Idiotic Technology?

*ring* *ring*

Me: Studio.
Phone: Hi. Can I speak to the person who handles your I.T.?
Me: I don't know what that is.
Phone: The person who handles your I. T.
Me: What's I. T.?
Phone: ...
Me: What precisely are you selling?
Phone: We're XYZ Consulting and we're the industry leader in data blah blah blah blah...

I still don't know what "I. T." is. It has something to do with computers. Sounds like middle management for people who don't know how to send e-mail.

I guess I'm our "I. T. guy" whatever the #%&@! that is.

One of our machines decided not to work this week.

As "I. T. guy" I figured it out.

The problem: the "air deflector door". Inside a PowerMac G5 there is a plastic door between the guts of the machine and the external (presumably titanium) access panel.

Through my intrepid "I. T." skills I discovered how to make the computer work. Here's what I did:



I took off the "air deflector door".

Want to see the computer not working?



Place the plastic door in the holding slots at the bottom and the fan on the hard drive shuts off, preventing the machine from starting up.

I'll point out that there is no physical connection between the door and the fan. In fact, the door doesn't attach to any other of part of the machine.

In order to fix Macintosh computers, sometimes you just have to think different.

...

A few years ago I received a call from a colleague telling me that a certain animator had passed.

"We lost XXXXX", he said.

Immediate condolences were offered. After a minute of the usual questions, I thanked him for calling and admitted that I never even met the person and, not to speak ill of the dead, didn't at all care for their films. He laughed and agreed on the last point and voiced what I already respected on the first -you may not have known this person but they were very important to our community and now an important of us all is missing.

I did know Emru Townsend. Even if I tried I couldn't think of a negative thing to say about him. Maybe that he never visited me in New York. And being Canadian is, at least, questionable.

When a friend texted me last night of his worsening condition, I immediately thought of that call from years ago.

Emru was a part of our global family. Not just through his publications, or through his well considered love of animation and graphics but as kind and bright person.

The world is a better place than it was when he was born into it. This morning, we all wake a little worse off.

I'd Like To Take Credit For This...

In addition to writing this awesome "blog" that 3 people read and making animation and graphics that nobody wants to pay for I teach college students who are too cool to appreciate the hilarious and brilliant things I say.

Several years ago I had a student who was clearly a natural. I've had a several talented students, a few of those were also hard working. They've gone on to a degree of "success" in animation.

Hanne Berkaak, who co-directed this video, transferred to The Royal Academy the year after I taught her. Perhaps she realized that there was nothing more New York could offer. Maybe she felt so gypped by her American education she fled as soon as she could.



You get her coolness and her inventiveness in this piece. Hopefully this will lead to more opportunities for her to show us her rare natural skills as an animator.

My First Animation!

Here's one from the archives.

Way back in the 20th Century when I was producing the "Troubles the Cat" segments for CTW/Cartoon Network's Big Bag they asked if we could help out on another piece.

Maciek Albrecht was the director on "Troubles" and we turned to him to take care of this film.

It actually is a film. The animation was shot on Maciek's animation stand in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Maciek used to live and have his studio in the building with the smokestack on Bedford Avenue and North 3rd.


"Zoom to the Zoo" was the first piece I made with Maciek out of this space. "Troubles" was being animated in Krakow and the production was run entirely out of The Ink Tank.

The biggest worry at that time was lunch. There weren't any places to eat on Bedford Avenue in 1997. There was a Polish bakery with questionable hours and even more questionable pastries. There was a pizza place or two several blocks down the road. I think even Plan Eat Thailand in its original cozy nook was yet to be opened. Elly, Maciek's wife, would sometimes make lunch for the crew. This is how I was introduced to bigos. She even made vegetarian bigos for me.


(image from here)

There's a real estate broker in Maciek's building now. Finding a place to eat is no problem. But if you're still craving some old fashioned Polish cooking -there's a pet food store right underneath Maciek's old loft.

We had no money to make this film. Maybe $4000 that we could spend -including stock and lab and transfer. I also didn't know anything about production. I was good with charts, though.

The idea was to do cut outs because they were cheaper. Maciek has this way of doing what he thinks will look best despite costs -one of several bad traits I learned from him.

Here we animated on paper. Then inked on cel the old fashioned way -all quill pens, notice the colored lines. The "opaqueing" is mostly cut out paper colored with airbrush (some is flat painted, some is colored pencil, some watercolor) and spray mounted onto the back of the cel.

Maciek then created a cycle of 4 frosted cels with airbrushed "wisps" on them which add a layer of moving haze.

Like I said, I didn't know anything about anything at the time. Maciek was probably tired of me looking over his shoulder for 10 hours a day and gave me some things to "animate".

He gave me a drawing of an eagle, a bear, a couple parrots, a gorilla, a gator laughing, a lion and there was another that got cut but I don't remember what sort of animal it was. It must have been really bad.

That's when I learned that animation is mostly tracing. Get a good drawing, move some stuff around, trace.



The compositing was done in the AVID. We had to work with a "supervised" transfer to BetaSP from Technicolor since that was all the budget afforded. The rendering of the keys took probably 48 hours. They're not even good keys but at the time, for the budget this was like The Matrix.

Naked Campaign: Coda

Our two year project of chronicling the 2008 election with Steve Brodner came to a close on Tuesday.

The approach to editing this film was different from all the others. Even so, the final structure demonstrates what we hoped (I hoped, at least) this would experiment achieve. Illustration provides a specific way of seeing, in this final piece the images (and the ellipses) tell a story that words could not speak.

This time we had the soundtrack as a starting point. On Monday Gail and Ben went to Bennett Studios in Englewood to shoot Jon Faddis playing the National Anthem.

This told us how long the piece would be.



Unlike the other videos, I began by putting on the opening title sequence and blocking in the end signature and credits. Then the detail work.

The edit started from the back.

Initially, we discussed using Obama's 2004 convention speech as a lead. We'd intercut with footage Faddis performing while Brodner drew and then mix in a clip from Obama's Tuesday night victory speech.

We've used real audio before, and found it effective- notably in The Straight Talk Eggspess, Three Legged Race, and Plot Holes.

The audio always comes first. The sound tells you what the picture is. Even when editing sound and picture at the same time the flow of the audio takes priority.

John Hubley famously recorded all of his soundtracks before beginning animation. Not just voice, but music. Tissa David asked him "how do you know it's going to work in the film." His response, "I listen to the track. If its good and it works, the film will be good and it will work."

Since we were working here with a defined measure of time (3 minutes, minus open and close), we decided to fill in the finale first to ensure it received the proper time.

We decided on two clips from Obama's Victory Speech, the second part echoing the "red state/blue state" passage of dichotomies from his '04 Convention Speech which we used for the first Naked Campaign film in January '07.

From there it was back to the beginning. First was Frederick Douglass.


This is also the longest of the portraits.

The editorial plan was to draw the viewer in with an elegant, almost elegaic pace. This portrait starts from the blank page and works to completion in 36 seconds.

Over the course of these films, we've done a lot of "undercranking" or speeding up footage to the construction of a drawing. In this, we purposely moved through the drawing process with slow dissolves and kept it all (mostly) in real time.

Intitially, Louis Armstrong was slated as the second profile.

He was a casuality of time. Just not enough room.

The next guy, Jackie Robinson, starts with his features already established. We see two strong lines being drawn.


The structural intention was to start Douglass from point zero and have each subsequent portrait begin later in the construction of the drawing.

We had a detailed discussion about who would be represented in this piece. At first, I was a proponent of Shirley Chisholm seeing her as more of an extraordinary individual. Rosa Parks, as courageous and noble as she was, represented the inevitable. Brodner made the irrefutable point that she was a "game changer". That her action, inevitable or not, changed the world and she, alone, is responsible for that.


Brodner created her with heartfelt warmth in this illustration. His definition of her action also clarified what this final piece of the campaign should be.

At this point, there was no need for the 2004 speech and the intercutting with Faddis was convoluted and unnecessary. Direct and simple clearly became the way to go.

For Dr. King the framing was tricky. That sort of effected the overall editorial philosophy of the piece.


His section fades out as the camera moves trying to frame him while the finishing touches are put on his moustache.

That brings us to the impressive portrait of Justice Marshall.



We only show his robes being colored in.

Lastly, the speech fades up and Obama is drawn with several parts already on paper.



He starts out, improbably enough, a little like Lincoln. As his features form, the portrait remains open ended. We don't see his eyes. The line is soft and open. His features recede into shadow. He is still a question.

A question -what's that? Watercolor fills in tone as if to say all the men and women leading up to this point simply provided the framework. Here we have the fulfillment of a promise described with pencil, pen and brush.

102 Years, Dammit! 102!

Kate Hambrecht "dragged" me to an animation event last night.

"Serge Bromberg presenting 100 years of animation" at the Alliance Française.

First, let's address the title. It's a peculiar nationalism that has caused the nation of France to completely disregard J. Stuart Blackton's 1906 "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" (we'll call his "Enchanted Drawing" from 1900 a trickfilm, not "animation") in favor of the younger "Fantasmagorie" by Emile Cohl.

You could argue that "Fantasmagorie" is a better animation. The claim isn't "Fantasmagorie is the first animation that doesn't suck", you'd have to go many years deep into the 20th Century to find that.

Bromberg mentioned a recently discovered Russian film which predates Cohl's work, but I haven't heard anything about it.

Delphine, sitting in front of me, advanced the claim that Emile Reynaud created the first animation. Bendazzi offers a few pages on Reynaud and comes down clearly on the side that his work was not film (therefore not animation). I'll side with Giannalberto on this one.

The highlight of the evening was a crazy film that I had never heard of by two French guys I'd never of.


Joie de Vivre's design is drawn from Art Deco (contemporary, although dying in popularity, at the time). Almost immediately after it 1934 release it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

The filmmakers, Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin (Amid Amidi says he's the financier -I haven't seen anything to confirm or deny this) created a stream of consciousness piece that is threaded with by a chase scene and punctuated with visual puns.

Air wave

Public Radio has finally done something right (besides Joe Frank).

Weekend Edition ran a 9 and a half minute story on Brian Dewan that almost begins to capture what a brilliant guy he is.


I've known Brian for several years -the first few years of our acquaintance involved minor chit chat without proper introduction. We've moved a little past the minor chit chat, I don't think we've ever had a proper introduction but at least we know one another's name.