Be more Garden?

      

painting, gardening, animating...

I often look at someone else's work and you think "I wish I could draw/ paint/ animate/ like that" Or even garden like that. I think this is normal, and one of the ways you learn. So you try to copy the style. It's derivative and a bit rubbish. So you rework it and rework it and eventually end up with something that looks a bit like the thing you admired and quite a lot like your own work. The trick is not to give up or fly off at a tangent down another interesting-looking pathway before you have assimilated. Exactly what is it about that style/ image/artist that is so good? why? how?

Then, sometimes, the gardening will inform the painting and the animation will inform the gardening and so it goes (especially when the painting studio is in the deranged jungle end of the garden)

But animation isn't really about the image... it's about the movement - not an avenue of trees but a waving of branches enclosing the imaginary walker and a rustling of leaves and a sense of being in a jagged green and grey ocean rolling past your feet. It's hard to study the movement in an animation, to investigate how that tells the story. It's easier to spot when it's bad but when it's well done...you're just there in the garden, feeling the sun on your face and the freshness of the air.

    

Mums

Nell waking up... or dreaming

I like drawing old ladies. They have character and no-one expects them to be beautiful or graceful...although they often are. They are full of interesting wrinkles and contours, never bland. Full of stories and symbolisms, usually they embody someone - a Mum, Great Aunt or Grandma - who is important.
My own mother was ill last year - queue panic, what's app group flurries and early morning motorway dashes. False alarm, but it made me think of how people we love never die, so long as we hold them in our memories. But how does that work from their perspective? And how on earth do you indicate in a drawn animation the idea that someone (Nell) is living in another person's memory? Are they conscious, or just a movie which plays? Can they affect the rememberer, or are they just trapped in a time-loop? How frightening to suddenly jump from being 30 in a maternity ward to being 80 celebrating some anniversary. From first date to deathbed and back. Maybe it's like dreaming. Maybe it would be easier to write this as a book! So much, always so very much more to learn...

Be More Shed

nobody puts shed in a corner

Well I did. I wrote and drew not 365 but 366 sheds for The Daily Shed. Lockdown continued. Then I wrote and drew The A-Z of Sheds (so hands up if you knew what a xyst was?) The pandemic continued, so I did 2 picture books of 1-10 interestingly random alliterations inspired by Mervyn Peake. And then 10 more, but sheds. Everything still closed so I continued to search for inspiration by tramp the newly litter-encrusted footpaths of my "semi-rural" locale; Used Facebook to cheer up my chums and myself with comic illustrations, and photos, whilst creating depressingly nihilistic animations. Worrying about the state of the world, about money and bills, joining protests whilst mentally hiding under the bed waiting for the grown-ups to come home. Brooding on the nature of creativity and the meaning of it all. Obsessing about loo rolls, petrol shortages, and Normality...and finally launched into a picture story book about 3 sheds. And then adapted it to an animation. Massive amount of work. Fiddly drawings, 7 1/2 minutes. 

How the hell do you animate a shed helping another shed to make itself a pair of legs, when neither of them has arms to work with...or a face? Why did I write such a difficult story? Because the story was all about words, rhythms, creating images in people's minds...yes, let them worry how to get those legs on. It took so long I stopped and made a joyful 1 minute film (Be More Shed) half-way through, just for fun. This is a privilege.

So now - we still have brexit, corona virus, war in Ukraine and the cost of almost everything is doubling. I still don't have my pension. Enough. I decided to try to use animation to save the world. Maybe you cannot change the world by drawing it, but you can certainly try. Impossibility should never be a barrier to dreams. I will animate the Struggle, the Joy, the Outrage. I will do what I can. I will try to become my best me. I will try to Be More Shed

Strong is the new... sexism

Cactus is completed.
It turned out to have a coherent narrative - which, obviously, was not the one I had written and storyboarded (however sparsely) for it.
Once again I seem to created a hero who is an old lady with a bun. Once again I seem to have created a story about an artist/ the power of art.

I can't decide whether that is
a. sloppy thinking, just looking at what's right in front of me or
b. authenticity, speaking about what I know, understand and feel strongly about
or maybe c. both of the above plus there aren't that many animations about old ladies but the ones I have seen - notably Belleville Rendezvous- have been fabulous. so
I like making films about women and there aren't enough of these
I like heroes who are NOT physically strong or beautiful or overly sexualised...

which leads me to the thought: Why do I SO hate that advert: "Strong is the new beautiful" After years of being told we must be beautiful to have worth, women are now being told that strength makes us beautiful. A Post-feminist loophole that means men can appear to be less obsessed with our outward appearance to the exclusion of any inner characteristics, achievements and skills, yet still berate us for not fitting their model. Beautiful may now have more diverse forms but it is still compulsory.
Sod that.
At least when you are 80 people stop demanding that you are beautiful, sexy, available-for-objectification and physical strength is not expected/ but mental strength and a fierce independence can be appreciated as a somewhat shortage commodity...

So - old lady heroes to the fore! (and no thank you, we do not like the word Heroine. That is a badly-spelled narcotic. Nor the word Shero, which is a tautology since the Hero (personal name) of classical mythology was a woman. and since most of the heros I know are women)
Since you ask, I'm not 80 - nowhere near. But when I am, I expect to still be making animations, possibly about 100-year-old women.

New Year Resolution part 2...Pen

Pen -  a tiny animation

Tidying the hard-drive, finding a failed submission for an E4 channel ident...instead of binning it I decided to re-examine, recycle, and start from an existing sequence to see where
the animation would go. Approaching it as I would walking, and increasingly, drawing. Having fun. It went into images of cages, surveillance, midgies and scary birds.





Sometimes you have to let the story tell itself, and not try too hard to impose a meaning, a moral, a reason. They come.

So I finished another film ("Man")

... big news. Not really, but it has already created the need for another film. A follow-on, a deeper exploration of some of the ideas I floated past in this one:
1. the representation of gender and why do we put up with it.
2. the generation of ideas, how and where does it happen.
3. sorts of wooduct-ty marks and how to economically animate them
4. blah blah something to do with the presence of the artist within the work...the self-referential recursive fractal thingummy.
This happens when you have a tiny animation trying to contain several big ideas.
Your head gets full.
Sometimes of fish.

Start with the right story

think in images not in words...?

Another day, another film festival... and I have to say: I don't really get it...animations that aren't actually animated, but seem to be a series of images, some of which have movements in, some not; and which accompany a story being told by a narrator. I don't want to come across all purist (having made a career of doing things the wrong way) but it seems to me the point of animation is that it should do something that text and image don't - something more. That it should be not so much an image that moves, but a movement that is captured. I wonder if people make these films because getting fluid movement is really hard, especially if you are looking for naturalistic movement, or even harder.. gracefulness? Or whether maybe they are starting with a story which is too complex and subtle to work any other way. I like to find stories which will work without dialogue, where the narrative comes across in the actions and the emotions come across in the visuals, the pace, the expressive capabilities of a wobbly drawing.
There's a fine balance in trying to make animations for adults, which are visual stories but neither slapstick nor downright obscure. I don't know if I'm making that balance; but I do know I'd never make an animation tutor- I'd be telling the students "You're starting with the wrong story!"

and here is the finished article

Because it was there...

Once you are out of your artistic comfort zone, and no-one is crying, might as well try some other previously unused (by yourself) and hard-to-imagine-what-you-can-do-with-it technique. A tutor in my first year at artschool told me "you can change the story but you can't change the handwriting". We-e-ell Chris, actually you can if you work hard. If you decide to accept the challenge of doing a "simple clear instructional" animation style - just in case you really wanted to apply for some of those commissions - just to see you can - just because it was there. And quite quickly you realise you have to make the style your own, and it doesn't look much like the "inspiration/ source" materials that they have posted online because - well, that's someone else's work, ideas, style...handwriting. And because copying someone else's work is really boring.
(I mean, if that's what they want, why don't they find out who animated it and get them to do the commission? is that too simple? What about original ideas? What about being different because you are actually trying to compete with those sources so maybe an alternative approach rather than glorified plagiarism might be more exciting to your audience. Or maybe not. maybe your audience wants what everyone else has, in the same way everyone else has it? You see, I'd be rubbish at marketing...)
And then this interesting thing happens where if you take out all the autographic marks, the scribbly, gestural doodads, it becomes all about the colour. And you realise there is a very good reason why you normally work in black and white or limited colour palettes, because you're not very good at colour. I mean, I love colour! I love clashing red and purple clothes, rich mixtures of orange and red, I love the blue of bluebells and the contrast of purple and yellow in an iris. But without the marks, the textures, everything looks like it was cut out of sticky paper in a nursery classroom. And trying to use every crayon in the tin is fine when you are 7, but suddenly becomes painfully difficult and inappropriate when you are trying to be a mature artist. <Guffaw. Mature!>
Well then -  another day, another chance to learn something new, develop a new skill, face another challenge. Another chance to fail and a chance to be proud of succeeding. Another way to be a human.

Between

Somewhere in the borderlands between farting about, playing, creative play and robust experimentation...somewhere in that liminal space which exists between worlds, and beyond the relentless call of emails, messages, and ooh I wonder if anyone has fitbits on special offer right now...
Somewhere in the space we desperately hope is neither this nor that, and so uniquely able to observe and learn from both the thisses and the thats...
Somewhere between serious artistic endeavour I hope will result in a useful product, and the joys and frustrations of the process for its own sake... between the joy of freeedom and the self-censorship that tuts "you are just wasting time"...seems to be where I live right now. Computing colleagues used to speak of "creeping featurism" - of the phenomenon of digital things never being finished because they were to easy to endlessly reproduce, tweak, to create different versions ... Self-imposed deadlines help, because shortness of time lessens the fart-about factor - correspondingly then, there is a danger that more time to invest in the art process simply results in more Faffing.
Currently, I am running 3 projects with a curious hierarchy. Animation with a capital A is an experiment in an animation driven not by narrative but by purely visual developments, events following other events on the basis of morphing shapes and what they suggest. Im counting the ways that could go wrong. Narrative is so fundamental, not just to my work but to human interpretation. Plus, new software which works differently, has to be re-learnt and is much less forgiving...Thanks for reminding me why my daily artwork environment is full of obsolescent and unsupported antiquities, at least a decade out of date but still my go-to tools like an ancient and almost hairless paintbrush that is perfect for scrubbing in texture...
Making animations with a lower-case a is a series of weekly animations for posting on social media. It's not self-consciously art, it's entertainment... into which I suppose friends and friends-of can read meaningfulness - or not.
The third which is perhaps art, or perhaps craft, but chiefly Fun with a capital F is not animation at all but making jolly things which will have some kind of a life, actually be seen and bring (in some tiny way) happiness to those who engage with them. A pair of wings for a costume hat, some glass bunting for the front window which the neighbours have remarked on, photoshopping...for so many occasions.

moving between liminalities via a Foucauldian lacuna

Sometimes the three can overlap...sometimes the fun leaks out and into other things... and the ideas can jump from one to another, if we do not allow ourselves to put fences round them, but let the borderlands overlap and cross-pollinate.

 I'm thinking I will make a map of these borderlands, of the areas where quicksands and bogs threaten the unwary, of the mountains that offer the best view on a clear day, and the citycentres full of excitement, diversion; and the chance to compare notes with other travellers over a pint or two of creative metaphor. Of paths less travelled by, of where be dragons, and where best to start your recherche for temps perdu. Although perhaps the point is that liminal spaces cannot be mapped - but that's no reason not to try.

Feed your Head - with Animation

I love film festivals. And Aesthetica/ASFF & Manchester/MAF give you 2 in one week which tends to make your head rather full. Also, strangely, it tends to give you a sense of existential crisis. (This film festival is full of film students. Only film students. We are making movies in order to train people to make movies. My life is pointless. sort of thing). Once again I was amused to hear some informed scoffing (Huh, its just a one-character shot. Too easy) and relieved to hear other people voicing my own confusion. There is always at least one film I get to the end of thinking "What? WTAF? I don't get it"... but sadly not in a good, "ooh this really challenges your assumptions and makes you think" kind of way but more in a "either I am really dense or this animator is just failing to communicate, and why the hell do ALL of these animations have funny little firefly things in" kind of way.  There was one which featured fireflies as protagonists, and one in which they were the metaphor that carried the plot...but about 8 more in which I just felt like animators were afraid of stillness so there had to be some kind of random movement in the background. Or, ooh, maybe fireflies are this year's big trend. And I've missed it. Again.

http://pepelemorse.tumblr.com/

There were some fabulous films, my favourite from MAF was probably Lucrece Andreae's Pepe le Morse /Grandpa Walrus (the story, the drawings, the believability of the characters) but there was also some really effective mixing of media/ style/ scene in Daisy Jacob's the Full Story - mixing drawn and painted images seamlessly with pixillation...(and that was something else besides bugs that was very big this year, live action pixillated)and Carlos Gomez Salamanca's Lupus, a kind of animated documentry/ reflection.
ASFF seemed to have more stuff that was visually dark and highly textured, but also with - well - JOY. The biggest hit with the audiences seemed to be Jack Bennett's Not the End of the World, because it captured so accurately the excruciating intensity of teenage first crushes and confusion. Once again the programmers appeared not to have anticipated that anyone might want to see all the animation programmes (rather than pick-and-mix through experimental, music videos and a bit of thriller, say) so trying to see them all meant travelling down on two separate days and a killer sunday schedule. Thank goodness for the nice warm teabar at City Screen.
And once again MAF co-incided with the latenight xmas market, so enabling shameless retail interludes in the gaps between my selected programmes. This enabled me to empty my head (aw look, baby penguin xmas baubles) before filling it again with ideas, questions, inspirations and enthusiasm for my next animation experiment. Hoorah!

I hate walk cycles

Is it just me, or is the obligatory concentration on walk cycles really boring and cliched? Of course, how people(animals, animated cheese-on-toasts) move is a great way to show character and mood - (sneaky, happy, existential dread). In a character with limited information (when compared to a human actor) we have to use everything we can to establish a real, empathic personality. And this includes posture and movement. It's the idea that everything is about walking...  I can appreciate the philosophy that "Its not the destination, it's the glory of the ride" but the more interesting journey is a metaphorical one...

In 10 years of hand-drawn animation, the current short is the first  time I have ever needed to concentrate on walking as an activity, and tried to show the difference between walking with hope, drudging without it, going up a hill or down...but all of these were variations on the same character, in a mostly one character storyline with no dialogue. So the way he moves is all there is, and what he is doing is walking (to get away from, to get to, to search for...) . generally, walking in these shorts is a rare activity, its all about cauldron stirring, extreme closeups and maybe drawing yourself a new face.

It's possible I completely misunderstand how to do animation and that all of my work would be improved by a greater study of walk cycles; but for me, the movements, their extreme range, anticipation and aftermath of each one in Disney or the classics is too much. Too ugly and unreal. The extreme exaggeration is also part of what makes female characters so sexualised. But is it necessary? I like my movements and my characters to be more subtle, less funny but more likeable.

If we all learn (and teach)how to do animation the same way, the films will all come out the same way. And part of that problem may be that in most commercial/ feature animations, the imagery is flat and bland - that is to say it has no signs of having been drawn by a human hand - perfect curves, smooth flat colour, shading provided by computer algorithm. In small films by independent makers you will get something more shaky, quirky, visually interesting even before anything starts to move. The character can be described in the marks, the energy of the drawn lines, the round/angular smooth/jagged, sketchy/ assured...the materials themselves and their natures & associations. Unfortunately this kind of handmade and "painterly"(ooh I can use that word for the first time since Artschool) style is time-consuming and expensive for studios and so seldom seen. How can we scale it up? How can we economise ? How can we treat animation as an art process rather than a commercial film production line? and How can we encourage students to really experiment with technique, texture, style but still provide them with the skills they need if they want to join the commercial hegemony? I'm not sure walk cycles is an answer...

Actual films online

Quick note to both my readers...short films, trailers, and experiments are now being posted twice a week on Instagram ...Highlights, Lowlights and random nuns.
Also, I'm leading up to an animated advent calendar to be posted daily from 1st December.
Don't like Instagram - then try Vimeo

Animation as a social activity

Part 4 of shakespearean woman - Lady Macbeth on the analyst's couch - has won a wee prize at the Shakespeare Film Festival, Yay! Hopefully I will be down in Stratford for the shortshorts night...And the Nice People at Out in the Garden have recorded another voicetrack for part 6 which is now complete. Whither next? Oh, well experiments in new "theme tunes" are being conducted with friend and colleague Mike Kirkup; new "Elizabethan style" music on guitar and harpsichord (did they HAVE harpsichords in Elizabethan times?)...and also some incidental music of the old cinema school; a possible model for many future shorts. And the NP@OITG are considering the possibility of devising new stories for short shorts collaboratively, improvising screenplays instead of plays. Suddenly animation has become a very social activity. ...which means it all takes longer.



Meanwhile, I have been playing about with stained glass and driftwood, and making things. (possibly badgers) This has also involved walking on the beach. Is it art? is it craft? is it important? Well it's fun, and as I recall from the Sculpture School graffiti of the late 70s "Art can be Fun. Fun can be Art". And it provides achievable (with some language and personal injury) challenges. Plus getting feedback is nice. and making things can be a social activity.

After artschool, after various group studios and the PhD forum (Northumbria) and the late lamented School of Arts & Media (Teesside), there needs to be a new art community...but this is not always easy to find. Will they want me - am I cool enough (should I have a handbag made of an old Dulux tin? are my earrings making a statement?) Is this a scary clique who regard me as competition - or is that all in my head? How do I get beyond smalltalk and make meaningful connections? Exploring the spaces between disciplines, and the overlaps, remembering to look for creative energy everywhere...and Its just possible I have re-acquired a community of practice.

Sound and Silence

Last night I watched The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney, not Lloyd Webber), which unaccountably I had previously never seen. The Tyne Theatre was a character in this drama - sitting in the posh seats you can really enjoy the baroque, blue swags, plaster fruit and veg everywhere, the extreme wallpaper, the sickening height of the ceiling and the beautifully lettered names of composers adorning the balconies. Reminding you it was - is - also an Opera House. The film was a restored print with ghostly green or purple/blue tinges, and some of the scenes were almost undecipherable. In fact there was so much colour in the Black-and-White it took a while to register than in the masked ball sequence it had suddenly gone into colour...a garish, red-heavy technicolour. But it was excellent, atmospheric, and in the "famous" unmasking scene, truly scary. Meaningful looks, heaving bosoms and general (by modern talkie standards) overacting notwithstanding.

Excellent, very much because of the live score provided by Brendan Murphy and the Mediators, using piano, electric keyboards and synths, glass harmonica and random percussion. Normally, I hate electronic music, but the subtle shifts from piano to organ to disturbing electronics were perfect, and provided a great counterbalance to the melodramatic elements of the visuals. I started out expecting - hoping - this would be a percussion version of the Buster Keaton-esque rinkydink live piano, huge and fast and mirroring the film. Instead it was subtle, beautiful, minimal in places and crazy - but never baroque - in others. It balanced the film and helped to reinterpret it for a contemporary audience. And a live soundtrack, with all the emotion and sense of presence and spontaneity...as though the band were expressing their response to the film as it occurred to them (which of course wasn't how it worked)...
An inspired idea by whoever programmed it into the Whitley Bay Film Festival.
And it made me think why it is that I hate the comedy soundtracks of animations - the mwah-mwah noises , the plinkety plink of feet winding up to run, the strange violin wa-ee-a telling you someone's jaw has just dropped in amazement. You don't need them. It's overstating. It's bolted on. And formulaic - a code - the opposite of live, spontaneous and expressive. If animations - like silent films - need to make their statements boldly and clearly, then that can be counterbalanced by a soundtrack which tells the story in a more abstract and lyrical way. As an animator I work with just the images; although there may be a script if there is dialogue; but the story, the emotion, the atmosphere has to come across without any sound...or how can I complete it? The sound IS an add-on, and yet it has to be as communicative, as creative, as crafted as the animation (or the silent movie) itself. And somehow it has to give an impression of an integrated, holistic end product...of an interplay between the two elements even though one is created after and in response to the other...a collaboration. I wish I could produce my own scores for the animation. Mostly, I wish I could afford to commission Brendan to do it.

Comix!

The next big adventure came rather sooner than I planned - the adaptation of one of the tiny Shakespeare animations into a comic. The whole story.

 Interesting how you can get away with a certain amount of disconnect in an animation - two parallel strands of story that you switch between...even in a very short short; but that this immediately becomes confusing in a comic strip. You almost feel as though you want to put dirty great arrows on to say - look this bit follows this line of thought. Then you realise a more grown-up way to do this would be by mirroring some aspects of the visual. Pose, face...easy(?) when you can cut and paste. And then you are forcibly reminded that whilst in a storyboard every frame is exactly the same size and aspect ratio, that is a VERY dull way to compose a cartoon strip. But...those are the drawings you have to work with.
Actually, strip cartoons and old fashioned comics often use a standard size/shape, but have Batman Marvel forever spoilt that by leading us to expect dynamic, different-sized, non-rectangular...? Ooh wait, this goes with my earlier ideas about changing sizes and shapes of screen in a movie...There's probably a really nice piece of software that helps with the creation, measuring, balancing of different frames; but I probably wouldn't use it!
So now I get to re-read my favourite comic books, Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), plus anything by Scott McCloud - this time looking at the shape of the boxes. And so many different ways to explore this particular range of adaptation...

Performance to Camera...or Microphone

A good friend and sometime artistic collaborator has recently started working in "performance to camera" which is interestingly/ subtly not the same as acting or - well - performing. It is a way to share practice which is not simply a documentation, and engages the audience on an emotional level more than a documentary, perhaps because the artist has control of the process. Although maybe also a fruitful area for debate/ argument about auteurship and the locus of the "art" within the medium. I thought of this when I was doing the final sound mix for the soundtracks of the Shakespeares. I wrote the scripts, yes (based obviously on the ideas of Shakespeare, Hollinshed, and a number of scholars); but they were recorded as a kind of radio play, by members of "Out in the Garden" theatre group. It was live, and although the actors were not professionals they were very human and convincing . And it was apparent that there was a real interaction between the characters as well as the actors.

Mary Queen of Scots...it's an allegory

In very short animated shorts, the whole process tends to be a one-woman band. Ideas, Writing, Drawing, Animating... rather like the process of painting. This process did begin with a written story, but also with a strong sense of what the visuals would be and that the two would work together. Isn't that the only way? But working with a group of people in this way is refreshing. The group sessions had their own life, and that life came into the film, opened it out - letting mistakes or improvisations happen and then remodelling the film around the sound. Letting the particular way someone said a word, or phrased a thought feed back into the pace, and the detail of the images. Making sure that the things I had written actually made some kind of sense - or even some kind of poetry. So Im wondering about conceptualising this as a performance to microphone...which is then in conversation with the images, and they agree what they want to do and then get on with it.
The timings are different - the rhythms of natural speech are sometimes too fast/ sometimes too slow for the drawings...And the drawings have their own speed. Lumpier, more highly textured drawings wanting to move at a slower speed. Black and white drawings seemed to want a cleaner, crisper kind of sound - not technically crisp but stylistically. And then you have to try to match the kind of voice with not just the style of drawing but the shape of the character and how it moves. One of the voice cast asked me "How should a woodcut speak?"

Now that is a bloody good question all animators should be asking ourselves.

Persistence of Vision

Having undertaken to illustrate a children's picture story (that's a separate category from picture book, who knew?), I thought it would be so much easier to make a simple series of 30 images instead of 1500 per minute. How much more time I would be able to spend on each, making it perfect. How intricate and endlessly fascinating each image could be, like the best of those I remembered from childhood. Those which allowed you not only to enter the image, but wander around examining flowers, delicate grasses and textures...and imagine the backstory; look deeper and invent more stories. The liberating ability to include random extras, red herrings and decorative details.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
In fact, I have wildly underestimated the demands of a different discipline; I am struggling not to assume that each illustration must be exactly the same size and shape, filling the "screen" , even though some of them are detailed close-ups and some distant views. The shift from landscape to portrait orientation is easier so far - possibly because coming from painting into animation I found the transition from portrait to landscape was quite hard in the first place.

I failed to anticipate the scariness of trying to draw something well enough to withstand that lengthy scrutiny instead of hurtling past at 25 images per second. Weirdly, this means I am sketching on paper and scanning the sketch in a desperate attempt to get the process going...Not only all of this, but more importantly I have also underestimated the power of persistence of vision. Every image I see in my mind is a "scene" - an animation, and I can't read "the tree was about as tall as a person" without seeing the tree grow upwards, a person peer around the branches and then wave at the reader. Trying to build that sense of movement, of energy...trying to develop the dramatic pace that will match that of the original story...without using animation? Will I be able to complete this project without having accidentally created the e-version, the flickbook, and the interactive animated ebook first??
Watch this space.

Stanislavski's Cat

Recording voiceovers for the tiny Shakespeares, with a group of local drama types, seated round a massage table. None of us is an "Ac-tor", so we try to find ourselves in the story...to speak as-if. Dressing up "like a witch" in pointy hat and stick-on warts as-if Dressing in our best butch to pre-empt certain types of undesired attention. To pass unnoticed...or to challenge and brazen out. If the story is right we should all be able to find a personal truth in it somewhere, which means we can speak for ourselves rather than try to be a Jacobean era witch/herbalist/batty old lady.

stolen from pinterest. Cat from Maeterlinck's Bluebird

None of us is an "Ac-tor", so there was a certain amount of confusion, hilarity and collapse of stout party. In fact, most of the cackling happened off-the-record as we just chatted, teased and generally improvised around the theme. Our host suggested that instead of one of us making a cat noise, why not record the cat? Ah, I have failed to explain that the point is there is no cat. We fashion an imaginary cat to make believe we are witches. Directing is a whole lot more difficult when there are actual people involved. Let alone cats.

Witch one (which one?) suggested we should just record all the bits in between the script...Woman 1 (not yet a witch) replied that that might be the basis of another and much better film - about 3 women pretending to be 3 witches, who in turn are anachronistically commentating on a play in which they were actors. About how the contemporary sensibilities, politics and social structures would commentate on that. About a group of feminist/ lesbian/ non-actors interpreting the behaviours and words of 3 women who were really men, and whose words were crafted by a man.

No, stop, my head hurts. In the end, there really does need to be a "good bit later where Lady Macbeth goes nuts."

Community of Practice Revisited

animating painting...

Last week I had a random tutorial with a Masters student... from a course I don't actually teach on.
From a different subject area.
Except that we are both painters now trying to make animations. Trying to animate paintings.

OK, it was his first and my Nth, but while I was talking I realised both how much I had learnt since MY first - and how much I still had to learn; how many things I had to try and to explore...

He was doing things "properly" - storyboards, pencil tests, animatics (I had to look it up to even find out what an animatic was); I seem to have made an artistic career out of doing things improperly. But what was interesting was not which set of processes we each were using so much as how the process affects the form. In painting there are always happy accidents, interesting marks and ways in which the paint reacts with the surface, the solvent, the other paint.It isn't so easy to see but there are ways in which a technical or computer process also affects the form, and offers opportunities for random accidents of inspiration. Where the problems and frustrations - or the need to save time - generate creative solutions.
We talked about the different demands of learning as much as possible through the project, and of completing a fabulous movie...that old thing of process vs product but somehow still hugely relevant, hugely important to remember. We say that the learning is vital...that it's research...but are we maybe too keen to steer our students  - and our practice - towards the perfect product?

We always say - especially to the students - that teaching is an exchange, that we learn from the process just as the students do. That this is a community of practice in which we can all help each other to grow and develop;  to reflect on our own practice and where it fits with other peoples'. So it was nice to be reminded that that does actually work. Cheers, Christopher...