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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
Categories |