A Mystery Work in Progress and Its Hideous Spawn
April 21, 2007 - posted in work in progress
The 8 or 10 of you who read this production log have no doubt been wondering, “Where has Chris been lately? Has he fallen ill? Joined the Army? Gone to prison? Has he killed again?! Oh, dear. We should have kept a closer eye on him!”
It’s a funny thing, life. The last post I made here was about how I burned out on comic strips at the age of 23, and have never looked back.
Well, in putting that post together, I was forced to look back. And with ten years’ distance, I actually kind of liked what I saw.
Long story short, I’ve been experimenting with something new.
I might be announcing this new thing in about a month. It takes a different approach to the same material I’ve already been dealing with in the Mystery Work In Progress. Work on the short will continue too. But the story and its characters have become too big for one short, and have splintered into two projects– one animated, and one NOT ANIMATED! What?! Yes.
I feel very weird and unsure about all this. These past couple of months have been a hell of a bizarre trip, with flashbacks and strange feelings of being young again, even though I can’t stay up past 9:30 anymore. But I’m following my gut, and that’s never failed me before! (oh, wait…)
Stay tuned!
The Insects
April 19, 2007 - posted in sundries
Here are some specimens from the ol’ robot entomology collection. Might these have anything to do with the Mystery Work in Progress? Probably not. But I’m not sure yet. The words that best describe the Mystery Work in Progress are: a) “Mysterious,” and b) “In Progress.”
Green Screen Movie Magic
April 18, 2007 - posted in work in progress
Last night I put Post-It Note tabs on my fingers and waved my hand in front of a video camera for a few seconds. Why did I do this? Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. It’s all part of my patented Cargo Cult animation process.
This has nothing to do with the cartoon, but I noticed in the background of my weird little green screen experiment, you can see a hilarious NYT Style Magazine spread on my desk. On the left is an article called Starved to Perfection: Why Are We Not Entitled to Take Up Space? which documents the horrible images many women have of their bodies and the obsession with looking thinner at all costs. Fair enough.
On the page facing the article is an ad for Tummy Tuck Jeans shrieking:
INSTANT GRATIFICATION!
LOOK ONE SIZE SMALLER!
This is obviously a subject NYT Style takes very seriously. And as you can imagine, it really got me thinking about how fat and disgusting my hand looks in this video! God! It’s so fat and ugly! My finger is, like, bulging out around my ring! God!
I’m putting my hand on a lettuce and cigarette diet until it’s pretty again.
Redesigns
April 10, 2007 - posted in work in progress
Scene 2 of the Mystery Work in Progress is coming along nicely. (I’m only on scene 2! Dear God, when will it end?!)
Scene 1 was pretty much done when it became apparent a major character redesign was needed. At every step of the process, the characters have asserted their “robotness,” even though I wanted to make them very organic and bendy like the original sketches. They just seem to want to move and act like machines. I think it serves the story well, so I’m letting it happen. And by “letting,” I mean struggling through hours and hours of painful trial and error. But in the past week I’ve stumbled on bodies that are beginning to work, and am nearly done reworking scene 1 and some of scene 2.
In the early stages of animation on a short, it takes a while to get the rhythm of the characters. Especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. So there tends to be a lot of “over-acting” which mellows out as I move along. (get lazy)
To the right is a still from scene 2. I didn’t want to spoil anything, so I shrunk it down a little.
A Shark Dream
April 9, 2007 - posted in sundries
I dreamt that I was scheduled to give a lecture on the subject of Sharks at some university in St. Petersburg, Russia. I showed up at the campus with some friends and family. They were planning on going to a museum while I gave my talk. I hate giving talks and I wished I could go with them instead.
About an hour before the lecture I realized I had forgotten everything I ever knew about sharks. (In the dream I had apparently given this talk before) So I sat in the hallway and tried desperately to remember something– anything– to say about sharks. All I could come up with were vague feelings of awe and fear.
Then I remembered that I had been faking my way through the previous lecture as well. I know nothing about sharks and never have. And I remember thinking that these people were easily fooled– not only had they failed to call my bluff the first time, they’d actually invited me back to speak again!
When it was time for the lecture I said to the students, “Rather than listening to me drone on and on about sharks, let’s make this an open discussion. I want to hear what you all have to say.” And it went pretty well. I faked my way through it yet again!
I only mention it because somehow, deep down, that dream probably had something to do with pretending to be an animator.
Jaron Lanier, Adapted for Storytelling, with Apologies
March 29, 2007 - posted in sundries
A bastardized quote:
How do we make beautiful films? General animation principles… are good enough to create elegance, but not beauty. Beauty requires an awareness of human affairs outside the studio.
…and another one:
When storytelling decisions aren’t made in reference to human concerns, they can only be made in reference to each other, leading to a self-referential bundle of nonsense suspended by a sky hook…
When we treat our stories as no more than conduits between human imaginations, grand vistas open up.
I’m far, far removed from the main animation community, being an amateur who lives in the Midwest. But I do read some animation blogs and books here and there. Many seem to be concerned with industry related matters, or with craft, or with technical issues. Rarely do any of them talk much about why in the hell anyone would make or watch cartoons in the first place. Where does the original impulse come from? What is their real, useful function in the world, and how are they different from live-action films, comics, theater, and music?
I find thinking about this stuff helps me to put off doing my work.
Jaron Lanier is a computer programmer, musician and humanist. Oddly, I think he has produced more inspiring and useful writing on these matters than most people — even though he’s usually talking about software. (also, he’d make a wonderful cartoon character, wouldn’t he?)
The bastardized quotes from above are from an essay he wrote for the Association for Computing Machinery, on the subject of “hope in the next 50 years of computing.” With apologies to Mr. Lanier, I replaced a few words (”software” with “film,” etc.) and presto! the quotes seem to apply to animation.
I suppose these particular excerpts might apply to just about any creative profession.
Still, there are some strange parallels between the software and animation businesses. Both are faced with figuring out how to make money when everything can be duplicated and downloaded easily… Both are perpetually locked in a struggle between the needs of large, industrial proprietors, and those of small, independent or individual innovators… If they expect to thrive, both industries must figure out how to escape the shadows and defy the legacies of some powerful, looming corporations.
There might be real human usefulness to be found somewhere in both fields. Maybe (as Mark Mayerson has suggested) animation has never warranted this kind of consideration. Maybe it’s all just childish little drawings made by lonely introverts. Ugh. It’s so easy for animation to lapse into self-reference. Our cartoons are way too often derived solely from older cartoons.
I don’t know what my point is. I’m just putting off my work. I hope I have helped you put off your own work for a few minutes.
Below are the real quotes from Lanier’s essay.
Lanier:
How do we make beautiful software? General engineering principles… are good enough to create elegance, but not beauty. Beauty requires an awareness of human affairs outside the computer.
…and:
When software design decisions aren’t made in reference to human concerns, they can only be made in reference to each other, leading to a self-referential bundle of nonsense suspended by a sky hook…
When we treat information systems as no more than conduits between human imaginations, grand vistas open up.
Toy Camera
January 3, 2007 - posted in work in progress
More background research!
Last summer I bought a cheap toy camera at a toy store in Florida. It’s a plastic Holga-like thing that takes 4 pictures in rapid sequence on a single frame of 35mm film. The view finder is a little plastic rectangle that hinges on the top of the camera, and the lense is cheap plastic. So 90% of the photos come out complete crap. But the other ten percent are nice research for the Mystery Work in Progress.
I was thinking maybe there would be a kind of dream-like haze in this cartoon. These photos are not exactly the right look, but they do have a certain feeling I want in the backgrounds. (see the previous post about background research)
Sketchbook Assortment #1
December 29, 2006 - posted in sundries
The Mystery Work in Progress is still in progress and still a mystery. It’s going very slowly. I’ve been working on and off on this project, at night, in my basement, for about 2 years now, with huge breaks for other work and life-living. It’s hard to keep the momentum sometimes.
In the mean time I’ve scanned in lots of random pages from sketchbooks I can post here, just for the hell of it. Some of these are many years old, but they’re just laying around, so…
Here is Random Sketchbook Assortment #1:
Fight Club Paper Products
December 17, 2006 - posted in sundries
A couple years ago, I was at the office supply store when these Avery Matte White High Visibility Labels caught my eye:
Over at the Avery Dennison in-house design department, you can picture a pale, skinny, Edward-Norton-looking graphic designer, sitting in a cubicle under florescent lighting, hating his work and dreaming of overthrowing his boss. But instead of founding a liposuction-fueled soap company, or a quasi-terrorist underground boxing league, this little culture jammer stuck it to the man by mixing a little Mayhem into his package design assignment that the management wouldn’t likely notice right away.
Or maybe it was all a big misunderstanding… Some employee of Avery Dennison or their hired design house got bored and sent out a humorous prank memo to the other designers:
Ha, ha, ha. “Paper Street.” Everyone in the studio had a good laugh and went about their day, continuing, as they always had, to design packaging with sample labels addressed to “Jane Jones.” Everyone, that is, except that one weird guy who sits in near the door and keeps track of how many donuts you took from the break room. You know that guy? He doesn’t get jokes. He takes everything literally and follows orders without question.
So off he went, dutifully obeying the memo and updating the design he’d been working on that morning. Two months later, to his surprise, the poor bastard gets canned for having undermined Avery Dennison’s profile as a family-friendly leader in paper solutions. (By God, they would not have their sterling reputation tarnished by those awful goings-on at Tyler’s place down on Paper Street!!)
Today that poor, unsuspecting designer is bitter and unemployed, holed up in a basement somewhere, silently planning the destruction of Western Civilization. Tyler Durden, indeed.
That’s how I like to think it happened…
Now don’t you have a cartoon you’re supposed to be working on? Oh, wait.
Seriously, now. Get the hell back to work.
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