Cole

Doing some more research and found this nice little film on Thomas Cole on the website for his landmarked home in Catskill.

Picturing America

The past year or so we've been happily and proudly associated with the NEH and PBS' Picturing America (On Screen) initiative.

The program is expansive -crossing schools, libraries, websites and ultimately broadcast media. We did the title sequence for the broadcast and made a few of the short subjects.

In trying to finish up the last one, we hit a bit of a snag. So I revisited the NEH website for insight and found this. The body of the segment is downloadable, this is the only version I could find embeddable (which, incidentally, is a spell check approved word whereas "downloadable" is not).



The first :45 seconds or so are a kind-of intolerable opening. Skip passed them to body of the clip. The students reactions after the NEH promo ends are also interesting.

As mentioned, there was a hiccup with this last piece we're doing. Watching this little video helped remind of the goals of the initiative. I had been thinking a lot about the "ways of seeing" and "observing" aspects -the former hasn't been well addressed in the other episodes -but was reminded of the resulting rewards of seeing and observing: illuminating stories of the past.

Hopefully this shift in thought will help wrap up the last subject and turn it into a good little film.

Picture Process II

Here's the next couple steps for the motion graphics illustration of the "The Dove".

After typing the script, reading it a few dozen times and listening to it just as many we did a thumbnail, sketchbook storyboard.

This is a good way to start figuring out what's going to happen.

It's a simple starting point.

This very rough board was transferred into a less rough board.

Since this is graphics, the board doesn't necessarily need to be as precise as a "cinematic" film.

The board can be pretty diagrammatic.

Next, we'll do a rough pass on the animation.

Collaging A Collage

We've been contracted to do the graphic for the NEH/PBS initiative "Picturing America".

This has mostly been the title sequence and typesetting with a couple other things here and there. That's in addition to the handful of full subjects we've produced.

Last week we began discussing with Gail Levin a way to illustrate the construction of Romare Bearden's "The Dove".  The impetus behind this idea was the voice track of his niece describing the artist's thought process.

We thought it would be interesting to document the process as we go along.

Today we got the audio cut.

Step One: Listen to the voice over a few times.

Step Two: Type the transcript.

Step Three: Verbally run our idea by Gail.

This little bit is deceptively difficult.  When it's complete it should easy and obvious, but getting there might be tricky.

The primary concern in creating illustrative graphics about art is to be "true to the subject."  At least in these educational films.  Reverence is appropriate.

What is difficult here is that we'll need to show the construction of the collage without the benefit of pulling apart the layers from the original. 

Our next step will be to sketch a rough concept board.