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.
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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. |
Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
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