, I'd like to see him in motion too (he doesn't have to be perfect, have another speed-session, see how long it'll take you to do the body, then animate til his little neck snaps :) - Ubatuber That is a nice sculpt of the head. It has a great shape and volume. Thanks for the tip about mixing sculpey and premo too, I may have to try it sometime. -3DG Hey, thanks for taking the time to show us how you do it. That's great!! - Mahlon Bouldin Thanks for another great tutorial! I remember that posting in April with all the projects you planned for this year, and thought that was maybe too much. If you have a clear idea of the Radke puppet film, it would be great to see that go ahead - let the others go for now. If that needs to ferment a bit more, then Shelley's suggestion for the Buster film - just do the payoffs without too much tedous setting-up - sounds like a good idea. If it's borrowing from silent movie convention, then perhaps a lot of that setting up is already there in our memory. Whatever you decide to focus on, you've got my support! - Nick Hilligoss Wow everyone... I'm completely blown away by all these fantastic comments! What a great suprise to open my email and find them all waiting there. What a great bunch of friends... when a guy needs a little support you all come through with flying colors! May 07 2006 This one's for Shelley Well, and if anyone else gets anything out of it, then consider it a freebie! Shelley, you've been thinking about possible ways to suspend/support puppets on some kind of support rod system, and I've made some brief comments on your blog, but I think a picture is worth a few dozen words (or so) and I thought you'd get more out of this. You mentioned something like a dentist's drill arm. Here's my version, much smaller and lighter, and doesn't inspire terror the way a dental drill does. It's hard to see it in this tiny pic, but I have a right angle clamp from Lab Depot Inc on the rod, that my wire is clamped into. I have all the screws on the rig tightened pretty firmly, creating a good "friction fit" situation, meaning that it holds it's position but when I want to move something, like tilt the arm or swivel it, I can do so without having to loosen a screw, just grab it and push/pull it right where I want and it stays. The clamp is a thing of beauty too.... it can slide along and swivel around the horizontal rod and I can loosen a screw if I need to and feed through more wire or pull it up to lift Buster off the ground. I got a bunch of these right angle clamps and they're awesome! Using them in conjunction with the rest of my rigging setup I can create a complete overhead jungle gym system or just make movable arms like this. Comments Just noticed you added my blog to your link section. Thanks - I really appreciate that. - Grant's Animation Not a problem! When I run across a stopmo blog I don't have linked yet I add it to the list. Far from complete yet, but little by little it's getting there. I hope we get to see some new updates on your film soon. Soooo Kewl. Thank you so much Strider, The picture and explaination really do help. I had read your surface gauge tutorial but didn't think they would be hardy har har enough for my heavy 13-14 inchers. I will absolutely try these clamps now. Thank you again, - Shelley Noble You're probably right that the setup pictured isn't strong enough for your bigger puppets. Buster's a little shrimp, which makes him light and pretty easy to work with, but he doesn't stand up to close-ups as well as a larger puppet can. But using the same basic components, you can easily cobble together a big A-frame over your set, like a swingset. The drill rod comes in 6 foot lengths I believe, or possibly even longer? Not sure about that one. Then the puppet would hang under the right-angle clamp which can slide along the bar. I don't know what kind of cielings you have there in Halfland-land, but it would also be possible to set up something similar to my lighting system, using pipe clamps or whatever to set up some water pipes in a grid formation. Then you could hang arms under that to keep all the uprights out of your way. It's all about having a buttload of different kinds of clamps and bars/pipes/rods to make cool swingin' arms out of. But, if we're fortunate, you'll decide that tie-downs are the way to go. May 03 2006 Say hello to my little friend! I was just sitting here minding my own business and suddenly noticed this guy not 2 feet away! I think he's a Wolf spider... common house pests here in the midwest, completely innocuous. They're not poisonous, don't bite, and aren't aggresive at all - in fact they're pretty shy and retiring. But in the spring and the fall they make my basement studio their home, and from time to time I meet some of them (though usually not this large!). This guy looks to be about 3 1/2 to 4 inches across. I've seen them nearly twice as big before, but couldn't get them to sit for a portrait till now. It's always a shock to see one this big, even knowing they're "friendly" and actually help keep other household pests under control. This one was sitting on the return address label of the Camera Cagliostro enveolpe I got Elukka in the other day from Finland.... you can plainly get the sense of scale by the way he completely straddles the writing. It took me a while to work up the courage to fire up my camera and power up Framethief to take these beauty shots, and I figured he wasn't going to stick around, especially when I had to stand up to switch on my A/D converter, but sit still he did, and I took a few shots in poor lighting from three feet away. Then I decided you don't get an opportunity like this every day, so I got up again and turned on one of my Par lights to spotlight him, and crept closer with the camera, until I had it about 6 inches away. He stayed stock still, so i snapped off a few good shots. Then as I was converting them into jpegs for uploading, I caught sudden spidery movement out of the corner of my eye. He had turned around for his facial closeup! Those 6 big beautiful brown eyes were focused on me, and I found it much harder this time to get in close... my hand wanted to tremble and for some reason, entirely of it's own accord, was ready to pull back spasmodically the instant he moved again. I couldn't help it! But I was able to get another good frontal closeup before he started that graceful and creepy spiderdance that inspires dread in the hearts of humans the world over. Then I decided he was looking a little dull and needed a good long spritz of Acclaim Gloss Spray Finish, which probably gummed up his breathing spiracles pretty good. I imagine he'll be a lot less lively now, and probably a bit shrivelled. Sorry little friend, but you haven't been paying any rent, and this studio isn't big enough for the two of us. Maybe if you hadn't had to gall to be quite so big, or to sit out where I could see you. I couldn't deal with the thought of you lurking in the darkness so close to me, and maybe next time appearing on my leg, or in my hair. This thing was big enough to run off with one of my puppets, I tell ya! It was also very obliging of this little fella to be the same color scheme as my website, and to even sit in an environment that matches so perfectly the colors of my blog. He has a really great sense of aesthetics. I often use these manilla envelopes as reflectors to get some good diffuse fill light on my puppets. Comments Spiders creep me out - especially when they get that big. Oh sure, their harmless... until they BITE YOU! Anything that big out west is usually a tarantula. All spiders that size are scary and fascinating at the same time. Did you know they can crawl upside down on the ceiling? - Mark Fullerton Yikes! If you disappear, we'll all know why now! ;o - Shelley Noble Dude, your basement = Shelob's Lair. Galadriel [VO]: "May it be a light for you in dark places..." - Eric Scott Strider has his very own Shelob's Lair going on. 8-) -3DG April 29 2006 The Dreaming I've covered a lot of territory in this blog.... Alchemy, Appollo VS Dionysus, Quantum Physics, Surrealism and now Theater of the Absurd. This is me searching for direction - groping my way through the dark. It's fairly straightforward to learn how to make puppets or animate them.... it takes time to get good at it of course, but it can be taught and learned pretty easily. But meanwhile, I've been thinking about what kind of films I want to make when I put the closing tag on my student days and start being a filmmaker. While I was working on Race the Wind, it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't a film that HAD to be done in stopmo. It's essentially a puppet version of a Buster Keaton gag. In fact I worked pretty hard to imitate realistic movement in parts, though I did freely stylize a lot of things. But I want to go beyond that.... make films that couldn't be done in live action or in 2D or CGI. There's something innately surreal about stopmotion itself, and that's at the heart of why it's always fascinated me. Tatu's films really push stopmo to that point, take the viewer to a place they seldom go. A few entries ago I mentioned a lifelong project of mine that I intend to resurrect now in stopmo, but I didn't explain the nature of it. It was called The Dreaming, and reflects my longstanding fascination with dreams. Some of my favorite movies are like dreams, though it's rare that Hollywood manages to get at the real essence of dreams - usually they have a cliched dream sequence that begins and ends with the image going all wavery and you hear harp music, and often they even feel the need to show the character going to sleep or laying in bed, and then waking up at the end of it. In a way, this demonstrates the ridiculous limitations of standard dramatic convention - only rarely does a director come along who's bold enough to present anything that really has dream logic and approaches the true power of a dream, like David Lynch. And I loved Nightmare on Elm Street parts one and three, because they approached real dream imagery in spite of being fairly standard slasher/horror fodder. The Dreaming started off as just a simple idea long long ago, but it kept growing and I became obsessed with it... it became the driving factor behind my wanting to become an artist/writer and possibly filmmaker. As I said recently, it started life as just an idea for a very short stopmo film, but as I developed it I became aware of the intense possibilities made available by dream material, and it grew and grew, until I decided it needed to be a comic book series or a group of fully painted graphic novels. This was in the early 80's at about the same time I discovered Kent Williams, and he influenced me powerfully, and I also started studying everything I could get my hands on about dreams, like Freuds monumental book Dreams and Jung's similar one. In fact, this is what started my interest in psychology and philosophy. But in those days I was sort of stuck in comic book/almost superhero mode, and the story came across more like some kind of superhero character who wore regular clothes than anything really remarkable. The basic idea was that there's a race of alien beings who travel between dimensions always looking for intelligent races to serve as their parasitic hosts - they feed on psychic emanations of intelligent beings and turn them into mindless zombie-type slaves. They find him one night while he's sleeping, using this type of long range detection instrument that seeks out emanations of intelligence in other universes, but they don't realize that he's asleep and dreaming, and they lock onto his brainwave signal and start trying to locate him so they can begin to feed on the human race. So basically his dreams become nightmares where he's being hunted by mysterious beings, and he always manages to escape through some kind of dream logic or he has to make himself wake up, and if they ever find him and manage to trap him, then it's curtains for humanity. He goes through all kinds of trauma, starts taking stimulants to keep from sleeping, tries therapy and meditation and all kinds of things to try to gain control over his unconscious mind. And he begins to learn how to gain control over his dreams, to attain lucidity, so he can turn the tables and fight against them rather than always fleeing. Well, I developed it in this form for many years, creating countless drafts that all had good ideas but were incompatible for various reasons. But I was improving as a writer, and my ideas themselves were becoming more mature, and the whole idea began to change. It became less superheroish and more existential, and I decided it would be bolder and much more original to have the entire thing take place inside a dream or a series of dreams, without the reader knowing that's the case... because that's the way dreams really are... there's no harp music or wavering cloud borders, you actually think you're awake and that it's all really happening... that's what makes it so powerful and surreal. If you knew it was just a dream nightmares would have no power, and the thrilling dreams like the ones where you fly or can do crazy things would lose their impact. But this was at the time I went into art school, and somehow it started to seem dumb, so I shelved it (but as I said before, I mentally pictured myself closing it off inside my brain in a time capsule that I knew I would open later at some point). I've kept a dream journal for many years, and in fact when I started doing that I went back in my memory and wrote down all the old dreams I could still remember... certain ones really stand out. Some of them have an urgency and you know they represent important things going on in your life at that time. I also wrote down what was going on in my life during each of these dreams, if anything was. But more importantly, I started to write about dream logic, about the various kinds of crazy locomotion that takes place in dreams, and how dreams utilize a sort of symbolic shorthand to represent ideas in powerful ways that often have little to do with reality, and therefore are more compelling. But of course if you just make a movie that's exactly like a dream it wouldn't make any sense.... it's one thing to go through all this crazy stuff while your conscious mind is asleep and anything goes.... but when you're awake and watching a movie you demand a little more sense. So dream-movies have to have their own cinematic logic. Also, there are things you experience in dreams that you just can't get across in a movie, because in dreams you have all your senses... you can smell and feel things, and there are memories and weird thoughts, which you can't get across onscreen. Ok, you know what... I could go on and on, and I want to, but I need to wrap this up. In the future I'll talk more about it, but this post is long enough already! Comments Cool, great ideas, thanks for sharing! Sounds like you'll have a lot of freedom in animating, going for surreal in places, like Bickford....like watching cloud formations....I'm definitely thirsty for more, hope this is the first in a long series of making-of posts :) Can't wait to see what you've thought up for sets... - Ubatuber Heh... me too..... April 28 2006 THEATRE OF THE ABSURD I've written a good deal in the past about surrealism as it applies to stopmotion, some here and a lot more on the message board. One of the most exciting proponents of stopmo surrealism is Finnish animator Tatu Pohjavirta, who's latest film Elukka (Animal) is now available on PAL DVD from Camera Cagliostro. Mine came in yesterday and I spent a rapt twenty-some minutes immersed in his odd dreamlike world. You can see a trailer, plus a few of his short flash films, on his site, and his entire first stopmo film Kuvastin (reflector) can be downloaded on Archive.org. For some reason while I was watching Elukka, the term Theater of the Absurd popped into my head. It's not something I knew much about, but I googled it and found this site. A few excerpts: The Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt that there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of human condition. One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication. Language had become a vehicle of conventionalised, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Words failed to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface. Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically. Conventionalised speech acts as a barrier between ourselves and what the world is really about: in order to come into direct contact with natural reality, it is necessary to discredit and discard the false crutches of conventionalised language. Objects are much more important than language in absurd theatre: what happens transcends what is being said about it. It is the hidden, implied meaning of words that assume primary importance in absurd theatre, over an above what is being actually said. The Theatre of the Absurd strove to communicate an undissolved totality of perception - hence it had to go beyond language. Absurd drama subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically impossible. According to Sigmund Freud, there is a feeling of freedom we can enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic. In trying to burst the bounds of logic and language the absurd theatre is trying to shatter the enclosing walls of the human condition itself. Our individual identity is defined by language, having a name is the source of our separateness - the loss of logical language brings us towards a unity with living things. In being illogical, the absurd theatre is anti-rationalist: it negates rationalism because it feels that rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite. It offers intoxicating freedom, brings one into contact with the essence of life and is a source of marvellous comedy. I'm not sure if Tatu is aware of Theater of the Absurd, but watching his film just made me think of it, and now it gives me new material to feed the gestalt of my creative engine. Apparently in the Absurdist plays nonsensical language is used to point out the inneffecuality of language to really communicate what we feel and think. Not something I'm interested in for my films, like Tatu I'm doing films with no dialogue, which automatically brings objects and actions to the forefront. And as I've said so many times, surrealism isn't an excuse for a bunch of meaningless scenes strung together in a vaguely arty way. One thing I really like about Elukka and Tatu's other films is that there's always a story, though it takes some strange and sometimes utterly nonsensical turns, but it has a compelling dream logic that suggests profound truths just beyond the boundaries of our understanding. A bit of Absurdist theater that everyone is familiar with would be Monty Python, especially I think the cut-out animations by Terry Gilliam used to tie skits together. One thing a lot of people hate about Python is that there are no punch lines.... the comedy is absurd and utterly refuses to follow traditional laws of drama (sort of like real life). My thinking is that those "laws" of drama are like the language that Absurdist theater was designed to undermine and surpass.... it gets an artist thinking in familiar, comfortable formulae. If you read the Ron Mueck article I linked to a few days ago, he said he hired a model for the large man sculpt who kept demonstrating conventional "artistic" poses that didn't interest him at all.... it wasn't until the model was bored and just sitting there thinking about something else that suddenly Mueck became interested. That's reminiscient of Kent Williams and the subtle, unconventional expressions/poses he captures that seem to reveal mysterious and unfathomable depths of human nature often overlooked by conventional artists. Comments How amazing?! Another interesting aspect you've brought to all this. Yes, words are inadequate. And yes, life's best moments can slip by unnoticed for their ordinariness. Yes, an artist is thoughtful, or at least his art should mean something to him. And yes, it's the great artist that sees the moments in between. - Shelley Noble April 25 2006 What do you want to accomplish by the end of this year? Time marches relentlessly on in spite of our best intentions.... december 31st will be here before you know it. We'll all look forward at that point, and think about our new year's resolution for the following year. But we'll also look back and think about what we've accomplished. What was your resolution from last new year's? Have you/are you accomplishing it? Is your life on the track you feel it should be? My resolution was to get a couple of films finished. I plan to have Race the Wind done by the end of this week, and I'm pretty sure I can accomplish that. Then I launch on the Scott Radke film, which I'm really looking forward to. I figure that one will take me till at least July or August to wrap up. Then maybe I'll do another StopMoShorts flick - though in a sense the Radke film is for StopMoShorts, but it's a promo spot, not an entry for one of the contests. It's a promotional piece for SMS, for Scott, and for Darkstrider.net all at once. I'll be satsified if I can complete the Radke film and one more short by year's end. That will be 3 films total this year... not too shabby. Then next year, I hope to start in on one of my (slightly) more ambitious projects. I added a lot of links under both Stopmo Blogs and Stopmotion - Studios and Independents, basically because I just discovered DG Goans' blog ObjectsAtRest (well worth checking out) and discovered he's got a huge list of links! It includes all the ones I've got plus some more that I've missed, so I decided it was time to get caught up. In the process I remembered the site of Anna Gawrilow, who made that awesome film of The Music of Erich Zann... and in looking at her site again, I see it's now available on DVD - though it's only available in PAL format and entirely in German. Not a problem if your computer will play DVDs. And there's no dialogue in the film, so don't worry about being able to understand it. I should also mention the entire film is available for download from the site as well... no need to buy the DVD unless you want to help support indie stopmo. Also, through CameraCagliostro you can buy (PAL) DVDs of Tatu Pohjavirta's Animal (Elukka) and Katariina Lillqvist's Mire Bala Kale Hin (My hair is black) - Tales from the Endless Roads. Here's the description from their e-shop: The series is based on the ancient Romany ( Gypsy ) legends and fairytales. The long journey of the romanies is not so well known in the history books, but the stories and fairytales have lived from one generation to another. These legends tell us about gallows and persecutions but also about love, enchanted violins and dancing bears. Comments Thanks for your compliment and for linking to my site. One of my goals is to get my next animation project done this year. That's probably not very original or unique but if I can get it wrapped on or before Dec. 2006 then I will be pleased. I have other projects that I'm eager to get to already. -3DG Hey, good to hear from you in here! It doesn't have to be original or unique... we're not grading on originality here. The intent is what matters. I'm looking forward to watching your progress on your blog, and hopefully at some point we'll be able to see Man Drawing..... April 25 2006 A few good links Here's a nice article on Ron Mueck giving some insight into his techniques for making those gigantic sculptures: Mueck article at Sculptor.org. It's weird to think that at every stage after its inception as a small maquette, this thing is hollow.... a chicken wire and plumbing pipe frame wrapped with plaster strips, then a thin-walled clay sculpt, then a plaster shell mold, inside which are painted layers of polyester resin. It just blows my mind. But I guess that's the way to do it. KerryDrumm.com. I linked to her sketches page because I love the top drawing, but the whole site is amazing. Comments April 25 2006 More words of wisdom "Given the luxury of too much time, the creative mind can become stagnant, obsessed with its own creativity, and thus create nothing." "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." "He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." "Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." "It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." "Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else." ... All by Leonardo Da Vinci Comments "Ideas, like eggs, must be used while fresh." --Shelley Noble Seriously, those are impactful quotes you've posted here, coming from him especially. All true. I don't know what it is that makes some doers and others, like myself, not so much. Hmmm. - Shelley Noble That's easy, just drink some Dewars! No, but seriously, yeah, some people just seem to be like sharks, always in forward motion. For the rest of us it's more of a struggle. But you've been doing some doing, as recorded on your bloggy blog. April 18 2006 Secret Journey I found a secret page hidden on the Bruce Bickford site! I was googling for anything I might be able to find about Cas'l or Prometheus' Garden, and I found this page: A Special Message from the publicist, Gus Reeves. I can't locate it anywhere through the site's navigation, and it gives an invaluable trove of info that ties up some loose ends for me. From reading it, you can see how much his work ties in with real life, especially right there in the area where he lives - something he shares with Lovecraft and Steven King, who both wrote about the Eastern Seaboard area which was their home. Peicing together info from the documentrary, footage from The Amazing Mister Bickford, and this secret page, I'm getting a pretty good idea of what's going on in both Prom's Garden and Cas'l (which I now believe both feature Gus Reaves, Bickford's scrappy little alter-ego). The tale I'm getting from it all is incredibly poignant, and loaded with real-life connections and distortions of reality in the way dreams are. I now understand the significance of the torture chamber under the disco.... which he calls the Secret Lab: "It's a lab and it's a torture chamber.... you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins. But it's... it's not a place you want to be, let's just put it that way." (my own paraphrase of Bruce's words). His explanation of The Vril explains a lot of the craziness in his films... the constant morphing, and the way objects respond to people's gestures... all a sort os telekinesis imparted by the mysterious Vril and whatever other powers dwell in those hills. What's really exciting about this for me is how much it reminds me of my own lifelong project, that's been through many different forms in it's decade or so of development, and has seen me grow from fledgeling neophyte into an artist and now an animator. In its original form it was concieved as a short stopmo film, back in the early 80's when I was first starting out in my early super-8 days. It grew through my wannabe comic-book/graphic novel days as I grew, and it took on depth and substance and started to weave itself into and all throughout my life, my dreams, my fantasies and fears and my creativity. In the early 90's when I decided to get more serious and study art for real, I put it away, sealed in a time vault in my cranium, but with the explicit understanding that it would be re-opened and reinvigorated when I was able to do it justice. That time is drawing near! Stop motion is its medium, and Bruce Bickford is helping to yank it back out into the light. My secret journey is ready to re-commence. Comments Woooo Hooot! That sounds absolutely profound, Dark Strider. Knowing you it must be. Seems the time is Now for many. A fresh start is in the air. - Shelley Noble April 18 2006 Words of Wisdom "Live honestly and develop your skills to the utmost" .....Akira Kurosawa "It's like you feel... what you're... you come in contact with what you're gonna do and you do it. It's right there. It's in your muscles. It's in.... it's in your nerves. You're not even relying on your brains. Your brain's extending clear down to your fingertips." .... Bruce Bickford "The smaller the better. And when you make a tiny scene, you're saving material, you're saving space, you're saving everything. Energy.... mainly energy. If you're working for Hollywood the material and the space are nothing, they have it all. But energy is what counts. A subconscious aspect of animation is the fact that - it's concentrated energy. It's the energy that was put into every frame... all the intricate movements that go on have to be taken care of every frame. The camera captures the light and there it is...." ...Bruce Bickford Comments Ahh, now I see what you see in him. He's got it. All the discussions we've ever had come 'round to this principle don't they? It's that every choice we make, even in how we live, informs what we create. And more, that art is everything that's behind our choices. Nice. - Shelley Noble April 16 2006 Back to Bickford I told you I wasn't through talking about him yet! He's got his own website: BruceBickford.com. That link goes directly to the Video page, where you'll find 2 clips, one clay animation and one drawn. Personally I like the clay work a lot better. There's also a mailing list you can sign up for to recieve notice when there's a new video release. And yes, there are currently 2 releases in the works - Prometheus' Garden and Cas'l. There's so much I want to say on the subject of this wild man prophet animator, but it's too much... and I don't want to ruin any of the great surprizes in store on Monster Road for anyone who wants to buy it. But I will say this much.... don't be too put off by what I wrote earlier about torture chambers etc. Not that he's not obsessed with torture and disemboweling and constant trasformation through violent pulverization and all that... cause he is. But it's not all just horrifying nightmarish dissolution and torment. See. I think he created this little clay world as a place where he can actually act out the scenarios that are impossible in the real world.... he made the torture chambers real and populated them with characters to represent the metaphorical torments visited upon the soul and psyche of sensitive and abused people (himself, but he serves as a stand-in for anyone who'se capable of relating), and in this nether realm the little guy can fight back and triumph over the brutish bullies and the tyrants. He sympathizes with the "little guy" as he puts it, because he's always been one. Peter Pan was his first hero, because he was a little guy and he could triumph over Captain Hook - and now in his imaginary world the little guy runs rampant and gives back to the bullies what they deserve. There's always danger... constant and imminent, and it's only through quick wits, decisive action and cunning that his little heroes make their way through great peril and survive to flail another day. There was a clip in The Amazing Mister Bickford that really whetted my appetite. I had no idea what it was from, or if it was just some bizarre little fragment that he had created with no context... but now I'm piecing together that it must be part of Prometheus' Garden, the story of Litte Guy Gus Reaves. I really can't wait for this to be released on DVD.... I need to immerse myself in that odd quirky world and actually finally see one of The Maestro's films straight through the way he filmed it (though I doubt it will really be entirely cohesive). I can't get enough of the strange, magical movement he creates... people don't have to complete actions or even fully initiate them.... objects slide around and respond seemingly to their wishes. Gus Reaves flicks his hand toward a drawer and it opens, a knife slides out and skitters across the table, then sort of spins up into his waiting hand. He makes a looping motion with a pointing finger and a string winds itself around and around the knife handle, then he snatches it up and is on his way, armed and dangerous. Everything moves with a beautiful economy.... sliding across available surfaces with perfect dreamlike logic. This is a vision of the interface between mind and matter, a lucid dream world where all of creation is subject to the transformative power of thought itself... sort of like The Force. Comments April 16 2006 A little shufflin' I've added a new link to the Stopmo Blogs section for Makeout City Studios, home of John and Liz Harvatine. And I decided to group my links better, since the list keeps growing. Because the Harvatines are associated with that crazy bunch in LA working on shows like Robot Chicken and Moral Orel, I grouped them with the others... Tennessee Misha and Ethan, and I moved Sven and Jeffrey's blogs up right under Shelley's to keep our Blog Brother(&sister)hood together. As for Ale Stopmotion.... I'm not sure what happened, but Alejo seems to have let his blog lapse (at least the english language one... I suspect he's working on his Spanish blog lately). It's just a feed of the items posted on Marc's Animateclay blog. Alejo, definitely let me know when you get the English blog back up if you do, I want to put you back on the list buddy! Comments Hey there! Wow! Glad I read this! No my page's not dead, it's just that I been a little busy working and on University, and each free hour I get I try to work on my stopmo's. I just finished animating my latest film, and after this week of editing, it'll be up for you to see. I made an update on 'New Project' section. Also I added a chat to my site, and I'm working on your tutorial for the principles of animation, but in Spanish....(man, did you have to make it sooooo long :P, just kidding...it's great stuff!) So you can add me again, I'm here! See ya! - AleStopmotion Welllllll...... yeah, I do feel bad deleting your link, especially when so many of the stopmo blogs have turned into Slogs lately (Slow Blogs - and that's because their creators are laboring away on Robot Chicken and Moral Orel etc). So I'll put it back, but it is pretty much a Marc Spess blog now, and I hope to see an Alejo Accini blog again (that I can read!). But I understand, I guess you're kinda busy and all ; ) So you're back in. Looking forward to seeing your newly-completed film! Thanks for the link up Dark Strider! You are the best! - Harva4 No sir... it is YOU who are best!!! April 14 2006 Sizematters Wild huh? Go ahead.... click it, if you're not afraid. I'll wait. Better strap your jaw up though so it doesn't hit the ground too hard. The pic above is the work of Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, and the link takes you to a selection of some incredible, mind-blowing images of his sculptures. It'll take a while to get over this, but when you do, I'll still be here. What's so striking about his work is the way he plays with scale. Incredibly realistic, lifelike people, only they're 15 feet tall, or 3 feet tall, or whatever. It's fascinating stuff. In fact, aside from the obvious Were Rabbit parallels, that's what's so fascinating about the picture in my last post. And in large part, also in the post before that... the one about Bruce Bickford (oh, I'm not through talking about HIM yet... not by a long shot!). Scale has long fascinated artists.... as evidenced by Egyptian tomb carvings, the concept of David and Goliath, and the work of many more recent artists, including one I'm sure needs no introduction to any of my readers: Comments Woah! Chin on floor straped back onto head in order to speak! My God! What possible gifts does this man posses that would enable him to create these works!!? I have never seen anything more life like, done in ANY scale! I once saw a porcelian doll in a doll exhibition by Anne Mitrani that had this same living breathing quality--but nothing with such skill and at such sizes. This is amazing! - Shelley Noble Thanks for exposing me to Mueck's work, it is TRULY unbelievable. I'd love to see the exhibit in person, live and up close...imagine how strange and awe-inspiring it must be to stand in his studio... - Ubatuber Hey Mike! I freaked out when I saw the Ron Mueck sculpture! I've seen his work in exhibitions in London some time ago, and he is truly incredible! The detail of his work is scary! From hair, veins, to wrinkles on the bottoms of hands,and feet. He is a MASTER! I have a book of his work from the National Gallery in London, if you can find it, it's really worth getting! - Tommy Williams Yeah, I'm still im awe about Mueck! And aside from the sheer sense of living presence and lilliputian scale play, he's got something else that makes him IMo a master... he's not afraid of vulnerability. All the sculpts seem to display it... these people in a way are stylized and in an odd way they're idealized but at the same time they all seem to suffer from various ailments and insecurities. It's like seeing Lucien Freud paintings brought into startling 3 dimensional reality. Also strongly reminds me of Kent Williams, especially his recent painting with the giant man washed up on the beach. Tommy, I understand there are a couple of books available on Mueck. Here's loads more images.... feast your eyes! Another masterful touch is the way each sculpt addressed and *animates* its surroundings. That man sitting in the corner in the pic above ferinstance.... it looks like he was made for that room, sort of looking toward the door nervously. And it's plain to see how powerful his presence is... note how the guard is unconsciously imitating his arm gesture! Thanks for the additional links on Ron Mueck. I thought a bit more about his work--how can one not?! And I thought that his works aren't so much idealized but rather impossibly realistic. And that his flawless reproduction of the true being of a common subject is what we experience as ideal. In other words, his works make me see the Divine inherent in man's making. - Shelley Noble Well spake Lady Shellington, well spake! Your intuition is uncanny. I've known of Ron Mueck's work for years (Also his brother Richard, another Melbourne master sculptor) but primarily as a sculptor and puppeteer in films. You've seen his work in the Henson film Labyrinth - I believe he both sculpted and operated Ludo. This out-of-scale hyperrealism he's been doing recently came as a surprise when I first saw a photo of his crouching boy a couple of years ago. I haven't had a chance to see his work for real, where I'm sure the scale of the work is most effective. - Nick Hilligoss April 14 2006 Life imitates Aardman...... How bizarre is this??!! In England, there is actually a gigantic rabbit terrorizing vegetable plots, and the plotholders have hired armed guards to combat it!!! Here's a pic of a similar monster rabbit: Here's the article, from Yahoo News : In a tale reminiscent of the last Wallace and Gromit movie, furious villagers in northeast England have hired armed guards to protect their beloved communal vegetable gardens from a suspected monster rabbit. Leeks, Japanese onions, parsnips and spring carrots have all been ripped up and devoured by the mystery were-rabbit -- prompting the 12 allotment holders in Felton, north of Newcastle, to hire two marksmen with air rifles and orders to shoot to kill. "It is a massive thing. It is a monster. The first time I saw it, I said: 'What the hell is that?'" the Northumberland Gazette newspaper quoted local resident Jeff Smith, 63, as saying on its website (www.northumberlandtoday.co.uk). He claims to have seen the black and brown rabbit -- with one ear bigger than the other -- about two months ago, and at least three fellow allotment holders say they have seen it as well. "I have seen it and it is bigger than a normal rabbit. It's eating all our crops and we grow the best stuff here," said retired miner George Brown, 76, quoted by the domestic Press Association news agency. Smith could not be reached for comment Friday, but his mother told AFP that the hare-raising story is true -- and no less an authority than the British Rabbit Council said it was credible. "Certain breeds do grow very big, like the Continental Giant" which can be 66 centimetres (26 inches) in length or more, a spokesman for the Nottinghamshire-based council, which represent rabbit breeders, told AFP. In the last hit movie featuring Wallace and his dog Gromit, the two cartoon characters battled a monster rabbit that was cutting a swathe of destruction through locals' prize vegetable plots. This post rather strangely ties in with my last one, which will be explained next time..... Comments April 14 2006 Dionysus' Garden Click to go to Bright Eye Pictures website Today I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I mean, it was a complete crap day from the beginning.... a dull throbbing ache suffused all throughout my body, headache, sore muscles - the whole 9 yards. Aspirin proved about as effective as throwing a bucket of water on a raging fire. My rythyms were all out of sync.... I felt like I was sinking in quicksand or walking through molasses.... I'm sure you know what I mean. We've all had these days. You walk around looking miserable and saying things like "It just isn't my day". And when I got to work it intensified, as high pressure has a way of doing. I seemed to be moving in slow motion and thinking even slower, while customers were piling up, demanding and rude and implacable. And endless. It was very much like a modern suburban Inferno, some kind of subtle torture chamber disguised as a normal workplace. If only I could get it together.... if only the customers would give me a minute to clear my head, or if I could get somebody to help me out..... Welcome to the realm of Dionysus. Nightmare country, where flesh is tormented by nameless fevers and confusion blurs every thought. Frustration rules here. There's always work to be done, demands and pressures to the breaking point, and obstacles everywhere. Why is the floor so wet today, and these shoes so slick? Why do I feel so weak... if I could only sit down in peace and quiet for a few minutes. But when breaktime comes, the lobby fills with noisy people, and someone sets a crying baby in a high chair right next to you. And the sun is glaring in your eyes.... The bathroom..... closed cell of security. Peace at last.... but then somebody's rattling the door trying to get in, and they don't just try it once, they yank hard on it several times, and pound on the door like they're trying to break it down. Then they stand just outside the door, talking to each other in loud harsh tones, waiting for you to hurry up and get out. I think Bruce Bickford knows this place well. I got Monster Road the other day - this documentary will go down in history second only to Crumb as a portrait of a tormented artisitc genius. I'm fascinated by him.... his life, his personality and his work. Bickford's father was a brilliant aerospace engineer for Boeing and apparently a cold and cruel man touched by a bit of madness, and his two older brothers were bullies. From his descriptions, his childhood was an endless torment. And now he does brilliant animation of constantly morphing clay figures writhing in a world gone mad.... violence and cruelty everywhere, slicing swords and piercing blades cutting through flesh like butter and entrails spilling out to writhe on the ground and transform anew. Everything is in constant flux in Bickford's hellish imagination. The very ground itself heaves and pulsates and transforms into horrible monstrous forms. He once said that underneath every disco is a secret torture chamber. This sounds strange if you're not familiar with Bruce and his philosphy. I heard it on his long out of print video The Amazing Mister Bickford, consisting of clips done around the time he was Frank Zappa's in-house animator in the 70's, and at the time I didn't get it. But now, having got to know Bruce a lot better thanks to the people at Bright Eye Pictures who interviewed him and put together the box of concentrated sweetness that is Monster Road, it makes a lot more sense to me now. Now I understand that, like Svankmajer, he's a visionary who's been driven over the edge by visions too powerful to bear. Thanks to whatever biochemical oddity sustains the mind that is Bruce Bickford, and the peculiar life that forged him into the tormented artist he is, he's blessed and cursed to see too clearly into that Dionysian realm, where a thousand gentle tortures await and cruelty is concealed behind every kindness. It's a realm we all visit on those bad days.... revealed through a clarifying lens. It's the ordinary workaday world stripped of its illusions to reveal the torture chambers we all trudge through. And even though his vision is populated by bizarre constantly morphing creatures, it all looks too familiar, because we all visit that hellish realm every night in our dreams. The picture above is from Bickford's film Prometheus' Garden, a fascinating concept about a well of living clay that, when shaped into a figure, comes alive. It's also a link to Bright Eye Pictures, makers of Monster Road, and on their site you can find a small Quicktime trailer for it. My highest recommendation, though Bickford's work is definitely not for everybody. Comments Hi Mike, Thanks for posting about Bruce Bickford. I hadn't ever heard of him nor animators using stop mo as this type of artistic expression. I like how he uses the medium to speak his subconscious mind. Art as attempted healing. The places we visit deep in there can be so often fraught with this brand of gore and brutality of life. I consciously decided many years ago that I didn't want to focus on creating a world that I wouldn't want to live in. It's just my thing, even though Halfland itself is very much symbolic of facets of my personal psyche. Obviously, his particular work seems to have been therapeutic for Mr. Bickford, allowing him to vent his pain and torments. - Shelley Noble April 4 2006 Sneak peek behind the scenes of Race the Wind I'm working up a tutorial on how I achieved the running effect, but meanwhile until I get the text done, here are some pics. Click thumbnails to see larger versions: To the astute viewer these images pretty much tell the whole story, but I'll flesh out the details in my upcoming Running Rig Tutorial, coming soon to StopMoShorts. Comments So cool. Can't wait for the text. You know, I didn't think so because I loved the duotone, but I'm really lovin' the Buster in full color!! - Shelley Noble Needless to say, I'm delighted to see you, um, throw your hat into the ring, for this round at Stopmoshorts. I kind of guessed there wasn't time to finish (I'm wondering what the ending would have been!). But the animation, er, blew me away! Looking at the still photos, I suspect you've modified a Starevitch technique for the running and jumping. I couldn't pick it on the video, because I couldn't see a gap between the ground and the wall for the support to run along. (I didn't spot a shadow from the wire either.) - Nick Hilligoss Mike, I visit your site every-so-often for inspiration, what with your excellent Ahab stuff and all that tangible character modeled into him. Nice choice in music, too, for the clips. I'm more a slave of the CGI school (that bastard, but intelligent child of the camera), but I draw my inspiration from stop-motion and even emulate it down the circuit board highway. My hats off to ya. Thanks so much for keeping your blog updated with new and informitive posts. Glad to see introduction of Shelley Noble, too. Good luck, and I'll be dropping back by. - Mahlon Bouldin Great to hear from all of you! Thanks so much for the comments. I now regret encoding it in that horrid pale blue-purple color! What was I thinking in the wee small hours of the morning? Probably that it was time I get my hour of sleep before going to work! I've done a much stronger version now in black and white with good strong contrasts, and added some nice old-time film effects that looks so much better. My ending involved the hat rolling on past the end of the seemingly endless building and across a field, to be snatched up by Nessie in the final frames. I didn't have time to build the smaller scale set and the neck/head puppet (would have been just plasticene with a wire in it). But now I plan to finish it out a little differently since the SMS round is over, and give Buster the time he needs to stretch his little legs and play a bit. Mahlon, thanks for introducing yourself. I love that CG peeps are inspired by my work! I'm still in shock over the insane CG work in King Kong (not that you had anything to do with that... I'm just sayin'). My guestbook doesn't seem to work properly, so I figured I'll post this as a comment. I really need to lose the guestbook link. April 3 2006 Shelley hits the plogosphere!!! My cohort and the secret power behind the throne at Darkstrider.net Shelley Noble has entered the plogosphere!!! Yes, be sure to check her out at Notes from Halfland @ Blogspot.com. I've been hearing about this incredible project of hers since first meeting her (well, virtually anyway... we've never met in real life) but only been privileged to see one littel teaser shot, which was enough to whet my whistle. Tonight I was amazed to find an email from her containing the link to Halfland, the plog, which she intends to use as an incentive to push herself in realizing this fantastic concept that's been living in her head for so long. She plans to make it in the form of a series of one-minute shorts - bite-size melt in your mental mouth morsels of chewy goodness. And she has incredible high-res photos of the amazing setpieces and props she's been building. Do yourself a favor and get a preliminary glimpse of Halfland before it's all grown up. Also, I want to report that the spring collection is up over at StopMoShorts! Exciting times my friends.... Pastels are key, with daring details and lots of flirty pleats. Buster is hanging out over there, though I didn't quite get his film done. Soon I'll be revealing the secrets behind the makeshift running rig I created for this outing. I'm still in recovery from the two day marathon of animation madness and I haven't achieved enough distance to write about it with any objectivity. But I will reveal the secret to my success, and probably the best thing that could have happened to me just when I was going into deadline crunch... I shared a Pepsi with my keyboard -- it hogged half of it, but didn't seem to enjoy the fizzy goodness much. In fact it refused to communicate with me for a few days! I was effectively mute in cyberspace, and was starting to freak out, but my quick thinking seems to have saved the day. Immediately after it happened, I plunged the whole keyboard into the sink and rinsed it out for about ten minutes. Every time I tried to plug it in for the next few days it made things flash on my monitor, but after a while it was alright, and in fact those three sticky keys (from the first soda spill, just a few drops) are good as new now. I don't recommend it unless you're in dire straits, but it's a great way to keep yourself offline and animating! Comments Mike, I have to tell you how wonderful I thought "Race the Wind" is!! This is some highly sophisticated animation going on here! The b(l)uster of wind looked authentically natural and the comedic timing of the hat chase sequence was worthy of Buster himself. I gasped when he leaped, too cool. I've seen two other shorts of this collection so far, enough to say that everyone should be applauded for their talent, wit, and gumption for getting these actually done and up there! I look forward to seeing the rest. And thank you for your reassuring thoughts, Mike. You know, that's what I first noticed about you when we met as it were, how gracious a person you are. When I would read questions posted to the SMA board I would see your answers were not only chocked the hell up with helpful direction but also with a rare generosity of spirit that I had to take notice. Who is this bloke?!. I'm so glad there are people like you supporting this art. _ Shelley Noble March 24 2006 One Bad Mitten I just re-discovered a little film I made some time ago -- my first completed short as a matter or fact, made shortly after getting my Unibrain Fire-i webcam and Framethief. It was lost for a while -- forever I thought, being as the original file was destroyed in a big computer crash. But I discovered an old thread on the message board where I had originally posted it, and (I completely forgot about this) my friend Jason had actually posted it for me on his site because I didn't yet have my own. He had only posted it "temporarily", but hadn't deleted it yet, so I was able to retrieve this small quicktime version of it! I feel like Robert Osbourne of Turner Classic Movies announcing the "recently discovered print of a lost classic film, long thought destroyed". Well Ok, it's not exactly Criterion Collection material, but here I present to you in it's entirety, my first complete short film, One Bad Mitten: If you're interested in some behind-the-scenes stuff describing how I achieved the flying effects, here's a link to the orignal thread on SMA: One Bad Mitten thread Comments See, now THAT'S good filmmaking! I loved it! I'm glad we now have the restored complete collection of early Brent. _ Shelley Noble Thanks Shellster! There are things about it I definitely don't love. It was really just a test for some flying effects, and I think I only used 3 or maybe 4 different shots. I reversed some of them and ran them through the editing software to change the speeds etc, and patched it all together enough to run the full length of the song. It really needed another good shot or 2. And some of the shots run the wrong way... he's flipping backwards through most of the film, but on some shots he's flipping forwards. It's more effective backwards - he can't see where he's going! The combination of black & white, slow motion, close-up and the continuous rotation make it into a study in lighting & shadow, motion, and composition, and I like the creative use of all 4 quadrants of screen space. I wish I had animated his expression a little though. Makes me want to do more of these really simple little exercises. March 21 2006 If you saw the recent Corpse Bride (and you did... several times, and now own the DVD... right?) you saw some incredible animation and puppet design. One of the animators responsible for the magic is Phil Dale, and the puppet designer is Carlos Grangel. Well, finding themselves now with a little spare time on their hands, they're attempting to make a short film of their own, along with a few more creative types. You might have already noticed the new FundMyShort link above... if you click that it takes you to the site where they're trying to utilise the power of the internet to get some funding for this project. This is exciting stuff.... Phil posts at the message board on occasion, and he said they decided that, with the new world we inhabit in terms of global communication and evil corporate methods of financing independent films they decided it was high time to try to find new ways to obtain financing independently. I hope I haven't massacred this... I'm just trying to remember what he wrote a week or so ago. You know... it would probably be better to let the website speak for itself! I think this is a fantastic idea and wish them the best of luck with it. If you have a blog or site of your own, consider helping to spread the word... they need as many people as possible to see this! My link goes to their blog page... the one i think will be the most consistently interestign, and where they'll be gradually unveling their project. The site consists of several pages though, and to me it's fascinating to look it over and see how this all works. I urge you to take a look at a new way to use the internet that could prove invaluable to all us indie type filmmakers in the future. I've just realized (and I feel like an idiot) that this would actually be the 3rd collaboration between Phil Dale and Carlos Grangel. They worked together not only on the Corpse Bride, but also The Periwig Maker, an incredible film that led to both of their involvement on Corpse Bride. Phil is a phenomenal talent, and often graces us with his wisdom on the message board. He once said about his Corspe Bride animation that what he likes to do is counterpoint a character's actions with the dialogue, to add that subtle bit of life that a powerful performance can bring. I liken the combination of him and Grangel as one of the great pairings in artistic history, akin to Gilbert and Sullivan, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or Harryhausen and Louis Delgado (the sculptor who often fashioned Ray's puppets). Or for that matter O'Brien and Delgado. Any way you slice it, it's a winning combination! Comments Thank you so much for posting about Phil and his work here, Mike. I had no idea that this level of animation mastery existed!! He is truly the best. - Shelley Noble March 20 2006 Playing Starcastle at Lambert Strange title, I know, but stick with me. Tonight I'm discussing a concept that's important to me in all things creative, including my stopmotion studies. I'll just start from the beginning... Remeber the 80's, when there were video game arcades everywhere, ranked masses of graphics-laden console machines blipping and buzzing and screeching while hordes of desperate-eyed teenagers fed them tokens by the pocketful? Yeah, I was there. There were only a few games I really liked to play, and one of them was called Starcastle. It was a really simple game, but wickedly hard to play when it got going fast! There was only one place in Belleville that had it... and it wasn't an arcade, it was a little gasmart on the far end of town that only had like 3 games. Well, one day it was gone, but one of my friends told me they had it at Lambert airport in St. Louis in a huge arcade room (which was the biggest arcade I've ever seen!). We drove the two hours out there to play it and to see what other games they have, and when we managed to get up to the Starcastle machine it turned out to be messed up.... the display reacted a trifle slowly to the joystick, making it sluggish and a lot harder to play than what we were used to, but then we were routinely putting the high scores on the game in Belleville, so we tried it, and found it a lot more challenging. In fact, we decided we enjoyed playing it more, but we couldn't achieve anywhere near the scores we normally did on the good machine. Then when we found a Starcastle game at a different store in Belleville and played the fully functional machine a wondrous thing occurred.... we found our practice on the more sluggish machine had really sharpened our skill and reaction times, and now we could reach levels beyond anything we had ever seen on it! It was a blast, but more importantly we had learned a valuable life lesson - that making something more challenging can develop your abilities. It's something we never forgot, and it became a term we used sometimes in other areas.... for instance, if you try drawing in a moving car and someone asks you why on earth you would do that, tell them you're "Playing Starcastle at Lambert". How does this apply to my stopmotion studies? Well, I find I'm making everything pretty difficult on myself, by putting these trick effects into everything I do. I could have easily just done some animation of Buster walking around and doing some slapstick, but I wanted to learn how to make a puppet run and jump, so I pushed myself to figure it out and learn it. I'm also planning a pretty nifty effect for his little micro-flick to debut at StopMoShorts in about.... 10 days (Yipes!). It gets pretty harrowing sometimes, and I start to wonder why i do this to myself, but I know that when I'm doing ordinary shots now (if there is any such thing in stopmotion, which I'm starting to doubt) it will seem so much easier! I find it's in fact necessary to force yourself to move beyond your comfort zone and try these things, otherwise you'll just keep doing the easy stuff. And it seems right to me to try it early in your learning curve, before you get set in your ways. I think there's a tendency after a little while for any artist to stop expanding and trying new things and sort of settle on what they consider their "reportoir", and if you don't try many things before you reach that point you'll be pretty limited when you get there. I'm also striving to perfect my skills in setbuilding, propmaking, puppetmaking, and especially conceptualizing and writing films, to try to avoid the "crappy early movie" stage (but maybe I'll just end up taking longer to get through it this way, who knows?). I went in search of a screengrab from Starcastle, but couldn't find one, though I did stumble scross this awesome Flash emulation of it: Starcastle Flash emulator Comments I really loved this post, Mike! Great lesson and insight. I have always worked this way too. Only... when is it too much detail and challenge to the point of inaction? I'm still lost with getting things done work and play wise. I experience even great life as stress, often overwhelmed. Should I just make an appointment? Anyway, nice of you to write up this story of your learning and publish it. - Shelley Noble Great post, I'm right there with you...I'm close to finding a great balance between the "think outside the box" extremes of the Jenny Greenteeth project and the more simple, straightforward tests, especially now that my first short is almost done! - Jeffrey Roche March 12 2006 What I've been up to A lot of time passed since my last blog entry.... let me explain what I've been up to. Well, partly I just didn't want to push that awesome pic of Scott Radke's puppet heads down, but also I've been busy on other fronts. Mainly the Newbie Guide at the stopmo message board, the source where it all began for me almost 5 years ago. I was instrumental in getting it launched, and contributed a lot of chapters to it, and it bugged me that I couldn't get in to edit things now and then, for instance broken links, or to add new material as it becomes available, so I emailed Anthony Scott, the site's administrator, and asked if he'd consider giving me moderator status in the Guide so I could sort of take over as its proprietor. He did that, and I've been having a blast ever since! First I went in and did some sprucing up on some of the older entries, fixed links and added a few new ones, and then I uploaded a few new entries. We're now up to 14 scintillatin chapters and counting! But I'm bothered by a disturbing new trend. Recently the board has less and less activity by the old-timers, the pros who started it all, and more and more by a new breed of unmotivated newbies who are too lazy to put in any time studying and reading and just want to ask simple questions that have been answered countless times already, cluttering up the board and bugging the crap out of everybody. There are also a few pranksters who seem to have nothing better to do than annoy a group of friendly and polite people. These types have made me reconsider my past willingness to help out any and everyone on the message board, and in fact for a brief while I considered asking Anthony to grant me full moderator status so I could begin to enforce some of the rules and clean up the board of these clowns. My efforts and suggestions met with very little support, and I no longer like the idea of taking on that kind of responsibility, though if somebody doesn't do it soon, I'm afraid the board will go to the wolves and all the remaining decent folk will depart. The board has been incredibly fortunate thus far, with Anthony doing all the administrative chores himself, and not having to take action against any kind of inappropriate activity, but with the new influx of uncaring and disrespectful newbies, my thinking is that at long last the stopmo board has reached the point all boards reach eventually, where rules are necessary and someone must be ready to enforce them. But it aint gonna be me. I feel like I've repaid my debt to that site with all my contributions, which include a pivotal part in the creation of not only the Newbie Guide but also StopMoShorts, as well as the instructional parts of my own site and the clips I have posted of European stopmotion. I'll still moderate the Guide and keep fleshing it out... i consider it somehow my sacred duty to organize some of the vast wealth of information that lies buried in its dark depths. But I wonder if it's not partly because of the Newbie Corner and the Guide that we're getting these new lazy members? Ahhh... what to do, what to do? But as for the slackening activity on the board, I'm beginning to think that the real activity has shifted from message boards to blogs. It seems all the motivated individuals who also post on the board these days have their own blogs, and we all visit each other's and leave comments. Blogging is becoming what the message board once was, but more focused. I just added a link under Stopmo Blogs for Ale's site in Argentina. He's a great guy who's getting started and really into it, making fantastic progress in his own efforts as well as helping people on the board and on their own blogs. There's getting to be a sort of informal group of blog brothers, consisting of myself, Sven Bonnichsen, Jeffrey Roche, and Ale who all comment on each other's blogs. I'd love to see others join in, with or without their own blog. Oh, and I'm seriously considering moving my blog to a real blogger network, which would make my life a lot easier! Comments Hey! Thanx for the link ;) This community is just amazing, and I'm really proud of being part of it!It's really a great way to learn and maybe try to teach something every now and then... About changing to a blogger host...I'm not sure if I'd recommend that...I mean, it depends a lot on what you're trying to do: for example, Sven is just blogging his progress, so he'd be OK with joining blogger for example. But I'm trying to make a complete StopMotion site, probably the only one Latin America (I'll have to translate it back I guess! hahaha) with how to's and that kind of stuff, so I'm struggling with blogger...As soon as those ads I put on Ale StopMotion give me any money, I'll get a host service.... Maybe you could keep Darkstrider going on, and make a blog, for....well...blogging! See you, and let's hope our puppets are getting along! - Ale Yeah, I would just move this blog page over, and keep the rest of the site right where it is. I guess I'd still have the archived blog pages here too. It's a lot of work for me to keep updating this, and posting the comments that come in (they all go to my email and I have to manually paste them in here). Most of that would probably be automated on a real blog, and I'd have my very own Blogger name that would automatically show up when I comment on other people's blogs. Wow, how many times can I say blog in this blog entry? Blogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblog....... "There's getting to be a sort of informal group of blog brothers, consisting of myself, Sven Bonnichsen, Jeffrey Roche, and Ale who all comment on each other's blogs." ...Hee! I was just talking with Gretchin about this! ...Buster, Jenny, Guy, and Percy are all in the same hospital nursery -- poking their noses over the crib walls, eager to get out and play. :-D --Sven March 11 2006 YAMAKASI Well, I guess I can't just keep that picture at the top of my blog forever! It's time to let it slide down a ways and make a new entry, though I haven't got much to say. I'm finding it difficult to keep blogging without revealing too much about my projects. So tonight I'll just post this awesome link: Yamakasi This stuff is simply mind-blowing! I think any animator would share my fascination with the sheer beauty of unrestrained, flightlike movement. It's so good to see something extreme that doesn't involve skateboards and broken bones or animal maulings. I discovered these guys on a Bravo show, but they failed to say who they were (postmodern television at its... um.... finest I suppose), but - wouldn't you know it - Shelley immediately knew what I was rambling about in my excited and incoherent email and told me about Yamakasi (meaning Strong Body, Strong Spirit, Strong Person), the group founded by David Belle in France, who follow a code called Parkour.... "Life is made of obstacles and challenges - To overcome them is to progress. If you become skilled at Parkour you gain something for the rest of life. Understanding the philosophy of Parkour is to look further than just the simple movement or the performance of the movement. It could even be said to be a lesson of life for everyday! But still you have to internalise the philosophy - An essential element of learning Parkour." These guys step outside the confining boundaries of public concourses and use the entire urban landscape as their playground. Man, if I was only 20 years younger... and in Olympic condition, and absolutely fearless.... you know, on second thought, maybe I'll just let Buster do the jumping around ! I added a link to a new blog by The Band Sinistre, who are working on their third stopmo film, The Hell Screen. Check it out on the left at the bottom of the Stopmo Blogs section. Comments Feb 16 2006 Legal at last! Yes friends and fellow stopmo lovers, that's the work of Scott Radke up above, and this time it's completely legal. I didn't copy his style (like I did for my Simple Puppet tutorial).... this time it's actually his own work (as if you couldn't tell!). After he contacted me some time ago - detailed in the december 12 entry at the bottom of this page in fact, we decided to work on something together. Actually I said I was thinking of commissioning a couple of heads from him, and he said no need.... he'd be glad to do some for free! I gave him the basic info on how I make heads, so there's 3 wires coming out the bottom, and I sent him a casting of Buster's head as a size reference, and then the other day he sent me this picture. Needless to say I'm blown away! We've got a lil project in mind that should be a lot of fun. I don't want to talk about it any more than that though... I'm learning to actually keep my mouth shut about a project while it's still in the early stages. I think I'll just spring this one full blown when it's done. I might have to put buster on hold to do it, but I'll definitely finish my StopMoShorts entry with Buster first. Scott had never sculpted at such a small scale before, but he did a fantastic job, as I knew he would. His work needs to be brought to life through the magic of stopmo. I've only ever seen maybe one film clip online featuring one of his puppets, and that was a marionette (which have their own very different magic). I'm incredibly proud to be able to animate these guys, and I only hope I can do them justice. Oh, and the pic is a link... click it to see Scott's live journal. Comments Amazing collection of heads there... my compliments to Scott Radke. Do you have the story worked out? No, you're right, don't tell it, save the energy for the film itself. I've got the feeling you've reached critical mass, and something surreal is about to be born from this collaboration. - Nick Hilligoss Wow! He's a genius. This is so exciting that you two will be collaborating!! - Shelley Noble FANTASTIC! These heads look great, can't wait to see what you come up with. - Mark Fullerton Thanks everybody. Man, I can't tell you how cool this is for me! I mean, I know the picture is drool-inducing, but (as cliched as this sounds it's true) it just doesn't compare to actually seeing them in person and holding them in your hands. It's hard to wrap my head around how he manages to get so much life in them while working so simply, with just the simple warped forms and little features. Makes me feel foolish for spending so much time working on Buster's skull structure and trying to get perfect symmetry. His paint work is really the clincher. They're nothing like flesh color... although you might find some of these colors on a cadaver! He sculpted them in Creative Paperclay, and the spikey pieces of hair that stick out on some of them are actually just paper. I'm all worked up about this project now, in fact I've been making some props for it, but I really need to put the heads away where they can't keep looking at me and get back to work on Buster. We've got a date to keep on March 31st over at StopMoShorts! Mike!! welcome back to cyber world!! and congrats on the collaborative work with Scott.. this is a very exiting thing!!! - Nina Folch Fantastic Heads! Can't wait to see what you do with them Mike. - Phil Dale So cool Mike! You are going to have so much fun animating those characters- their faces are suggesting so much movement! - Ethan Marak Welcome back to the web Strider! Your site has been missed! Scott Radke's work is AMAZING! I can't wait to see what you do with these masterpieces! - Tommy Williams Those look great - terribly characteristic, expressive. Do 'em justice! - Seth Lutske (Inertiac) Wow! Very nice indeed. These will have even more personality once animated. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final results. You're the right man for the job, Strider! :) - Eric Scott Feb 02 2006 The Dark Matters I've been devouring the His Dark Materials books.... last night I read The Subtle Knife all the way through. I haven't read a book in one sitting since I was a teenager! That's how much I love this stuff. Brilliantly handled on every level. I can't believe how many great ideas Pullman has woven into his tapestry - concepts from the cutting edge of contemporary science, which in many ways are beginning to pass beyond yesteryear's purely analytical science and merge with myth and spiritualism to become more holistic. I always felt like 20th century science and modern art both suffered from one flaw... they only know how to take things apart, not put them back together so they work as a whole. The human body can be dissected and studied, but a cadaver doesn't tell you anything about life. And strangely, all these pictorial advances made after the advent of the camera... pointillism, cubism, abstraction - you can see all of them handled brilliantly in areas of classical paintings. The difference is that the classical masters integrated the effects into the overall picture harmoniously. Some time ago I linked to the website of F David Peat, one of the scientists at the cutting edge of quantum physics and the study of consciousness. Not surprizingly it was Shelley who led me there (I don't think she knows she's the agent for some cosmic ubermind that's feeding this info through my humble website for dissemination to the world at large). I was utterly absorbed by his theories and spent weeks immersed in his essays and feeling my mind expand to the outer reaches of the cosmos and contract down to subatomic dimensions - my soul filter out into the very matter of the universe. He draws on a diverse array of thinkers... artists like Cezanne, musicians like Bach, ancient traditions of American Indian tribes, and scientists like Einstein. Finding his website was a foundational experience for me, drew together what seemed previously to be a diverse range of interests, and sort of paved the way for much of the thinking I would shortly espouse here on Darkstrider.net. And now I find Philip Pullman and His Dark Materials. It's the same potent cocktail of scientific/philosophical/religious thinking, only now blended into an epic story as compelling as the Lord of the Rings (My former favorite). And it's so much more relevant today. Here are a few quotes from The Subtle Knife that demonstrate what I find so great about it: Scientist Mary Malone (of our own Earth) explaining strange new findings about recently discovered subatomic particles of dark matter that they've dubbed Shadows: "Our particles are strangle little devils, make no mistake." "You know what? They're conscious. That's right. Shadows are particles of consciousness. You ever heard anything so stupid? No wonder we can't get our grant renewed." "And here goes the crazy part. You can't see them unless you expect to. Unless you put your mind in a certain state. You have to be confident and relaxed at the same time. You have to be capable -- where's that quotation... 'Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' That's from the poet Keats by the way." She and her colleagues study these conscious particles with a specially built computer they call The Cave, after Plato's allegory of the cave in which prisoners can see only the shadows of things and not the actual objects themselves, and mistake shadow for reality. In Lyra's world these particles are collectively called Dust and communicate with humans through a complex and beautiful device called an Alethiometer, which only a few adults can read with great effort by consulting a series of books and making complicated mathematical calculations, but Lyra can read instinctively just by relaxing into a trancelike state and focusing her mind properly. Later her friend Will comes into possession of a special dagger called The Subtle Knife... a knife so subtle it can cut through anything... including subatomic particles. He's trying to learn how to use it - to unlock its secrets: "This time he forced his mind to do what Giacomo Paradisi said, gritting his teeth, trembling with exertion, sweating. Lyra was bursting to interrupt, because she knew this process. So did Dr. Malone, and so did the poet Keats, whoever he was, and all of them knew you couldn't get it by straining toward it. But she held her tongue and clasped her hands. "Stop" said the old man gently. "Relax. Don't push. This is a subtle knife, not a heavy sword. You're gripping it too tight. Loosen your fingers. Let your mind wander down your arm to your wrist and then into the handle, and out along the blade. No hurry, go gently. Don't force it, just wander. Then along to the very tip, where the edge is the sharpest of all. You become the tip of the knife." I know this process as well. It's the artistic process. For Subtle Knife substitute pencil, brush, or puppet. It's the writing process. It's the process of gradually coming to the understanding of what kind of movies you want to make. Comments Feb 02 2006 Sackin' out Tonight we delve into the mechanics and artistry of animation itself, the very heart and soul of what this website (and my life's quest) is all about. Be it Euro-mation, Ameri-mation, stopmo, gomo, fastmo, slowmo or Mojo, all animation relies on certain principles to make it live and breathe. I realize some animation isn't intended to live and breathe, in today's hip, cool climate of retro-savvy flash overload the trend seems to be toward cartoons done at 3 FPS with deliberately bad animation, stupid characters and plots (when there is any such thing) and loud annoying noises. It seems to be part of media programming's ongoing efforts to dumb down America and create a generation of drooling idiots who giggle uncontrollably on cue. Hey, it might sound like a joke or a bizarre sci-fi concept, but I've seen the way video games make kids (and sometimes not-kids) spend endless hours pushing buttons on command, staring into little screens and reacting to everything the computer does. It's insidious I tell ya! And tonight I witnessed the next step in the devolution of mankind as we enslave ourselves to our computers.... some kind of crazy interactive video games where kids have to run back and forth or from side to side in response to cues from the game. I kid you not... it was on the news, some YMCA program. When I was a kid the YMCA was all about fitness and swimming and karate... real honest-to-goodness physical activity. Now even that's being bastardized by the invasion of the computers. Is it getting to the point where we can no longer do anything without being tethered to a computer? (I ask as I sit hunched over my keyboard.... but hey, at least here I'm in command... or so the mighty Mac lets me believe!) But I digress! We're here to discuss animation. So let's go to the ultimate source... the font of all things great where true animation began and reached the pinnacle of perfection... the almighty Disney studio. Above I posted a few sketches taken from their book The Illusion of Life. This was the famous "half empty flour sack exercise", one of the early breakthroughs that led directly to Disney's climb to greatness. In the early days, the Steamboat Willie days, cartoon characters were made from balls and rubber hoses and all that mattered were the gags. Oh, those old spots are awesome, don't get me wrong... I loves me some rubber hose animation! But it only works for short novelty bits, you can't develop any character or get a real sense of life. For that you need what Walt referred to as "animatable shapes", which is what the flour sack represents. If you picture let's say a mouse's head that's built on a perfect sphere, and imagine it turning... how do you know it turned? Simple... the features kind of slide across the front of it! it looks neat... but isn't very subtle or realistic. Not that realism is the goal, but a sort of stylized realism was definitely the goal for Disney. Mine is a bit different, but I see the benefits of lighting my torch from Disney's eternal flame of perfection. From the drawings above you can immediately see how much more expressive this sack of flour was than a spherical head. I colored the drawings in so they show as silouhettes so you can see how strong the outline itself is... that was one of disney's big things. The action should read clearly even in silouhette. What makes a flour sack such a great shpe for expressive posing? Ok, I'll try..... since it's half empty, it allows for their concept of squash and stretch as shown in the top row of drawings, and because they were sketching from life - drawing an actual sack arranged in front of them - it always maintains the same mass (something they didn't understand in the beginning... a form must maintain its mass no matter how much it squashes or stretches). Also, it has a definite shape that shows front and back planes (curved planes... what living forms are built from) and side seams, which immediately show even the slightest twist in the form. And, as the artist clearly demonstrated, the placement of the little corners lends itself perfectly to little hands and feet. I think all these principles carry over into stopmotion (well, except for maybe the tiny hands and feet). It seems like puppets can be designed to take advantage of them, to keep things clear and expressive. I also think it could be a great exercise to make yourself a little flour sack (could be plasticene or an actual sack partially stuffed with polyester fiberfill, and with maybe wires running along the seams) and practice animating it to give it a semblance of life. That's something I'd actually love to try one day. On a strongly related note, I recently uploaded a chapter to the stopmotionanimation.com's Newbie Guide detailing The 12 Principles of Animation as laid out by these guru-dudes. I urge you to read them... study them, download them and memorize them. Make them your credo, your mantra.... ok, you get the point. At the end of the list is a link to the Animated Cartoon Factory, which has loads of great little quicktimes demonstrating the principles and how to combine them to create lifelike action. Comments Feb 02 2006 Echoback... bloggin' the blogs (Monodrone.org) I was just perusin' the webways tonight, digging the ambient darkness, and ran across Monodrone.org, online home of Jeff Gerhard. The site apparently isn't finished yet, but he has a few sections online, including one called This Altogether Thunder. So far it only includes 3 entries, one of them largely concerned with my site: Anything with Dark in the title is guaranteed to be good. Obviously we share the same aesthetics and a lot of interests. I was so pleased with his writeup for my site that I left him a comment at the bottom of the page, then looked at one of his other entries, which is about Good Soldier Shweik (the books, not the Trnka films) and he mentioned Bruno Schulz, the Czech author who inspired the Quays so much, and who I went into raptures about back in April 2005. His other entry concerns medieval maps, and I love his take on the subject. I competely agree with him, I wish modern maps were drawn the way they used to be. It's good to run across a like-minded soul, and thank god for the internet for making it so easy. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention... I almost choked reading the comments under the Anything Dark entry... somebody mentioned Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books! Too weird! Comments Jan 30 2006 Nobless Oblige (noh-BLES oh-BLEEZH) The belief that the wealthy and privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate. From French, meaning "nobility obligates". Once again I've dipped into one of Shelley's emails for another Noble nugget. She's wealthy in knowledge and understanding, and likes to share with those less privileged. I swear, without this girl, I don't know what the heck I'd blog about half the time! She sends me these great inspirational things, and they're just so good I gotta share 'em. Here's a quote about Mikhail Baryshnikov from a New Yorker article. Why am I blogging about ballet you ask? Just read it and all will be revealed.... "Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the most eloquent soloists of our time, once summed it up: When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. . . . Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be. . . . Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly." Now, substitute animator for dancer and you see where I'm comin' from. It's not quite the same thing of course... a dancer much more than an animator reveals themselves onstage... you see exactly how well they've developed their body and the body language that comes through unconsciously and reveals their character. An animator is more hidden behind his puppets (or drawings, or pixelmaps or whatever), but still, to a much lesser extent, I believe the character will come through. My art instructor always said he could see each student's personalities in all of their drawings. I suppose this explains why the Quays and Svankmajer do such intense, uncompromising work. When I think about them, I picture extraordinary people.... extremely passionate about their art, and making life choices to support it. For instance the Quays moving to London. *** If you tried to check the Magic Clock trailer I posted earlier and it didn't work, that was just a temporary link. Here's a new, more permanent one: Magic Clock Trailer. In the near future I'll get it properly hosted on my server and posted on the Video Clips page, but till then, this is it's new home. Enjoy. Comments Great catching up with you, Darkstrider, super posts; on reading, Buffy, musicals... I have recently discovered how Astaire was a huge proponent of what's now popularly called integrated musicals, which for him meant dance and song that advanced the plot and narrative. I just bought his fourth picture with Ginger; Swing Time, and just about fell off the couch applauding every number. How fantastic that particular film is. It turns out it is considered their absolute best. There's a number in there considered Ginger's best two miutes of her career, and I have to agree. Oh and the Starevitch clip??!! Man that is killer great. What the heck is it? a trailer? what? where? who? how can I see the rest!! Thanks, Shelley Another thing about those classic musicals, and that Whedon brought up in his commentary - too much cutting kills a dance sequence (Moulin Rouge, anybody?). And a dancer should be seen in full, from head to toe, rather than a lot of close shots of the face and the feet etc (Moulin Rouge anybody?.... sorry, I'll quit picking on it now). I really dug Bandwagon. Great stylized backgrounds ala Caligari, and some really cool dance moves. Cyd Charisse is a goddess! I know as a dancer yourself you'll appreciate this... the Quays (how many times can I mention them in one blog entry?) were interested in using space the way a dance choreographer would. About Magic Clock, it's available as an R2 PAL disc through Chalet Films in France. Jan 26 2006 His Dark Materials First an apology of sorts. My last blog entry ended up going off in a different direction than I intended... I hardly covered myth at all! I'll get to it, I promise, but today I have a few more things to say about Philip Pullman and his fascinating series. Forget that PDF file of the first chapter... I looked at the 'excerpts' on the Bridge to the Stars site, and each excerpt is three full chapters! I wasn't going to buy these books.... I love the ideas, but didn't think the actual stories would appeal to me much. But after reading the first three chapters of The Golden Compass I'm hooked! I really dig the idea of the Dæmons and the way he uses them to reveal a character's inner dialogue. These little things are dopplegangers... little tag-alongs that shadow their masters and reveal their emotional state sort of like those cartoons where a person's shadow is doing what they really want to do. Example, in one scene Lyra is morosely acquiescing to the admonitions of an adult woman while their dæmons are rolling and clawing at each other. And the form the little buggers take is very revealing of the master's nature... for instance a good servant will usually have a dog for a dæmon while a strong warrior might have a lion. Pullman is very widely educated and has a great knack for melding together the psychological and the para-psychological, the scientific and the spiritual in a way that shows an innate understanding of each and of human nature. I don't doubt for a moment that he gave males female dæmons (and vise verse) because they're a sort of personification of the animus/anima of Jungian psychology. It's also a fact that female pets will bond with male humans, etc. I think what really hooked me though is the world the story takes place in, an alternate-dime