It’s semi-official that we are making a low-budget horror film going into the spring and summer. Outside of my ongoing work on Coal Republic this will be my first real film project in 5 years (well, except for my recent filming of Krusaders 3.) I’m not going to give away details just yet, but if anyone’s interested in being involved with making a no budget film this would be your opportunity to learn from someone who knows.
There are a lot of very difficult parts to making a film when you have very few resources, but the limited resources thing can also work to make you more creative in different ways. Instead of trying to make a film above your means, it’s best just to lean into what you have and understand it is what it is. For example, I would not try to make a special effects thriller on a $250 budget. Understanding the sort of limitations you will have is important from the very beginning, and should inform everything from story development to script writing. Of the many challenges you face, getting people to show up consistently is always one of them. To be fair it is someone of an expectation that folks will be flaky especially when you’re not paying them. This like with many other things people always say they would love to do something like make a movie, but in reality very few people will even have the courage or drive to even get themselves to take the minute risk of showing up. I’ve found this to be true even when talking to people about making content for YouTube or TikTok. There are always a thousand excuses not to do it, but the real reason is always fear. Fear of judgement, of ridicule, of failure, or of being uncomfortable in general. So many people live their entire lives around avoiding risk and discomfort, and as a result are unlikely to do anything interesting. Whatever excuse you have, it isn’t good enough to not do interesting things you might like to do. That’s why I keep pushing to make my work. No excuses. If something is important to you then you will find time for it. So get to work folks, time is ticking. You only have 80-90 years if your lucky so at least meet half of your potential. If not for your own sake, for that of your children or pupals. Imagine your grandkids or young people you have impacted looking at your work and saying “ That old bat had hustle!”
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It’s been a minute but things have not been slow. I think I have finally come to a conclusion on exactly what I want to do with the backgrounds for the chicken processing plant sequence in Coal Republic. The first idea for the exteriors actually came from my friend Rudy when I posted on Facebook that I was stuck on the sequence. He mentioned using stock photos of concentration camps from World War II. It’s such a brilliant idea and goes along with some of the other aesthetics in the film. I’m sure I will print some of these and alter them in some way first, but that’s going to be the starting point for the exterior shots in the sequence. The interiors were different creature altogether. One of the major things that I really like doing in this film is playing with the juxtaposition of the flatness of the animation drawings to the textures of the backgrounds. I really wanted to ramp this up a little bit in the interiors of the chicken sequence. I’ve played around for nearly two years on concepts for this, as my earliest ones date back to 2016. This evening I played quite a bit with some different materials, and I came up with something that I really like for the backgrounds. I took an old canvas board and painted red-brown acrylic on it, and then once that dried used antique white acrylic caulking as a medium to manipulate and create the background texture, which almost simulates old white wash boards or weathered texture. Where the acrylic underneath was not totally dry it blended in bits with the acrylic caulking and created some really nice variation on the surface. My first attempt had too much texture, but I went back with a credit card and gently smooth down some of the surface being sure to leave some of that wonderful texture behind. The lighting of this painting during photographing was also important in the final composition. I really like the results, but still need to play with it more. I will probably need about 20 to 30 backgrounds for the sequence and at least now I have a starting point for developing them. I’ve only just started scanning the animation drawings for this sequence, so there still plenty of time. I’ve put the war sequence on hold until I can shoot some footage to complete it. I need to shoot some live action close ups and extreme close-ups to play with and intercut into the animation. I posted a request for actors and had quite a few people who are interested, which was exciting. Things are starting to progress forward a little bit more rapidly, which is good considering I am behind schedule as usual. The good news is that the schedule is totally my own making, as my project is fully funded by me. One of the few benefits of being a no budget animator.
I know it has been a while since I have made a post. A great deal of things have been happening. I put Coal Republic on hold about a month ago (again, I’m sorry) because so many things keep happening that require my immediate attention. As you know my job (as a teacher at a high need school) doesn’t allow me to go into many details about he issues I am facing there, but I can say we have too many students in crisis, too many students in need, and not enough of us to go around. In addition to those issues, Cate is finishing up her schooling and I have done all I can to help her with that. He union has demanded more of my time as well. We have been working hard to elect pro-education candidates in the aftermath of he strike in February, as well as pass a school levy in Kanawha County. I have also been working on several paid commissions for the fist time in two years (which I had not been doing to focus on Coal Republic), and I have been making most of my gifts for the Christmas season. All of that combined with the normal efforts of having two toddlers and the extra responsibilities I have taken on at work for additional money (Leadership Team, PD Team, Vice President of he LSIC, Vice President of the Faculty Senate, Saturday School Teacher) and my position as an executive board member of AFT Kanawha and co-building rep for my building… It is just a lot of keep up with. I have been trying to develop my skills as a painter in doing a self portrait. For those of you following my Instagram I have been documenting that process on there. I hope this explains where I am, and I can guarantee I will be posting with more frequency but I can say that I will work towards it. Too many irons maybe, but if it isn’t hard then what’s the point?
I think what really drives my motivation, and the motivation of most creative types in general, is an urge to stay relevant. Creative types typically don’t have much choice in their compulsion to create art, so the actual primal drive to create is not what I am addressing here. What I am talking about is what motivates me to make work for an audience other than myself. I want to have a real voice in what is going on in the world around me. Whether or not that voice is accepted is another issue, but I want to have an active commentary in the world around me. My work is more motivated by history, sociology, psychology, and even politics far more than it is by fine art or cinema. I feel like I have a unique perspective to share, and it is worth sharing. There may come a time when I no longer feel motivated to make art for an audience, but as of now my motivation is in remaining relevant, not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Few things make me more disappointed than teachers who do not live the subjects they teach. I live by art alone. It is important for my students to understand that about me. I am not just a teacher, but an active artist who is relevant with his artwork. Otherwise, what is the point in teaching, or what authority do I teach from?
Going back to work as a classroom teacher is certainly going to complicate my animation working schedule. Most of the summer I have spent the last few hours before I go to bed working on compiling the scenes. Going back for the school year is going to put a damper on my extreme late nights. A major complication over the summer has been the persistent fact that I do not have a work space. As it has been I have had to pull my computer and everything out every night after the kids are in bed, then put them back up when I go to bed. The priority for this week is making a small work station in a corner nook in my bedroom. I am going to do this by simply screwing 2x4s to the wall on either side and placing a piece of plywood with Masonite on top of it on top of the boards. This will allow me to have a permanent work space for my scanner and computer with minimal cost and effort. Minimalism. Once his is sat up I plan to work a couple hours in the evening most days, and schedule in a 4 hour block one day on the weekend. This should work to provide me with adequate time to work on this project. While this is going on I am going to be working to outline my next project, which I will not be making public until it is well underway, so don’t hold your breath for that. Still, the priority is and will be Coal Republic until that project is completed. I am starting to explore marketing options as well, but again I am not getting too invested as I’m not wanting to count I hatched chickens.
I know I keep going on about the war scene I am still working on in Coal Republic, but it really is pivotal in many different ways. The success or lack of success on this scene determines the pattern of the rest of the film. The duration and methodology will make or break the completion time of the film.
The overall duration of this clip is important because it may be a cushion for the rest of the film. When storyboarding these scenes I had planned on each lasting 4 minutes. By doing this I was aware that if I had 10 scenes in the film, the final product would be 40 minutes, which is a minimum standard set by most agencies for a feature film. By aiming to extend the overall length of the battle sequence beyond that, I am allowing other clips to fall shorter if need arises. Also, the great things about a war scene is chaos. I story boarded the introduction to the clip and the conclusion, but a bulk of the action and violence in the clip was designed very much in the moment. There was no preplanning for those clips. Like in war, chaos rules the day. High action clips require a lot of drawings, which is the downside. The upside is that those clips are so fast that the clip accuracy of the drawings is not as important. Infact, messier work can in some ways contribute to the overall feel of that kind of action. Like nothing makes sense. Like the world is falling apart. Keeping the lines fast and loose allows for greater speed, but also more emotion. It also allows for more mistakes if they happens, as they are easier to hide in rapid, loose animation. Due to all of the sequences necessary, and all the cuts involved the sequence, though fast and loose, is still the most complicated. The establishment of a clear methodology to the animation in this project is also vital here. Doing the most complicated sequence first has the benefit allowing me to establish the method of patterns by which I will conduct my work the rest of the film. The difference here, is I’m doing 30 clips at a time with a total of around 60 to 90, as opposed to about 20 to 30 total clips per sequence through most of the rest of the film. It’s also important to note the most of those clips in the rest of the film require fewer drawings, as I am able to reuse and loop many of the clips through the sequence. None of this of course mentions the fact that my doing the most complicated sequence first, there’s a big psychological relief involved. Establishing a workable plan by which I can scan, color, cut out, and animate each sequence is easier to do when the work is more complicated because I know if that method works in this sequence it will only be easier and every other sequence. By choosing to do the most work first I am making the entire project easier on myself as I go along. The goal is to make as many mistakes as possible here, so they are not made later. I really hope this plan works in developing the field so that I can complete it in a short amount of time after this sequence is completed. The first experience I had with animation (in the context of making it) was my junior year of high school. I was in an art class that year that I attribute to being the single largest influencing factor on my adult life. It was a photography/ studio art class at Winfield High School. I was in this class with a great bunch of experimental artists and creative minded hippies who just wanted to make cool things and have a good time. Most of them were seniors that year, and I being a year younger was a bit more impressionable and was eager to be involved in whatever it was they were doing. Most of them I had know for years through scouting and mutual friends, and so they were not really strangers from the start, just guys I didn’t know super well. The biggest supporter of this environment was the teacher, who really let us do essentially whatever we wanted. He would discuss our projects with us, and related topics from his own life as well as historical and artistic references. He encouraged us to take risks and say things with our work. We did alot of crazy things in that class. One of the students had acquired an old VHS camcorder that we started experimenting with. I remember he filmed a ceiling fan using various filters and settings to Pink Floyds “The Wall” and we all say around the room with the lights out watching video of a ceiling fan like we were tripping on acid for about an hour. I later was inspired this in a Youtube video I did called “Oscillation”. There really was something hypnotic by it. They did several other projects as well, but the one I remember being the most impressive was using the camera to do a short clip using sand animation. My classmate took a light box that had been in the classroom and poured sand on top of it. He then sat the camera above it pointing straight down at the light box. As he would draw in the sand with his finger, light would come through the lines and make an image. He would then hit record on and off very quickly on the camera to film about half a second of video. He would then redraw the image in the sand with his finger, but with a slight movement to it, and repeat the process. He drew a face that rolled back and turned into an eye. The same concept was later practiced on the board using markers (one of our favorite things to do was to project 35mm projection slides onto the board, turn the lights out, and trace them with marker). Watching this, and being inspired by the simple stop motion of South Park, I sat about doing experimental films of my own.
I sat about constructing a crude rostrum out of 2x4s and a piece of plywood. I can’t remember if my dad helped me build this first one or not, but a year or so later he would construct a second, less ratchet, rostrum for me. When I got to the part where I had to find a way to secure the camera to the rostrum I remembered that during photography class our teacher had mentioned to us that the hole on the bottom of cameras to mount them to tripods was the same diameter as an anchor bolt for a toilet. I stole one from our toilet at home, and it worked just fine. I then sat up my desk lamp as a light source for the set up. The camera I was using was a low resolution Logitech Quickcam that came with my computer (I think the resolution was something like 200x300). I did not own any digital cameras at the time (it was 2003) and so I didn’t really have any other options… Nor would I have known how to use them if I did. I used the Logitech software in the computer to take pictures one at a time as I manipulated my paper cut outs on the rostrum. Once all the images were taken I would load them into Windows Movie Maker and shrink them down one at a time from four seconds to one eighth of a second in the editor, which was the fastest you could shrink them. I had to do each photo one at a time because there was no way to preset the duration of still photos to anything other than 4 seconds (and if there was, I wouldn’t have known how to use it). My first project was an overly ambitious cut-out animation film called War at Sea. It was a 4 minute cartoon I filmed in a weekend, and it really taught me how the process worked. There was very little dialog. It was mostly an action film set to music. I had little cut out airplanes taking off of aircraft carriers and bombing other ships. Once I finished it I took it to show to the class. I remember them agreeing to show it on the school morning announcements, despite there being a cartoonish scene of an admiral shooting himself in the head. From there I would experiment with a variety of cut out and claymation projects over the next year and show them on the announcements at school. Even then I was thinking about making a feature. My senior year I envisioned an animated feature made entirely on my bedroom floor using action figures. I even went so far as to tool up for it, painting backgrounds, and buying colored felt to lay out and use as grass, water, etc. Alas, it was not meant to be. I had issues writing a script and no organizational skills to do such an ambitious project at the time. I had very little resources to learn these things until I went to college and started reading on the topic myself… And even then it isn’t like there is an over abundance of resources for young animators in WV, especially before the proliferation of these resources on forums like Youtube. Though this experimentation was crude and the products were terrible, I learned alot about making animated work, and it inspired me to pursue it as less than a career, but more than a hobby to today. A pivotal time in my life it was, and all thanks to perfect storm of circumstances in a public school setting. I finished coloring, cutting out, and compiling my first group of clips into photoshop files tonight. Tomorrow I will start my first bulk group of animated clips. This ending sequence is the most complicated by far I have ever attempted, and is the most complicated of the film. A close second would be the next sequence I am doing, which is a fight in a grocery store. The one I am doing now is a war scene. They are so complicated because there is a great deal of fast moving clips in quick succession in them. What makes the war scene so complicated is that the backgrounds are film clips rather than still backgrounds. This creates an additional layer of confusion when animating as I also have to edit those clips to fit into each of the animated clips individually. After the war and fight sequences are done most of the rest should fall together (relatively) quickly. A couple of the others that may take longer are because I still need to do some inking/ pen work on them. This work is not as hard, but is time consuming. I am still aiming for December as a completion date on all animation and editing. Scoring the film, and sound effects may still take more time. The wonderful Andrea Anderson agreed to do the scoring, and I am very grateful for that. I worked with her in the past both on the Porkchops film and on a few of my smaller projects that fell apart for one reason or another. I really appreciate her support for my work and look forward to working with her on this project. I’m working out what my project work schedule will be once I start back to teaching in a couple of weeks. I should be able to average 1.5 hours per night, which is a little less than now but works out well. As it stands I now work about 2 hours a night broken into 1 hour segments, with a break in between. Animation work is hard on the brain, and the breaks are necessary for my sanity. I’ll do the same once work starts again, with 45 minute work sessions with a 20 minute break between. My goal is to be in bed no later than 1AM on work nights, but I’ll be aiming for 12 midnight. 1AM would allow me at least 6 hours of sleep a night, which is better than I am use to getting in a normal work schedule. Again, there is always time because of something is important to you then you make time. I may try to work a few hours over the weekends as well, but I’m not attempting that right out of the gate. Overall, things are going well with the project. Slower than I would like, but if that is my biggest problem then I guess I am doing pretty well.
I remember the first time I interacted with a digital camera. I was in the eighth grade and a friend of mine had taken it with him on our eighth-grade trip to Washington DC. It was one of the old models from the late 90s. It only held about a dozen or so pictures and they were very low-quality. On the same trip I had taken several disposable cameras, as those with the standard cameras that my family would use on trips. The digital camera made no sense to me. Then again I had not interacted with computers much outside of school. It wouldn’t be until the following year that my house would get its first computer, a Compaq Presario, which looking back on it was not the best computer. Up until a few years later when I would take a photography class in high school this would be the only interaction I would have with the digital camera. The high school had one digital camera for the department and it too was an incredibly old digital camera. I remember you could only take about six or eight photos on it at a time in the resolution was awful. It also was about the size of a brick. For these reasons I came to the conclusion that digital cameras would always be this way. I did nothing but film photography until I got to college. The first time I got a 35mm camera was for that high school photography class. It was a point-and-shoot. That was the first camera I had ever owned that was more than a couple of dollars. The first thing that I did was buy a few rolls of black and white film that could be processed in color processing and went out and took some pictures. Years later, my teacher in that class would comment that it was very unusual for a student to look for black-and-white film to use a new camera like that. Even when I first used a digital SLR in college I was very uncomfortable using it. You have to remember it was 2005 and any camera that could take high resolution photos at that time was priced in the thousands of dollars. One of the assignments required us to sign out a camera of that value to take home to take “professional” quality photos with. I went and checked out the camera which I was warned when I checked it out cost about $12,000, and was made to feel like uncultured white trash for not knowing anything about it including it’s value. As a result I was so scared to use it that I never removed from the case and instead took pictures of the moon and of trees blowing in the wind at night using double exposure and long exposures. I did this with one of my viewfinder cameras instead of using the SLR. When it came time to turn in that assignment, I lied and said I used the SLR as required. I was told my pictures look very good when mounted and I made an “A” on the assignment. When I bought my first digital camera it was again a cheaper point and shoot camera. I remember really enjoying the fact that I could take lots and lots of pictures and not having to pay for developing. I really just like taking pictures of seemingly ordinary things. I don’t really know why. I wish I had some sort of creative or artsy reason to make myself seem more thoughtful for it but I don’t. Shortly after I bought this camera I realized I could apply this sort of technology to my animation. I had been using a WebCam on my homemade rostrum to shoot animation with since I started doing animation in 2003. The thing that I didn’t like about taking lots of pictures is that people expect you to take lots of pictures. This is one of the things that moved me out of photography. Firstly, I was never very good at it. Just because you like something doesn’t mean you’re good at it. Secondly, it became an expectation that anytime I would be at an event or out with friends or family that I would have a camera to take pictures with, and I would be told 20 times to go take pictures of stuff. This is one of the reasons that I hesitated so long in owning a cell phone, is that hinders your ability to genuinely experience things. As Time got on I still used a dSLR to do some projects with, particularly in photographing backgrounds for animation and for documenting artwork. I always found the SLR to be a little too bulky to take places. Now I use my cell phone for much of that like the rest of the population but given I’ve only owned it since February of this year I’m still getting used to it.
I had a college professor once say that animation is the most counterproductive thing you can do with your life. If you think about it, this is certainly true. An animator will spend countless hours drawing, pencil testing, penning, inking, and animating a scene that may only be a few seconds long. I am certainly feeling this with the battle sequence that I spent seven months drawing and am just now getting to scan it into the computer to animate. I have spent the past couple of weeks working out a procedure in the evenings that works for me to compile my animation into completed clips. I think I have finally gotten comfortable with the process and found my stride. My original goal of having the entire film compiled by the end of the summer was unrealistic. Given this battle segment is the most complicated part of the entire film in terms of animation and volume of cut sequences, I have decided to do this first to make it my goal to complete this by the end of the summer. I feel like if I can meet that goal that it would not be unreasonable to say I should have the entire film compiled by Christmas. There are a few steps in my process that I am skipping and the compiling stage for the fight sequence for the purpose of saving time. I want to make sure and take my time and do the film correctly, but it is also very important for me to finish it in a realistic timeframe. I feel like I am already exceeding that, but all the pressure to complete this film quickly are all manufactured by my subconscious. There are no people pushing me, and I have no financial backers to please. I guess it is just another example of all of those imaginary people that we spend our lives trying to please. The segments should start to go together more quickly from this point out, and even more so once I have figured out how I am going to replace my scanner. I will update in a week or so to see if progress has improved.
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Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
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