I have officially started the long and arduous process of compiling Coal Republic this week. I opted to start with the last major sequence in the film for a few reasons. The primary reason is because it is to be the longest and most complicated in the film. It is a battle scene so complicated I drew on it every day from November to June, and still have some filler bits of drawing to do. The bulk of this drawing was divided into a large number of fast and lose death scenes. These range in complexity from 6 cel clips with frame 1 animated as a still for 3 to 6 games then a fast death, to complicated death sequences made of 50 or so drawings. The fast and lose nature of this sequence also allows me to experiment more as the rapid succession of clips helps mask errors. The final length of this sequence will also determine how other sequences may be put together later in the film. Work on this is tedious and slower than I would like, but it is less daunting than the drawing part of the film, but more demanding in other ways. I am averaging 3-4 hours a night on it, which is pretty good considering. As long as there is forward motion all is well. I’m getting as much done while on summer break as I can, as returning to a full time work schedule will further restrict my available work time. If I can get this entire war sequence finished by the end of summer I will be managing pretty good, as several of the others can be completed in short order, with the other half combined being about as complicated in total as this sequence alone. Time will tell what progress can be made, but I am optimistic that that goal should be obtainable. I made a YouTube video of the scanning/ enhancing/ coloring part of my process. You can find a link to that video by clicking HERE or copy and paste the URL below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEJ98jWFSF4&t=
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I think there is still a strong place for hand drawn, American animation, because our story is worth telling. As an Appalachian first and foremost I know and understand the struggles and the downtrodden and forgotten in our country. That is much the point of the story I am telling in Coal Republic. Animation today is too refined. Everything is too refined. Real stories have grit. The stories of the people at the bottom of society are dirty. They don't have smooth edges and bit-mapping that is on-fleek. It is 2018. Everything is doable with minimal equipment. An iPhone has much more processing and rendering power than all of the equipment I used when I first started combined. Hand drawn line and the imperfections that go with that are a dying art form in the American landscape, but I feel the story they have to tell is drastically different than anything else on a strictly digital landscape. There is nothing that can match pencil-to-paper for what it does. There is nothing wrong with digital animation, but unfortunately much of it lacks heart. I certainly support hand done things, and my animation is no different. Coal Republic is a broken film about broken people and broken things, trying to make things work in a broken place. The people in it live low to to ground. They live in the dirt. They work their hands hard and torn to make it, but try as they might their efforts are futile. Like the characters, I am telling this story with my own toil, and from my own hands. This sort of animation will drain your life away and invigorate you at the same time. There is certainly a duality to it.
This is a blog posting sort of going from the same notes as a my video the other day. One of my pet peeves, as an artist, is when folks say they "do not have time" for their passions, or for the things they value in life. People in life will frequently hide behind their lives, work, children, family responsibilities, etc. to not put the work in it takes to pursue the things they love. If these things are truly important to them they will find time for them. We give time to the things we value. There is always time. For me, much of that work time has included my lunch breaks at work, a couple hours on the weekends, and an hour or so at night after the day to day hustle and bustle has calmed down. It is slow going, but the time is always there if it is something you truly value. This has been how I have approached Coal Republic (my upcoming feature animated film) over the past four years. There are times I have had to take a break because of life, but it has been a drive of mine to finish this film. In those four years I have had two small children, helped organize a statewide teacher strike, and improved my skills as a classroom teacher. Animation has, up until recently, always been a great passion of mine. I have been doing independent animation since the age of 16. It is something I have invested a great deal of time and energy into. I relate much of my present state of health to years of choosing to set working and stressing over projects over taking care of myself (again, we put time where our values are). To me, ones work in life is the most important thing they contribute. Without it, your time is meaningless. Though I have invested so much into this, still now many people have no idea I have shown many films abroad, and am an award winning animator. Animation has been an exciting adventure... but I am bored. I always said that before I walked away from it I would have do a feature to feel like it meant anything, and that is what Coal Republic is. Nearing the end o this project is cathartic, but it is also necessary so that I may close this chapter of my creative life, for now. I am not going to to walk away from animation entirely. I am already looking at doing some short films for some friends YouTube channels and publications, and surely will do more projects for myself later. What I am saying is it will no longer be the focus of so much of my creative energy. I want to make things with my hands again, build artifacts, and be able to step away from a computer. I need that for wellbeing in my life. This time was here and now, it stayed and now, it goes. I am excited to view my work as a pleasure rather than a burden again, and for me that is already starting to be realized. Being a one-man animation production team will kill you. I have learned that. I would be interested in doing another feature in the future, but not on my own. That was stupid, but again, necessary. Thank you so much to my fans and followers who have offered support and been so patient and understanding. You all rock.
This weekend my goal was to stay around the house and get some of that work done. That goal was somewhat accomplished as I was able to get the rest of my gladiola bulbs at the homestead, and get my back room largely cleaned out as well. Cate and I took the kids our some, visiting Gucci Kroger, getting some coffee, and then to Sam's Club for some take-home sushi. Sunday was my day to sleep in and when I got up, she understandably laid down for a nap. I took this opportunity, with the kids watching TV, to start tearing down boxes in the back room and putting them into trash bags. Boxes are the bane of my existence. I burn them, use them as a garden bed liner, and throw them out with the trash and still cant get rid of them as quickly as they come into the house. After breaking down several bags full I decided it would be best to go ahead and take them to my parents house to be disposed of (they live farther out, and it is easier for them to burn them in quantity). I had wanted to work on breaking down my matchlock to do some esthetic changes to it over the next few months, and so I figured since we were already down there I would take that opportunity to do so. Once Cate got up we got the kids ready and took them down. I also decided to use this time to get some footage for some YouTube content for the channel, and with Cates help was able to keep the kids at bay long enough to do so. Overall it was a positive and productive weekend, and I am working to develop a better schedule to keep up with my new posting habits on a regular basis. Thank you for taking the time to read. It is greatly appreciated.
I was listening to an interview with Marilyn Manson this evening I was thinking at something that he said. Somebody asked him about you him having fans and how he felt about the fact that a lot of people did not like him. He made the comment that anything of quality that’s worth doing there is always going to be a group of people who hate you and don’t like it and if you don’t have people that hate you for what you’re doing and what you’re doing doesn’t really mean anything. I would have to say that I agree with this assessment. Art is the best example of this. Whether it’s music for film or painting, if what you’re doing please everybody it probably is not very important and probably isn’t saying anything worth saying. This does not mean your focus should be to make people mad, though it certainly Can be, but it does mean that the inevitable outcome of doing anything of quality is that you will have a group of people that do not like what you were doing. This is sort of how I felt about the cartoon ever working on Coal Republic. In CoaI Republic the aim is to address a lot of the negative issues of living in this region. This includes unemployment, drug use and a general nihilistic attitude towards life. I address gun violence and really violence in general. I addressed a lot of issues from different points of view from both sides of the aisle. This is because I think a person who is educated on any topic is not going to fall entirely on party lines on either side. Like so many things, I think most of the answers are in the middle somewhere. I imagine once this is done that liberals won’t like it because it’s too conservative and conservatives won’t like it because it’s too liberal. This may make it a commercial failure but so is every other film I’ve ever made. That’s just the way goes sometimes I think.
I have been incredibly busy lately with what’s been going on with our legislature so I have not had time to post. Though I’d sort of originally planned on this being a blog strictly about my art and my making of art I am going to take a minute to talk about the eminent teacher strike in West Virginia. I am a high school art teacher in the Upper Kanawha valley and this is my fifth year teaching full-time. Since I’ve been a teacher I have had two children first my daughter and my son. My daughter is three years old and my son is almost two. As a full-time, fully certified teacher I have qualified for food stamps and WIC. With both of my children we were on WIC so that we could afford baby formula and fresh produce for children. For four years I have went to both the legislature and to our insurance board to ask for them to fix our insurance. For four years I and everyone else have been ignored and the insurance has progressively gotten worse and worse. Over the previous few years I felt like I was nearly alone in this battle. I would go to these meetings and inform people of what was going on and explain that I believed at the time the strike might be the only thing to fix it. As a young teacher living paycheck to paycheck the idea of a strike was not ideal, so it certainly is and was something that we look to avoid. This year the American Federation of Teachers made public employees insurance the number one legislative focal point. It was clear that the legislature was going to do nothing to fix this problem. A friend of mine who is a member of our local branch of NEA set up on social media a page for public employees to address their grievances publicly. This blew up fairly quickly and I believe in itself was a driving force behind uniting our public employees. They quickly came to the conclusion that a strike would probably be the only action that would change anything. I think it’s also important to address the issue of nihilism in younger people in our society today. This includes myself who is a steadfast pragmatic nihilist. When you raise young people into adulthood in an environment where it is made clear that they have no viable prospects and nothing governing the system but greed and disorder they typically turn to an attitude of absolutism in terms of economic systems. These systems breed an environment where strike is likely For educated working people. This is because they have spent an enormous amount of time and resources in getting an education as they were told to do for jobs that do not exist. If the jobs do exist they are poor quality with little compensation and poor benefits. This is not for some great philosophical reasons but simply because these people have very little lose. Knowing that if they lose their jobs the consequences will not be as dire as there living circumstances with the jobs are less than ideal. The older folks involved see that there truly are no prospects for younger teachers and for themselves the prospect of a retirement where everything they have work for is taken from them for basic healthcare which declines and quality every year. This older group, teachers who have been teaching for 30 or more years, often are in a better financial place but fear for the future. These factors combined caused many of our members, in fact most of our members, to demand a strike vote early on. The leadership I feel was very reluctant at this as they aired on the side of caution. This is for good reason as West Virginia does not allow collective bargaining for its public employees. A strike in West Virginia is against the law for public employees. But again these fears on both sides for both nihilistic younger teachers and for the new retirement older teachers pushed the issue forward. This has been an almost entirely membership driven movement. This makes it pretty comical when we have politicians that claim that the union bosses are the ones pushing this. The reality is that the membership of these unions have been dragging the leadership along with them kicking and screaming. It has been totally membership driven, which is exactly as it should be. The varying levels of organization in each county have created an environment where counties in some cases behave more autonomously than others. Some smaller counties opted to take individual strike votes so that they may walk out on their own without the state. This took place over several days over the past few weeks. During this time nearly every county in the state took an authorization vote for the state level leadership to call for actions such as work stoppages or strike. With this information the past weekend the two major teaching unions in the state the American Federation of Teachers and the West Virginia Educators Association, along with the major service personnel union called for a statewide walk out Thursday and Friday. The demands have been simple and the bar has been set low. All the employees have asked for is dedicated tax revenue to fund the public employee insurance agency. With this they have asked for a reasonably small pay raise given how far below the national average teacher and service personnel pay is in West Virginia. They have also asked that seniority be protected in the event of layoffs at the school level. They also asked that the punitive bills against the unions that have been proposed this session be abandoned. It was in my opinion that they should also ask for collective-bargaining rights. But this bar may be too high. I have had the fortune through much of this to be a member and an executive board member of the American Federation of Teachers in Kanawha County. Though things in general moved a little bit more slowly than I think many of the members would have liked our local here has been fairly well organized in particular with actions such as demonstrations and walk-ins. All of this in the action has been the reason for my lack of participation on the blog and for my current hiatus from my creative endeavors. Hopefully as soon as this matter is resolved I can return to work with little more distraction. We are really fighting to create some meaningful change for public employees. Our teachers and service personnel in West Virginia are currently in a bad state. Pun intended.
I have been working this evening (in addition to designing a shirt for the union) on developing the online presence for the micronation I am founding. If you don't know what a micronation is, it is a country which is not officially recognized by any national or international body, and is often declared as a social experiment or some sort of political statement. There is a great deal of history behind micronations that you should research if you are interested. I am somewhat basing the charter of the one I am currently working on on that of the real-life "stateless state" of the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. It is recognized by a majority of nations, and is entirely stateless. It only exists as an "extra-territorial" state within Italy via a 100 year lease of a building they operate out of. Their history is around 1000 years old, they have embassies all around the world, and even an advisory seat in the UN. Again, they have no sovereign territory, and the country only actually has 3 citizens who are its officers. If they are recognized as such by the international community, why can we not build something that is the same? Details later.
For a minute while at my parents house I went down to look at some of the lumber we had cut from trees that were recently downed at their house. We had some maple and mulberry slabs cut out of it with a natural edge. Dad has some ideas that he would like to do once it is seasoned, but my goal from the start has been to use this wood to make matchlock stocks with. Last year I completed a from-scratch build of a matchlock musket (a link to the video can be found HERE). It was a sort of prototype/ proof of concept considering I had never made anything like that before. As I was looking at the mulberry slabs (which are around 3'' thick) I saw there was a large crack down one section of one. I decided to use the table saw to cut a board out of this slab along the crack. I hauled the entire slab up onto the table by myself, and it was not light. After sawing the wood into a plank roughly 6''x3''x60'' long I then cut that into two 30'' pieces. I plan to make a long, cavalry style pistol or carbine out of this using a short barrel in the future, but the wood still needs to further season before I undertake this. This is all part of my tooling up for my next series of projects. Once I complete COAL REPUBLIC, the animated feature I have been working on for the better part of 4 years now, I am moving away from animation and back to working with building things with my hands. I really miss that. Currently I am just trying to get the infrastructure in place so that when this transition happens it is fairly smooth and painless.
Failure is something that anyone who wants to do anything interesting in life must be willing to deal with. In my 14 years doing independent animation this is a lesson that continues to repeat itself. I have encountered it in my education, in teaching, in my art, and in my life many times. This is not unique to me or any of us. Failure should not be an inhibiting factor in doing the things you want to do. In 2007 I entered my first official film festival, the then West Virginia Filmmaker Film Festival (Now the West Virginia Filmmakers Festival). I entered a cartoon titled "The Circus" into their short animation category. Having never entered a film festival I had no idea what the expectations were. I envisioned a sort of bohemian crowed of ascot adorned individuals who would swoon at the very sight of the war commentary I had created. It was, as much of my work is, hand drawn. My dad and a good friend came with me to the film festival. It was in Sutton, West Virginia. As we arrived the venue was an abandoned church. They had taped trash bags over the windows to stop light from getting in, and had a little screen set up in the front of the room. It was not what I expected. We went in an were seated and my dad leaned over to me and said "This place wreaks of liberal arts." As the films started only a handful of people were in attendance, and the only people who had actually come to see my film were myself, my dad, and my friend. Failure. I was given the award for Best Animation at that festival for the cartoon I had made. It was the only animation in the festival. Failure, that is what that was. Failure. I learned alot from that wonderful little film festival. I learned alot about marketing my films, and about the realistic expectations that must come with making art in rural Appalachia. How arrogant and naive of me to imagine it would be otherwise. I learned that too. As a result that film festival, now in a new incarnation, under new management, and being widely promoted, is a kind of cornerstone for my animated work. When I make cartoons now I try to set my deadlines based on that festival. When deadline time comes around, I feel compelled to enter something. It was an important part of my education, and the people involved were, in a weird way, sort of teachers. I have been working on the same film for nearly 4 years now, a record for me, and I find myself trying to get it completed before the festival this year. If I don't there is no real pressure, as the film is totally funded by me. But, part of me feels deeply compelled to premier the film at the West Virginia Filmmakers Festival. Why? I guess there could be alot of reasons. I try not to overthink my weird anxieties when it comes to sharing my work. I try to focus on the work. All I know is that failure had such a profound effect that it whispers to me frequently to bat again and try harder. I think that is what failure is suppose to do. Not to deter, but to remind us that we are mortal and that we can either quit or do better. Then again, I could be over thinking that too.
I've not done any regular writing like this in quite a while so you may have to forgive me. The last time I had anything close to a blog was a Geocities website back around 2004 I would use to put some of my crude Paint photo editing up with. The earliest of this work I had done without a computer altogether, cutting out some of my teachers heads and gluing them to other bodies, then using a black and white copier to make the final image. I did not have a computer in my home until I was 13, and currently at the age of 30 have still never owned a cell phone (though I may remedy this soon). Hipsters when they heard this about me often reply "Yea! Good for you!". They misunderstand. I don't dislike technology, and don't underestimate its power in the creative world. I myself use it a great deal in creating art and in my animation work. I am still active on social media, love the ease of communication, and so on. I use a computer for these things. Having not had a portable device like that through this stage in our history I simply have not developed the bond most folks have with one. It isn't that I dislike them, they just are not that sort of fit for me. I can't imagine ever being glued all day to a device like that. There are parts of my day now when I am, but I get to a point where I just can't deal with it anymore. That has really been in many ways what has lead to my next stream of creative projects... A need to disconnect. I am sure I will post more on this later.
All that said, this is the first time I have ever made a concerted effort to do something structurally active and creative that involves my work. The purpose of this for me is to try to explain ideas I get and projects I do. More than that, it is a way for me to have the conversations (even if it is with dead air, or myself) in detail about the topics that inspire my work. It doesn't even make sense to me as a whole what I do or why I do it. My art, activism, professional, personal, etc. they all seem totally separate things to me and in many ways it makes my life feel very fragmented. It is just the way I order (or disorder) things. I, as many creative types do, have a compulsion to share ideas and I suppose this is just an organized way of doing that. Things will certainly be out of order, or topics addressed unrelated to one another. That's to be expected. I am hoping to gain a few readers, or at the very least, have something documented for posterity for those who may one day see relevance in what I am doing. Maybe it is good, maybe it is narcissism, but regardless this will be on the terms I see fit. At the very least it should be interesting. |
Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
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