the 3D shoot

was hilarious

imagine this:

me in an indian orange & elephant jumper, with a stuffed animal strapped to my ribcage to simulate a pregnant belly.

imagine Jacob with a cardboard robot costume covering his torso. imagine him punching me in my pregnant stuffed animal belly.

i'm down on the ground screaming because his blow managed to induce premature labor. i'm screaming 'I'M HAVING MY BABY'. imagine Nate, the equipment manager & all around awesome film guy, walks into the black box mid-scene. imagine his surprise :)

as far as technicalities go, I think we did alright. Palmer ensured that our cameras were on matching settings and placed on the table for optimum anaglyphness.

i kind of wish we had paid more attention to blocking.

we did give it some attention, but not the amount of attention that it deserved. I realized this in post when the scenes that were blocked more intricately, with a foreground, middleground, & background, were most successfully 3D.

PinholePix Hey hey

HorseRadish

It seems that I'm unable to upload our animation 'HorseRadish'

Hopefully I will have more luck with our 3D shoot blooper reel :)

Yeah look forward to that one!

jeez 23 pages of sound jargon

I learned almost a year ago exactly how to appreciate sound. A certain Shannon Silva taught me how. We would sit silently in her classroom with the lights out and our heads down, and just listen. listen so hard it nearly hurt. but it could hurt so good.. especially when you began to hear shoes scuffing on carpet fibers, and zipper pulls quickly and barely hit up against their accompanying zipper chain.

...My mother needs my help with something, be right back.

this is what I'm doing instead of my blogs right now

Father's Day 2011

In the last month, between working two jobs and taking 6x1, my room has become a total disaster, a warzone, and my sleep schedule's been shot to sh*t. So come Sunday June 19th, my first day off from everything, I had high hopes for a productive day.... I slept until 7pm. I woke up for long enough to eat and call my daddy, and went back to sleep.

Same thing today, except it was 3:30 instead of 7... I guess I needed it. Maybe tomorrow a normal summer will ensue.

One can only dream.

Cameralessness

I don't think magazine transfers can look bad, I really don't. It's just such a sick little trick. And so cheap.

I may or may not be in l.o.v.e with clear leader... and projectors... and cameralessness.

I knew this class was going to be cool when I first attempted to get into it 2 and a half years ago, but I was not expecting to be taught how to make film art at affordable rates. Did I mention my love for clear leader?

I found the inking frustrating, though. I found myself acting like a scared little octopus and just kind of purging my ink haphazardly onto the stock. I wanted to make meaning, and shapes, and cool looking sh*t, but it was hard to control. I even picked my colors out carefully and with directed intention, but occasionally I found a foot of my leader had joined forces to make a brown icky disaster. why, inks, why?

At least the bleach was great. The bleach I had control over. Maybe because I was removing rather than adding. How that gives me more control, I'm not too sure....

more on this soon...

it was worth it

i confess, Friday morning when I had to wake up and get ready to make the trek back to Wilmington from Raleigh, I wasn't smiling about it... but I knew the mix up was my fault and there was some rational level-headed part of my brain telling me that it was going to be worth it. and it was. it was worth it.

As Group 3, me and mine found ourselves helping out Diesel's group for the first time slot of the day. they had brought some funky funky props. i loved it. There was an 'oogity boogity' mask, and a skull flask, a black sheet which made its way over Faiza's body as she sat in the woods like some kind of death oracle.

It was interesting to see how the first trial at the Bolex long shot went. The group did a good job at thoroughly rehearsing and timing their action out. As the task master, I had to leave before they actually shot the footage, but that experience came later.

We had Stick come in to play the main character of our 56 second shoot. He was helpful because a) he's taken the class before b) he's funny c) he's a hard worker, and d) he brought his own sweat towel.

we rehearsed the long shot quite a bit because the timing kept changing. first it was a minute, then it was 30 seconds. then it was 53 seconds. perfect let's roll it.

Paul did a great job shooting the Bolex. and we had lots of fun with the props and costumes. props and costumes are fun. always have been, always will be.

I liked processing. but it's a scary thing when you don't really know what you're doing... ya know.

when we captured the inverted upside footage, we could make otu more figures than we thought we would be able to because our developed film looked different than all the other films. this scared me. I panicked but hopefully when we invert it etc in final cut everything will look fine. or interesting.

this was a fun day.

four hours of class was worth four hours of driving.

it was worth it.

the prioritisation of illogical, irrational

Well, Wells, you sure know how to lay things out. you're very smart, thoughtful, edumacated. And to me, nearly inspiring. You used one word that got my ticker beating a little faster, and my brain gears churning - materiality. yes. That is what separates orthodox animation from experimental animation for me. I don't really give a darn whether something is hand drawn, made from clay or from cut outs. I don't really give a darn if it has a narrative or if it has a hidden deeper meaning. I want the texture, the decision to explore the means of creation, the choice to go about something the wrong way, I want the results to give the human sixth sense a little tap on the shoulder. So, yeah, Disney movies are orthodox, normal, commercialized, blabbityblah, but I believe, and I think/I hope Wells believes that a Disney movie could be taken by a boundary-less artist, an animator with no limits, no signed contract to do as she or he is told, just the priority to be a little irrational, and it could be transformed, it could find a new musicality, reach a high level of abstraction, and most importantly embrace the way in which it was created over the why for which it was created.... pride in materiality. illogical creation. the prioritisation of animation.

one is white

two is yellow.
three is orange.
four is pink.
five is red.
i cannot see six's color.
seven is green.
eight is blue.
nine is purple.

I called Jacob Mertens a few weeks ago to exclaim over the phone that my bizarre number to color relation had a psychological name. I had been listening to NPR and happened to catch the tail end of an interview with a musician who could visualize her music due to something called Synethesia. She also saw each number as possessing an individual color.

Like the wikipedia article about neurological synethesia mentions, I was unaware of this grapheme->color association was unusual until I slowly began to realize that others did not have the same experience. I finally surveyed fellow students when I was fifteen and found out that I was seemingly alone in this experience.

But that's just neurological.
Synthesia in art is very different.
I'm new to this word, this concept, so my thoughts on the topic are scattered.
The brain is a powerful thing, and the world is a complex organism, and all things are one.
One person expresses the experience they have due to a certain stimulus, this expression stimulates experiences in thousands.

To be continued....