Conceptual Contextualization, Tumblr/Blogger Sync,

(One of my goals this year, my last year of grad school, is to streamline my internet presence. I have been assigned to write 2 Tumblr posts a week for my practicum, so I'm going to start making a copy of the blogs I do on Tumblr and copy them into Blogger. That way I'll have everything in one place at some point. I prefer Blogger's format, ability to save posts and ability to embed video in blog posts anyway. It is a little complicated to make copies, but I think in the long run it will be worth it, if I ever get followers. Because of the vast amount of information I process every day, I need to start strategizing how I research, how I talk about it, how I organize it and how it relates to the work that I do. The practicum is organized into 4 parts: Tools, techniques and materials; precedents; art, craft and design theory; and related disciplines. )

I do a lot of research, in a loose sense of the word. To an artist everything is research. Looking out the window at the way the clouds move behind the trees is research. Looking at another person's art is research. I am also innately curious and almost obsessed with earth sciences and astronomy from a layperson's perspective. On top of that, I'm very interested in diet, exercise, the human body, health, natural medicine and "primal" eating and lifestyle.

(An example of how I aspire to eat. I nicknamed it the "Privileged American diet", because it's expensive and based on a society of plenty. But I'm a privileged American and my doctor told me to eat this way to get my blood sugar down. It's not my fault sugar and grain are the cheapest sources of calories.)

Out of necessity, I began to research the "barefoot running" fad after I discovered my feet don't hurt as much when I am barefoot, and I started making my own shoes because the fad is new enough that the shoes are all expensive and I can't find what I need. I am interested in homesteading skills like food preservation, gardening, survival skills and general DIY. I'm incredibly fascinated by dystopian fiction and the science, sociology, and cultural consciousness that inspire it. I think about ancient mythology and how it relates to our lives, how we as humans use archetypes, the kinds of stories that are told throughout human history and the similarities in the way the stories are told. My background, personality, personal history, and the environment I live in are all intrinsically tied to what I do and how. I probably spend about 10 hours a week absorbing information that I can definitively call research and cite. This ranges from watching science documentaries while I go to sleep (they help me sleep, that's probably worth it's own blog post) to listening to audiobooks while I work in the studio.

(Viking turnshoes and one of many tutorials on how to make them. ) 

I have several avenues of research that I'm looking at. First, the changes in the world around me on a global scale that inspire numerous fictional stories, debates, emotional responses, documentaries and scientific inquiries. Climate change, resource management, war, ecological destruction and cultural shifts all work together in a web of cause and effect. Second, storytelling itself as a powerful medium of looking at what is happening in the world and translating it into something relatable, using archetypes, myth-telling, folklore, etc. Third, the way I tell these stories using my artistic abilities: All kinds of storytelling will be explored in my research, but they will likely converge as some kind of hands on, physical medium like paint or puppets that are animated in some way. Fourth, I'm interested in music videos and similar kinds of abstracted filmic storytelling connected to the poetic medium of music. I'm interested in how to translate a song into a short film and the precedents of doing so. My final project will either be an animated short film, an animated webcomic, an installation including animation, or an animated music video. I'm open to performative methods of storytelling as well. All my animations will be created using at least mostly physical, handmade techniques such as stop motion puppet animation, paint or paper. If I find a band, my theme will depend entirely on the song and the desires of the band.

(earth 2100, a sensationalist ABC documentary about a worst case scenario of what could happen to our world if we don't make some changes as a species. Includes badly flash animated but aesthetically pleasing fictional story to illustrate the points they make. I found it incredibly compelling even though it was clearly sensational and over the top.) 

Most of the research I do, I would do whether I was in school or not, but I'm approaching it differently now. I'll be analyzing what I look at in a cultural as well as personal context, I'll be organizing my research into categories, and of course I'll be keeping a bibliography and keeping track of who, what, when, where, why and how of what I research. My categories will include general animation; storytelling and artistic techniques; music video; film theory; mythology; dystopian, apocalyptic, utopian and futuristic fiction and nonfiction; and personal context. I will also be looking at the psychology, philosophy and sociology behind these things, if possible.

(After the End: Representations of Post Apocalypse by James Berger. I haven't started reading it yet.) 

As an artist in an academic institution, I have to do this kind of research,. However it is really important to keep in mind that I'm not a sociologist, a scientist, a psychologist, a philosopher or an anthropologist, even though I will be doing research in all of these fields. People get PhD's in each those fields. It would be impossible to uphold the standards of each one of them. It's not my responsibility to keep track of the peer reviewed proof behind them, do statistical analyses, do my own real scientific research, etc. I'm merely translating what I experience into something poetic and learning how to talk about it. I'm learning what makes me tick and what makes my audience tick. I'm learning who my audience is and what it is I want to share with them.

Throughout my blog, I embed links within the text for context (they look like this). It is the reader's responsibility to click on them, because I use them in lieu of a description. I'm already writing twice as many words as I'm required to, if not more. I will also try to cite the most important sources in formal bibliographic form at the bottom of my posts from now on.

Mostly, I need to remember the reason behind the impetus to study art and design in the first place. To take such a risk as to go deeply in debt to study a subject that has no economic security in an economic downturn, I have to have a really strong reason. These reasons are not rational at all, and though I will attempt to make my research rational, the work I do will not be based on logic or rationality. As many artists, I have an intense drive to create. So intense, I'm willing to risk my own financial security despite knowing what financial insecurity looks like. I grew up with nothing. I've been hungry and homeless, I've struggled through low wage jobs, family dysfunction and illness all at the same time. I've been through hell, and I know that my current life is not guaranteed. I'm risking the possibility of falling back into that desperate world, of working low wage office jobs to get by just so I can get better at my art. It's a huge risk, and I've known it all my life. But the impetus to do this is so intense, I feel that I have no choice. It is what gives my life meaning, without which there is no point.

Therefore, what I do as an artist HAS to be authentic, otherwise I'm doing this all for nothing. Why go through all of this only to do something that I don't believe in? Why risk everything only to lose sight of why I'm doing this in the first place? I'm doing art so that I can make use of these things I'm compelled to do on an intuitive level. I was raised to trust my instincts, and when I don't, I've always regretted it. So the inspiration for all my artwork, whether I'm working for a client or not, will be guided by this instinct. It's not conceptual thought that I work from, it's gut feeling, because gut feeling is what I'm trying to process and portray. I can ask myself why I have an instinct, use it as a point of inquiry, follow it until it no longer serves it's purpose and find another path, but I have to follow the original intuition to get there.

Temporalis: Time Passes. Paint on Glass and Animation Installation

Many years ago, I was introduced to William Kentridge and his gorgeous animated drawings. I began to wonder what would happen if paint was used instead of charcoal. It took me almost a decade to try it and find out for myself. I did some research and had some recommendations by teachers. Among others, I discovered Alexander Petrov, Caroline Leaf and my personal favorite, Carine Khalife.

Although not exclusively, paint on glass is commonly done on a light box, which means that the colors act differently than usual painting. The light shines through the paint from behind, so the value is controlled by opacity and thickness rather than adding white. I began by using oil paint, since that is where my experience lies. Oil paint does dry comparatively quickly using this method, even though I mixed it with petroleum jelly to slow the drying process and thinned the paint with vegetable oil. The drawback is that I only have a day or two to work on something, and once it dries, I can't work on it anymore. However oil has certain properties that acrylic and watercolor do not. Also, once the image is dry I can frame and potentially sell the final frame of each scene as a physical painting. Here are a couple quick experiments:

During the summer, I took a class called "Boundary Crossings: Cyber Folklore", an animated arts installation class through PNCA. Oil paint was not an option, as I was using the expensive equipment in the animation lab, so I decided to try watercolor. Watercolor has a few benefits using this method. The dry parts can be drawn into with water and repainted. Also, if glycerin is mixed into the paint it hardly dries at all, though the glycerin greatly affects the texture of the paint and makes it harder to control.

I also used this project as a way to explore something I think a lot about: Disaster, war, climate change and societal collapse. I was thinking about how we take for granted the world that we experience and how things may change at any time. I was riding my bike to class every morning through the lovely idyllic Portland, Oregon on beautiful summer days, and I thought about how one day, all of what I was seeing and experiencing may be gone, and what replaces it may not be so idyllic. I used Google Street View to capture 3 iconic views of portland, and then painted them as though they had been bombed. I used only a few colors so that the series of 3 animations would relate to each other.

To make this animation, I hinged two pieces of glass and attached them to a light box which was taped and wedged down under the camera so that it wouldn't move. The dusty wind was created by brushing a layer of wet paint a keyframe at a time across the back of the top piece of glass. The sky was painted on the back of the bottom piece of glass, the scenery on the front of that, and the movement on the front of the top piece. This created depth and layering and allowed me to move parts of the image without touching other parts.

 I failed to keep it still on the first one I did, which is why the Burnside Bridge scene appears to wiggle. I decided it looked like a camera blowing in the wind, which inspired an idea I didn't follow through on which was to install video monitors and create a bunker for my installation, equipped with video monitors and the sound of radio, a running generator, wind and one lonely voice crackling in on a radio scanner. The idea was good, but so much of the beauty of the painting was lost on a monitor, so I opted for stripping down the concept to a minimal and poetic approach and back projected the animations on to strips of vellum hung with invisible thread, removed all the props, and put the sound on large auditorium speakers for a full range which were placed behind the viewer and echoed through the storage closet. I can't deny that there was a touch of black humor in the project, painting the iconic "Portland, Oregon" sign fallen among the rubble was as much tongue in cheek as it was serious.

I plan to continue this animation process, perhaps in conjunction with my continued learning process with stop motion and claymation. I also plan to continue the theme of societal collapse and disaster. This theme is a contemporary mythology that echoes cultures across the globe and through time. Everyone on the planet is descended from the 3000-10,000 individual humans that survived the Toba super volcano eruption that happened about 75,000 years ago. Perhaps the memory of that worldwide catastrophe has been imprinted on us. Apocalypse is in our genes.

Homage to the Ball-Point Pen

Ah, the ball point pen. So cheap, advertisers find the advertising worth more than the pen, so many of my drawings have been done with a freebie. How many drawings have I done with a white plastic bic, emblazoned with the blue text of a bank or hotel? Many. There are so many things I could say about the simple, humble ball point pen. I prefer it to an art pen, because I can control the value of the mark and because it is cheaper. I love the feel of a simple ball point writing on the most basic sketch or printer paper. I like the smell of the ink. Accidentally, I've even tasted ball point pen ink. So intensely have I looked at a ball point and it's ink, taken them apart, studied the blobs coming out of the little interior straw that holds the ink, I can tell you the black ink is actually a very dark red or occasionally a dark purple or blue. I prefer the ball point to pencil as well, because with pencil I know I can correct my mark, so I'm less free, I think too much, I get intense, I make too dark a mark. It's a leap of faith. Life is like drawing in ball point pen: You can control the value, but you can't erase.

I would like to spend an artist residency with nothing available to me but simple sketch paper and as box of black bic pens. The cheap, simple ones, not the darker, smoother ones that are more expensive.

If I were to go back over the entire arc of my art career, even back to my childhood, I would find drawings in pen or pencil of characters. I've been doing character sketches since I was 12, maybe earlier, but only lately decided to recognize that they were character sketches. The following is scarcely 5 of the most recent character sketches selected from my sketchbook. I added them to my website and will continue to add them as I find some of the old ones and create new ones.

Recently I decided to start filling my sketchbook using the medium I love to make the drawings I love. It's so fast and relaxing that I hardly consider it a distraction from the rest of my work. It can be a relaxing and productive replacement for decompressing on a video game or Facebook. At best, the drawings may be preliminary sketches for future puppets and animations. Or become comics or animations themselves. I'd like to do an entire graphic novel in ball point some day. No pencil pre-drawing. Just a leap of faith.

Here are the best of the last week of drawings. As I find dig out more or draw more I'll add them. Hope you like them!

Little test animation

Ok so this video is pretty jumpy. It's a test sketch of a new puppet I manufactured over the last couple weeks for school. It's also a little faded looking due to the experiment with a makeshift fabric "filter" I put over the camera, which I think may have an application for the other stuff I want to do.

I'm intending to animate the puppet coming out of a chrysalis. Kind of a predictable video perhaps, but I'm new at this and it's an easy set. the best thing I can do is make something simple the best I can, so I understand the nuance. Later I can do something more complicated.

The set was too small so I zoomed in too close to see the wings in all their glory, and the puppet is honestly too big, so the process of animating her takes some awkward support systems (I bought a microphone boom just for that purpose, and you can actually see the little thread on her left wing.)

All in all it was a great and informative test but as a video itself it's not much of a product... more part of the process!

I loved working with "breathing cycles" which I don't see much in 3 dimensional stop motion, but it's pretty much standard in 2-d analog animating.

2 New Animation Tests

So, I've been sick recently. Probably the flu. The kind of sick where you stay in bed for a week, only dragging yourself up for the barest necessities. Unfortunately, I was sick when I had final projects to work on. I missed a couple really important classes, fell short on a project I all but abandoned, and didn't get into the studio at all. What I did do, however, was make a short 2 dimensional animation using a graphic tablet and GIMP. It's very short. I use iMovie to add sound to my animations, and I've found that it lowers the quality of the images, so I need something else to use. But this is a test, so I'm ok with it.

I did it from my bed on my laptop in short spurts of energy before I got delerious and went back to sleep.

Today, I did another little animation, now that I'm feeling better. It's my first time lapse video and the first animation I did with my new Canon Rebel connected to an intervalometer. It's not impressive but it's kinda cool. I decided to let myself be in the picture, because the outdoor long term project I want to do, I will be in the picture. Kind of like a puppeteer, only in an animation. I hope that while the puppet will move smoothly, I will pop in and out and jerk around. Maybe I'll be in black so I'm more of a shadow. That would be kind of cool. Anyway here it is. Enjoy!

5 Day Animation Challenge

I'm posting this a week later than I expected. I did it. I did a whole... or most of... an animation in 5 days. It was suggested that I do a couple more 5 day animation challenges. The sound was much longer than the animation, and I had to loop sections to make it fit the music and it was pretty much a failure. Oh well.

Here is the short, soundless version. It's a sketch, and an experiment. I don't expect to win any film awards for this. But I think it's got some cool stuff going on.

Next, I'm going to play with some armatures that are not wire, make something bigger, possibly with natural materials, and use a found setting instead of building a set. I have some interesting ideas to play with. I'll post them when they are done! It was suggested by my mentor that I do a couple more 5 day animation challenges, and I agree that it would be more productive than going back and finishing this one

Animation Adventure Begins!

This is my first attempt ever at animation. The paper figures took about 10 minutes each to make. It's just a test, to work out how this animation thing works!

I decided to make another very fast, thrown together animation of about a minute or less. I gave myself a deadline of about a week. I know that deadline is insane for animating, and I like that it's insane, but the above 3 second animation took me about an hour to make and half of that was learning the software, so I think I can do it. It's like the animation version of gesture sketching. When you have a very short amount of time to finish something, you really hone in on what is important. Here is a sneak preview of the storyboard and sound:

This little animation is the first part of a longer story. The story has elements from mythology, like the ferryman that takes the dead across the river styx. The girl will have archetypal elements of Persephone and Orpheus, and the story will be somewhat inspired by the ancient myth of Ishtar's descent into the underworld. This scene might not make the cut, as it's a little unoriginal.  

P.S.: sounddogs.com is awesome, and where I found all the sound and music for this piece. Next time I'd like to use at least some of my own sound.