Brian Dewan had an opening at Pierogi in Williamsburg last night.
It was crammed packed.
Here's Leon Dewan talking to Hiroko about physics in front of one piece.
The show consists of a few things. There's the pen and ink watercolor like the work pictured above. There are a few film strips along with sundry installations. And most fun and interesting are three dimensional little white houses with comic strip illustrations for windows.
Here's Brian.
I can't offer any real critique of the show -not just because it was elbow to elbow and impossible to experience the work -but I think Brian is an amazingly brilliant guy, it's impossible for me to offer any impartial thoughts on the work in this short space.
The post about The Hole and Michael Sporn's insightful comment on Ian Lumsden's Animationblog.org reminded me of anecedote from my early days of production.
It's important to keep in mind when I talk about the 20th Century that I really knew absolutely nothing about animation. Even less, believe or not, than I do now.
Somehow I found myself responsible for the production of various high budget commercials and low budget short films. As such some extraordinarily talented and experienced artists were in my "supervision".
One of these artists had a reputation for being, uh, difficult. All of the other production artists, production co-ordinators, interns, everybody was more than a little afraid of her. The thing is, Sarah Calogero was a magician. That's not fair, or true, she was an artist. She could do things no one else could and had skills with Cartoon Color that no one else approached.
Every night I would take home a VHS tape from the library -that was my crash course.
After a couple weeks I knew what animation was supposed to look like. That was when I brought home "Windy Day".
This was something very differant. These were simple line drawings, or goofy characters, or designy abstraction -this picture was beautiful. How did they do it?
So I watched it again. In the credits "Production Art: Sarah Calogero".
The next day, I poked my head into her office and sheepishly called her name. You could feel her thinking (rightfully) "Why don't you leave me alone so I can finish this, you imbecile?". So I said, "I was watching 'Windy Day' and I saw that you worked on it. It's amazing. How did you do it?"
Immediately she relaxed. She brightened even, talking about John Hubley and the animators at his studio. "John," she said (she and Tissa are the only people I've heard refer to him as "John"), "was always trying new things." Unfortunately, I didn't know what she was talking about -so I don't remember what she said. Reconstructing the conversation in my head, I think she said a lot of it was double exposure (although looking at it appears to have been bottom-lit, she was probably referring to some of the earlier films in comparision).
Several years later I saw a few original pieces of art at Academy of Motion Pictures in Hollywood. The marker had faded and bled deeply into the paper.
That conversation conjured a deep affection from Sarah, she had such a reverance for Hubley. I would regularly ask her how she did things -or had done things in the past and she never anything but kind and generous to me.
At the time, I may not have understood how these films were made. I may have thought I was supremely unqualified for my position. There was a more important quality that I didn't even know I had which happened to make me OK at running productions.
The text is a little dense for art students, so this year the plan was to cut it with Vogler's Writer's Journey. Contemporary contextualization.
Poetics lays out about 10 or 15 concepts on storytelling. Plenty more, since concepts have components.
Aristotle's emphasis on "imitation" in art have particular resonance to animators.
"Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality."
A problem with the modern actor from the "Method" school is they insist on "becoming" the part. This presentation removes performance from it's ritualistic/religious roots and transforms the performing arts from an arena for the audience's self-discovery into a cult of personality.
An animator always imitates their subject. Ken Harris didn't pretend to be Bugs Bunny -he showed what a character like Bugs Bunny might do.
This series of posts about our title sequence for "What Are The Odds" has turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected.
Makes sense since it was a complicated little peice.
After boarding and cutting a leica reel, the next step in a narrative film like this is to create a shot list.
43 shots. 3456 frames at 24 fps.
I had thought to post Ed Smith's original artwork as ink drawings. I forgot that we used the originals in art production.
Inspired by the production process on Eggs we used the original animation drawings and colored directly onto them. It was a little more complicated, as we wanted a colored line -so we scanned the ink drawings, colored them by hand, scanned them again, then combined the layers in Photoshop.
Somehow I figured this would be the easiest process.
Here's a businessman walking, making a deal on a cel phone, drinking coffee.
He's in lockstep with two other guys.
For the art production we wanted to look like a watercolor. To mimic this we colored the paper with pencil and smudged it. This got rid of the pencil line and gave a smooth variation similar to watercolor. It's also about 50 times faster and more controlled than paint.
Signe Baumane helped out a lot with the art production.
One of the things that Ed Smith is best at is economy. He can do a lot with a few drawings and not make it look like "limited animation". I'm working on putting an example from this sequence together.
The downside of this skill is that you need a cameraman and co-ordinator that know what they're doing and when you go back into it a couple years later you need to spend some time trying to remember what you were thinking.
Here's the sheet for this shot. This is a case where the animator didn't figure out the camera. The walking men were created as an element to plugged into a sequence. Ten years this would have been unheard of, today it's commonplace.
As much as I hate to publicize our work, I had to share these "mind maps" Austin Kleon has done of "Make 'Em Laugh".
They remind a little of the "maps" that my writing teacher, Suzan-Lori Parks, would do of her work. I can still see the stovepipe hat she drew for The America Play.
Joey Ahlbum has also posted an excerpt from "Parade".
This film is a personal favorite. As one of the YouTube comments says "nice and random but i like it".
Who doesn't like random?
Brian told about the time this screened in Tompkins Square Park. This was back when it was still a Squatter Hooverville, before their annuities matured.
Amongst the squatters were some real world drunks and bag people.
One of them woke in the middle of the screening, looked up and said, "This movie's in black and white and color." Indeed.
