I'm sitting in a mountain of snotty tissues, clinging the power cable of my laptop close in case it lets loose and sets fire to my cosy recovery den. The thing that is most fun about winter in Capetown, is your clothes are more wet coming off the line than going on.
For two months now I've been toying around with a short film concept, and last month flew down to Johannesburg to shoot a portion of it and visit some good friends, when they let me. The film is short, less than a minute long, using stop-motion animation with clay puppets and my reluctant body.
Here is one clay puppet, the antagonist and omphalos of my little story, has he not marvelously sexy legs?
Somewhere in the time between now and then, I blocked myself and my good friend Thomas in my tiny rented room, behind a barricade of rubbish and nonsense, to shoot all the interior shots for the project.
Here's Thomas, helping me to cover one side of my room with bad journalism, pre-lock down.
This entire thing fell down while we took a break, and had to be redone before shooting.
Nonsense Barricade. We could not leave the room during the shoot, to preserve continuity. Thomas is still recovering from the isolation.
The project consists of using stop motion techniques and my ectomorphic-pseudo-athleticism to create peculiar effects, and use them to tell a story. Here's one such effect, shot that day:
Next week, if my nose permits it, I hope to shoot some of the exterior shots, and in the following months, if I do not scare him away, Thomas is going to design the sound for this picture poem we are making.
Watch this space: should it be that I survive the winter, there will be more posts.
I want to make a point I don't feel is made often enough in the field of visual art, and I'll hopefully share some of my concerns for a generation that may be reducing it's own potential for imaginative thought. My point is this: for the most part, people do not read enough. In fact, for the most part, people feel it is straight up uncool to read. If you're reading this, you have my respect, and hopefully these are opinions you share with me. I have been in many conversations with people who openly mock my love of reading, especially in the case of a book that has been made into a film:
With a smug expression they will say "who has time to sit and read? a picture's worth a thousand words. oh, and by the way, did you see how cool I was when I used an ancient quote to make a stronger sounding argument? Gee, I'm awesome." Well, I'm afraid to say, despite this petulent fellows hipster shorts, he is right: a picture is worth a thousand words... or so. Except he probably doesn't have a thousand words to put together. What he is missing is this: if you know how to read, and you pick the right words, a word can be worth 10 pictures. Frankly, I find the above attitude destructive to the imagination. The whole point of descriptive language is to condense ideas, to give flow to conception. words are a tool we can use to build universes inside our heads, in fact rational thought is impossible without them. You need words to think, and if you, like me, live to create images, you have to think imaginatively. if you want to bring your imagination to life, you need to transform images, feelings and events inside your brain into tactile, visible things that others can appreciate and comprehend.
And if you want to take what is in your head and put it on paper- you're welcome to. But you'll only get what's in your head to start with. That's why it is so hard to draw a human being without having one in front of you to reference. If you do not know their anatomy, their forms, their surface reaction to light and their gestures, you will not accurately portray them on the page- instead, you will get this something like this:
:)
Well, how do you get this stuff in your head? Simple. You study it. "did he say study? Ugh". That's right. you study. And sure, photographic memory is fantastic- but I'm guessing if you're reading this you probably don't have it. So how do you quickly and painlessly remember all this stuff you want to know? You describe it to yourself. You use language to condense visual ideas into concepts that your brain is designed to contain. And where do you learn these words that so elegantly condense imagery into chunks of linguistic goodness? In books. In conversation. In magazines. Your brain is capable of creating images, but as I said, you need that vocabulary in order to make images that are believable and communicative. When you read and you comprehend, you're not seeing words on a page anymore, you're seeing images, hearing sounds and experiencing experiences that the author has captured and presented to you so you can take them, so you can keep them with you and call up those images, those experiences whenever you like, whenever you may need them. It trains you to engage your imagination, to test what you DON'T know so you can strengthen the weaknesses of your own imagination.
Reading exercises your brains ability to construct images and places and people and worlds. Reading is not being encouraged enough in our schools, and it is weakening the imaginations and the curiosity of our youth. The human brain is better at rendering graphics than any computer in the world- if you've ever seen a movie better than your best dream, scarier than your worst nightmare, please drop it's title in the comments below so I can check it out, so i can either be blown away, or email you back to give my sympathies for the poor quality of your dreams.
I recently read a piece over on Animation SA by SAE institute’s Riaan Theron on style and the idea of theft in art. It makes a strong case for assimilating the techniques of others, and discourages the idea students may have that doing this is theft.
Riaan is the head of animation at the SAE Insitute here in Capetown, and you can check out his article here. Although I disagree with a few of his points the central idea of the article rings true: Style is hard to invent on the spot. You need to be taught at least the basics of a craft before you can progress, and from there on you will need to learn more and more sophisticated techniques in order to fulfil your creative vision.
How? By trying them out. By copying the works of other artists you admire and combining them into something unrecognisable: Your own style.
I'm by no means saying that your style should be exclusively comprised of other peoples art: That would be stealing and would be highly artificial, and in my opinion, lacking genuine creativity.
Riffing on Riaan’s post, I’ll propose a definition for creativity. It’s a bizarre thing, but in essence it is the act of combining several things in order to make something new that fulfils a purpose. It covers a range of things from engineering to music to language to making a sandwich, but in all cases the components of the engine/song/language/lunch need to come from somewhere.
Using the example of visual art: it is comprised of technique and creativity(in varying ratios). The creationis a series of choices, about what technique, and withwhat content you will create something.
So what I’d really like to say, and I know you’ll agree, is that content is what’s going to sell you as an artist. What’s NOT going to sell you as an artist is the way you may or may not shade like Albrecht Dürer.
That said, good technique will go far to rendering your work in a way that makes sense to anyone other than you, but trying to understand the world and draw content from it* is far more important in the quest to come up with new and creative ideas.
So, that leaves the question: What is good content?
I’m afraid I can’t answer that in any absolute terms, but I think I can guarantee that the conception of “good” content will always change with the times, and to keep up your own creativity in the times you need to stick with them.
On a different note, for your convenience I’ve shifted the focus of my links to some of the awesome SA talent I have the good fortune of knowing and working with, so click the links up top to the right at any time to escape my ramblings and feel the awesomeness. ^-^
It's been horrendously long since my last post, and today i finally found a moment to give an update. I've now found a box in a house in a lovely suburb in Cape Town to call home, it's affordable and there's a sink and it very seldom tries to bite me. I will upload a photo of my box when it looks less like a hobo lives there!
It's nearly the end of my second month working at Triggerfish and the time has flown. There's alot to making a movie I could never have imagined. Already the scale of the thing is a life time supply of intimidation, and the challenge of meeting deadlines and delivering quality work is both fun and stressful. That said, I've learned more in these two months than I did in a year at City Varsity. The Studio is popping with some of the most talented people I have ever met, and it's easy to become inspired just by walking around and looking at the beautiful work being done on this film. Not that there is much time for walking about :)
Nother town, nother drawing group! And this time, it comes complete with a blog of it's very own. Some of my works been put up alongside the uber-talent of Triggerfish, and my knees wobble in excitement to show you the awesomeness that is ULTIMATE DRAWING TIGERS.
The fruit of the last ASA Drawing Class of the year
So this is my last week in Johannesburg, the teets of whom I have suckled on since the day I was born. but now it is time the apron strings were cut, so to speak, and I shall now coerce my savoury milk from the beautiful bossums of Capetown. I fly for the mother city on the 28th, and my last exam for city-varsity will be completed this Thursday the 24th, which leaves me 4 days to party down and leave some love for the beautiful people(friends, family, cats and trees) who have defined my life in Jozi.
Yes guys, you are the tits, and I'll be damned If I don't have those tits in my future, even if I have to wait a little while to have them in my face once again.
So the varsity got us a semi-nude guy to draw! It's the first class of it's kind we have had the entire year, and cigarettes were smoked in the rain, in celebration. Everything about this piece is oily, the page, the sticks, the model himself (who spent 20 minutes oiling himself up and doing practice poses for his friend) and the "supplements" that give him great big muscles that struggle to hold a 5 minute pose.
I'm starting to get the hang of this pastel technique(breaking off +3cm pieces and blocking in tone with the side), although I know now that you can blend the buggers. I'm going to try that tonight at the ASA Drawing group, we're doing another long pose and this time maybe I will produce something that is almost a finished picture.
Time for anger.
These are a walk, sneak and run. To let off some steam, I made them an angry walk, sneak and run. We're animating a fight scene now for animation class. It will be glorious and arguably a better vent than getting into an actual bar fight. But I'm keeping my options open.
I'm trying out a new workflow here, essentially it goes like this:
1.) I think about the walk and act it out, feel it out and eat an entire lemon, with the peels on.
2.) If necessary I scribble thumbnails to solidify ideas and to create references I can scream at later if I forget what I'm doing.
3.) I set keys on some of the controls with stepped tangents, animators survival kit style on the extremes, breakdowns, ups and downs, BUT not putting too much into body mechanics as far as posing goes, just blocking in the attitude, so this rough pass is over pretty quickly. I do not key every control, some are just not involved in the poses that intimately. Then I pimp slap a picture of a koala bear taped to a punching bag in my shed. I do this to get in the zone, to take a break, and to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
4.) I open the graph editor. I focus on individual controls, splining, deleting static channels and getting the curves to resemble the motion I had imagined! It was important to think about it before hand, so that before I see the curves I already know how they should look for each particular channel. (Maybe in my thumbnail stage I should also sketch the graphs, so when my mom sees me working she thinks I am clever.)
While I do this I keep my camera view open, watching to see if my imagination translates well into reality. It often doesn't.
I focus first on hips, and the legs in a glance just to make sure the timing of the hips is planned to the steps. I then check that the shoulders are following through the way I would like them to, then the head. Then I do the feet controls, and if absolutely necessary set keys on the pole-vectors to keep them knees cracking correctly.
I do the arms from scratch at this stage, keeping the poses but deleting the graphs. I first animate the shoulder so it's motion is correct relative to the torso. I do this by keying only the rotation attributes and shaping the curve manually in the graph editor, the only time I click on the control itself is to select it.
After the shoulder's working, I do the upper arm relative to that, then the forearm relative to that, then the hand, fingers, battle-club etc until it acts like the arm I angrily envisaged whilst chewing a lemon rind!
so....
This applies mostly to walks, but I know on a non-cycling shot I would plan it similarly. So try it out, maybe you'll love it. That is, if it works for you. I find it a fast and easily alterable approach, but then again I am the kind of person who would pimp-slap a koala.
A major point of this exercise for me was to produce work quickly, and I did each cycle in a few hours. The sneak was a cheat. I just modified and stretched the graphs of the walk, as well as moving around some controls that didn't have any keys on them. This way i retain the anger, but gain stealth. Perhaps my next post will be less angry, and more stealthy.
