Today’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.
Addendum to yesterday’s. The final doubt.
I wish I knew why my videos keep getting their aspect ratios monkeyed with.
A scattershot post I think, to hide the fact I’ve not been blogging recently (the rate’s not likely to pick up any time soon, incidentally). So, random stuff:
Those are wugs. Imaginary creatures used for testing language ability, a subject that I touched on in a recent post and couldn’t be bothered to research further. It coincidentally came up while watching this Royal Society lecture [link will take you to a streaming video player thing] about genes and languages (lots of interesting lectures here by the way) which is about the research which led to the “Gene for language” news story you may have read about recently.
Anyway, wugs are cute, or whatever.
I’ve been making little videos recently.
This one was a birthday present for my dad:
Joust! from snailsnail on Vimeo.
And here are two hyper short experiments – I make this sort of thing quite a lot as mini-exercised, trying to teach myself new techniques and wotnot:
Tonight’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.
Today’s Random Test/Doubt from snailsnail on Vimeo.
Sometimes I read webcomics, this one is cool, it’s short, and beautiful (in its way).
What else, oh yes, films…
I finally got around to seeing the most recent Almodóvar: ‘Los Abrazos Rotos‘ (Broken Embraces), it was good, but not superb. If there’s anything that can’t be faulted it’s Almodóvar’s visual style, every shot is perfect, the colours and the shapes exact and delicious, and (i’d say) it gets better in each new film. But, on the other hand, it feels somewhat like he’s treading water. He has always been a director that (somewhat like Tarantino) appropriates prior films, styles and genres, but (unlike Tarantino) it has never been too overwhelming. However, in Abrazos Rotos, on top of referencing some of his stock styles (melodrama, noir) he becomes exquisitely self-referential. [[minor spoilers]] The film contains a film-within-a-film (that in the course of the narrative will get remade and rereleased) which is itself a remake(?) of one of Almodóvar’s films, ‘ Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios‘ (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). What exactly all this means is somewhat beyond me but, if you know the previous film, it makes for some of the most humorous moments in this one, if not it probably just seems odd.
Anyway, not a bad film, but it would be good to see such a talented director stir things up a bit.
Another master film-maker with a recent release is Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation god (not a word I’d use lightly) who made other stuff you might know if you’ve hung round me at all, like Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. So his most recent is Ponyo on the cliff by the sea, and it is, truly, fantastic. I’m waiting to go and see it again before I decide if it’s actually my favourite of his, but it might well be.
It’s a simple story which sounds worryingly familiar – a mermaid (well, sort of) escapes from her cruel father, makes her way onto land and makes friends with a boy with whom she falls in love and for whom she then becomes a human… I know, I know – but it’s nothing like that at all. I know most of you won’t but you really all should see this film (undubbed!) so I won’t go on about the content, but sufficed to say from the second shot in the film my jaw hit the floor, and it stayed there, making the carpet soggy, until the credits rolled. Technically speaking, the animators working with Miyazaki are the best in the world (however much he moans about kids today) and so visually the film is breathtaking and the story is just as beguiling, funny, poignant, all the good adjectives. Utterly wonderful.
Now might be the right time to introduce you to Samuel Pepys whose blog, while not being particularly contemporary, is always an interesting read. I bring him in now because events these past few days have been pretty exciting, culminating in yesterday’s battle.
It is, genuinely, a fascinating way to read the diary, not just because the blog format suites a diary so well but because it brings it to you in bite size chunks (automatically if you’re using RSS) and also builds suspense as if events really were panning out in real time. In addition, each day’s entry provides hyperlinks to help explain the places, people and items mentioned and often is richly commented on by people providing information on obscure words, links to other contemporary accounts and the like. The diary is full of history, society, sex, violence, intrigue and details of everyday life, so I recommend it to you.
For anybody who I got to read Blood Sweat and Tea by Tom Reynolds, you might be interested to know that the sequel is out, and you can buy it, or read it for free – below in some kind of new-fangled gadgety thing, or by downloading the pdf from this page. It’s factual and based on the above-linked blog about the London Ambulance Service. I haven’t read it yet, but do read the blog regularly so I guess I know most of what’s going to happen – always interesting.
Well, last night we finally finished working on the animation that I’ve been consumed with these past couple of months, which finally ended up entitled “El Pequeño Gran Viaje” or “The Little Big Journey”. I don’t know when you’ll get to see it, but soon enough – I have to subtitle it first. Here is a still :-
SO, now I have to work out what’s next. You may remember I have two unfinished poetry collections in the pipeline, called “One Punto Stop” and “Stories for Girls”, maybe I should crack on with those.
I also have another animation idea which I think will be cool. The only problem being, it’s a big project, taking techniques I’ve been developing in recent drawings and applying them to animation, and it invloves a humanoid main character… Now, I’m not very good at drawing people (well, at drawing full stop, but people are particularly taxing) so yesterday I found myself a model and started shooting reference photos – which may be cheating but whatever. Here you can see an early work in progress which I’m posting because this thing might not ever get finished, and to remind me when I started.
Right now, however, I’m going to grab a beer and do some hard relaxing.
Yesterday some of my pupils told me they’ve memorised poems to recite at the end-of-year performance tomorrow, and I asked one of them to recite it for me. Very nice too. They asked me if I know any poems, and I realised that I do. I only ever memorised one poem in my life, Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, when I was about 13 or 14, and for some reason it’s stuck with me. So I gave an impassioned and theatrical rendition in front of the frankly befuddled class. Today I thought I’d extend things a bit, and so, taking the first stanza, which goes like this:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I explained that many of the words are invented, but we can tell something about them by the context – that an article must mean it’s a noun, the ’s’ at the end means the noun is probably plural, and so on. This is actually a rather interesting area for a linguist, as are the rules which govern fake-word validity (I made that up because it’s years and years since I read any research on this and I can’t be bothered to re-look it up) but I didn’t stray down that path with my nine year-olds. Instead I used the famous Tenniel illustration of the Jabberwock wiffling through the tuldgey wood, as an example of how we might imagine unknown words, and asked them all to draw illustrations of the first stanza – imagining when brillig might be, where is a wabe, what are raths, why are they mome and what does to gyre mean. Anyway, I thought this would be quite a fun, interesting task, but it turned out to be tortuously difficult to get them to understand that these words mean what you want them to mean; one boy asked if he could look up rath in the dictionary. The teacher I was working with said they’re not accustomed to using their imaginations – I don’t know if that’s true, perhaps – and if it is, rather sad I think. One girl told me – I don’t have an imagination, well of course you do, you’ve just got to exercise it.
Anyway, afterwards I’ll show them the Tenniel illustration of this stanza and we can see how they compare.
Incidentally, I occasionally dabble in fake-wordery myself, though I stray rather beyond the bounds of specifically anglo-saxon-isms, trying to inflect words with a variety of different languages. I’ve tried as well in Spanish, but that’s quite difficult.
And here’s yesterday’s making-of gif – rather a long one, I’m afraid:
No extraneous photoshop today, because my print screen isn’t working – which is odd.
Mostly still animating… in the home stretch now though. Will be very glad to finish.
I’ve had an altogether fluy weekend – recovery not helped by forcing myself to work. Today I went into school because there were things that just needed to be done (this week is exam week) but I dragged myself home before lunch time.
Some colour at last.
Last night I went to another gig in very much the same vein as the last. If The Wave Pictures are the spiritual successors to Hefner then Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern are the actual successors, Darren Hayman being the former Hefner frontman.
After playing a bunch of new songs he said, “it’s around this point in the gig that the crowd starts to get a bit nervous, wondering if we’re going to play any Hefner songs…” And they did, and they played some corkers. The music was awesome, despite a guitar retuning between every song, and really benefited from the slightly unusual four-piece arrangement of drums, guitar, bass, violin.
The new songs are as powerful as anything in the Hefner/The French canon, and I think that it’s really noteworthy that the most recent album, Pram Town, works well both (as it’s subtitle declares) as a folk opera, a concept album about new towns, and as individual songs which retain all the humour and pathos we loved so much from Hefner.
I was slightly disappointed not to hear anything off Table For One (Hayman’s first solo record) but you can’t get everything.
The finale rendition of late-Hefner classic, When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines, was astonishing. And you can watch it here (sorry about my tuneless singing :P)
It was a shame to see a somewhat less-than-packed venue, and there only seemed to be about three obsesives there, standing in a row, belting out the choruses (you can hear all three of us in the video above) and dancing about, ignoring the immobility of most everyone else there. Still, it was a good gig.
Afterwards I bought a cd and got it signed and had a wee chat with Darren, and the bassist, whose name, like a terrible fan, I don’t know and whose beer I spilled, like the Barnes I am. I said I’d tried to come the last time he’d played in Madrid but had had to work, and he told me the last time was shit, so that was probably a good thing. Anyway, I realised I was getting a bit too crazy-fannish, so I scarpered.
A good night.
Not everything is going perfectly at the moment.
Stupid problems at work,
animation progressing too slowly and difficultly,
future looks incomprehensible,
feeling quite cut off from the world.
Time for a little tranquillity.
I’ve had a good day to day… plugging away at the animation, and even though it’s not so late, it’s time for a rest, and a party I think, that’ll be nice. Tomorrow, with any luck, I hope to make a lot of progress as the next sequence doesn’t have any particularly taxing animation, nor any technically complex bits.
Here is a tiny little test video, you can see the imaginary city starting to come together. I’m trying to play little games with perspective and things here, striking a balance between the undeniably 2D paper aesthetic we’ve got going and something a little bit more three dimensional. Do you think it works?
City Test from snailsnail on Vimeo.
Here is a short animation test I made yesterday of three cars emitting exhaust in different ways. This is for the current animation project (still untitled). I think that car one will the one used. Car two, with slightly more prominent exhaust, will also probably appear in closeup (the main role of the cars is to pollute the city, but they’ll also appear as set dressing, and I wanted a slightly less conspicuous version). Car three was my first attempt, even though I didn’t really think that would be the version finally used I wanted to play around with particle emitters a bit and figure out how to operate them, so used the opportunity to learn. I may have another attempt but using particles with a more stylised texture to fit better with the drawn style of the other elements of the animation. However all is subject to Laura’s agreement (she’s in Italy for a bit so I have temporarily free artistic reign).
Yesterday I went to a gig at Sala Galileo, a bar and well-known venue for live music. Playing were The Wave Pictures, a British group that are one of my favourites at the moment. They were awesome, and very well received by a packed house. This was the penultimate date in their current (and I believe second) Spanish tour. Musically they are a pretty traditional indie-rock three piece, the kind of music that doesn’t actually do much for me. But what’s special about them are the lyrics – witty and deft, full of self depreciation, odd-ball love songs and bizarre metaphors. Lyrically they have much in common with the likes of Hefner, a great British indie band with whom they are intimately connected – being friends and collaborators with Darren Hayman, the former Hefner frontman (whose recent solo album, Pram Town, which I thoroughly recommend, played in its entirety before the gig).
I went to the gig on my own, as I seem unable to pursuade anyone else of the merits of the group, but nevertheless enjoyed myself immensly, as you can here in this video where I, along with the rest of the crowd, can be heard shouting along to what I believe to be the best pop lyric ever:
I have tried explaining to various different people in two different languages the magic of the lyric, but mostly they just look at me as if I’m odd. This I find weird, because nobody will look at you odd if you say you like Magritte, and this I find more marvellous.
Anyway, the gig was cool, the venue small and intimate, the crowd friendly, with plenty of banter between them and the band, despite the language gap.
Actually though, probably the nicest surprise of the gig was the support act, Bristolian SJ Esau. I’d not heard of him and so listened to a couple of tracks before going without being overawed, but live he was something else. A one man band with an array of gadgets in front of him, a looping pedal and rack of effects at his feet, a guitar and a single cymbal. You’ve pretty much won me over if you play a guitar with one hand, a synth with the other, while using the headstock of the guitar to beat a cymbal (miked up, if my eyes didn’t deceive me, with a BugBrand contact mike).The process of performing by looping various bits and pieces over each other to create your own band and then playing along is one which, if not exactly mainstream, is fairly common these days (hello KT Tunstall) and is not without its pitfalls, fairly easily becoming repetitive, or noisy and murky, but Esau was none of that, and added to which his lyrics were original and witty.
A good night, all in all.
This evening I’ve decided to do nothing more than vegetate, after wandering like a zombie through my days (schedules which have roughly gone like this – up early, half hour editing/animating, to work (~1hr journey), work, lunch (1hr small group class, 40min editing, 20min eat), work, private class (1-2hrs), to home, photoshop mash / animate, bed (4hrs), up early, repeat) and, having wandered through a few days’ RSS feeds (never made it home last night), decided to post this half-sketched thought process that I’d been writing about our current project without fleshing it out. Picture:
Just random thoughts really, stuff I’d like to think more about really, but don’t have the time, nor the academic prompting.
One thing we’re doing in our current animation is manipulating children’s drawings and voices to construct an alternative vision of place, in particular of Madrid. Above is a work-in-progress street plan for this city, as yet unpopulated by buildings, people, animals, cars, etc. It’s a fairly intricate photoshop construction from a couple of road fragments drawn by children as a part of their own, different, imagining of the city. To be animatable we need something larger, and more structured, so I bashed that out. Below is a skyline, a much simpler cut-and-paste construction from a number of drawings of buildings. It’s just a temp picture at the moment, and may not make it into the final thing.
I’m quite interested anyway in cities, the way they’re constructed both in reality (if we believe in reality, which, as an aside, I’m not sure that I do), in the intentions of designers, and in the imagination. And this is quite a ripe field for exploration, I think. It seems that we might have a chance of touching on something quite profound with this process… but I’ll have to think a bit more before I can put some more intelligent ideas down.
Last night I asked my co-conspirator if we had any ethical concerns about the extent to which we edit the childrens’ pictures (I’d just finished inventing a dinning table out of a Parchís board) and she said, well – it’s better than slavedriving them into drawing picture after picture after picture.
This is probably the kind of thing that only I worry about, and to be honest it’s a fruit of mindless photoshopping that does let the mind wander, but I think that when we’ve finished it will be interesting to consider to what extent what we’ve made belongs to the children and to what extent it what belongs to us. More on this later (or not, you know how these things go).
[Comments appreciated, by the way. I feel like the internet is a bit empty at the moment]