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April 27, 2008

poetic license

by gl. at 5:23 pm

it must be national poetry month! i've attended a plethora of wordly events this month:

• i started out the month by attending the poemcrazy workshop. we collected words from books & "word tickets" and pooled them together, words like orphans, orchestra, pandora, vigil, eve, mistletoe, rose, admit, doctor, moon, roof, roll, orpheus, fallen, angel, moment, ghost, venus, dark, wine, rumour, grace, plum, devotion, glow, tedium, terror, window, daylight, grim, heretic, dwell, love, clouds, atoms, hollow, swallow, honor, translate, clutter, promise, binge, and trouble.
  
  we spun in place and sat down to try to write to such prompts as i am/i am not/i used to be/i want to be/i love/i remember/i forget, combined with chanting things like my heart says/my mind says/my soul says/my mother says/the door says/the moon says/the river says, and inserting lines like can't give you up/come back to me, later when it's over. we could answer questions like what's an object in the first place you remember living? what container would you be? what source of light would you be? what scares you?
  
  that was a lot to deal with in a short amount of time, and then it was time for lunch! one of the great things about a workshop at innerstandings is that a hot lunch is provided for you (spanikopita, cucumber salad, and tiny cups of ben & jerry's ice cream).
  
  after lunch we gathering objects outside in a little box to use as inspiration for our next writing prompt. we ended the workshop writing about contrast: sleep/awake or inside/outside, like this:
  
  "inside i am raining. outside i am another moon. inside i am columns that support a hall of justice. outside i am a mouse. i am an orphan inside, safe while invisible, a wordless winter. outside i am true, even in the summer sun. stars appear like fairy tales. inside i am a frozen ocean. when i breathe it's like thunder. outside, a yellow bird vanishes. i shiver. safety is written in tiny letters. inside i am a maze of rooms connected by a path of broken china. outside, a golden field rustling against the mountains."
  
  in our spare time we could look at a huge collection of poetry books, read her manuscripts, and look through her photos of boxes & journals.
  
  she thought i had beautiful, if illegible, handwriting. this became important because instead of us reading what we wrote aloud, she read it so we could hear it from someone else's voice. my handwriting is definitely influenced by calligraphy, but the artist's way morning pages style has also affected it: you can't write fast and pretty at the same time.
  
  dayna wrote about her experience at this workshop, too.

• later in the month i went to see lucille clifton. "breaklight" was the first poem i remember saving in high school. i didn't expect her to hear my telepathic request for her to read it, and she didn't. but of course, what she did read was great. dot hearn wrote about the experience on her blog.

• then i took michaelmas to the "secrets & lies" show at 23 sandy. all the books there are poetry, even if they're narrative in nature. i really love book shows at 23 sandy because she has a "hands on" policy, and a book show that doesn't let you handle the books is essentially a sculpture show.

• last night i attended vox: a spoken-word chorus. they took a handful of actors and had them speak a dozen or so poems in chorus. sometimes the arrangements were straightforward, and sometimes they were heavily rearranged. "howl" is quite good like this. and e.e. cummings is also very conducive to this sort of arrangement, and so it was no surprise that they featured three poems by him, one of two repeated poets. awesome space: an odd little corner of a shambling industrial building by the railroad tracks by the fremont bridge.

• finally, "wolf moon" has been published at counterpunch. it's part of a series of poems i'm writing about the old names for the full moon.

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (3) | categories: classes & workshops, exhibits & events, writing

March 30, 2008

book review: the anatomy of story

by sven at 1:15 am

The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby (2007) is just about 420 pages long. I recommend the first 100... And then to skim the rest.

The core idea of the book is, in my opinion, a good one: In order to create a compelling story, don't simply sit down and start writing... Instead, construct a well-reasoned architecture of story structure -- and then progressively flesh it out.

Frustratingly, though, the book's title is deceptive. The "22 steps" are not steps in your own personal progress toward becoming a storyteller, as one might infer. Rather, the "22 steps" are moments that occur in an archetypal story -- steps that Truby believes your protagonist must go through during the course of their adventure.

And, frankly, these steps are no huge revelation. Here is the grand list:

1. Self-revelation, need, and desire
2. Ghost and story world
3. Weakness and need
4. Inciting event
5. Desire
6. Ally or allies
7. Opponent and/or mystery
8. Fake-ally opponent
9. First revelation and decision: Changed desire and motive
10. Plan
11. Opponent's plan and main counterattack
12. Drive
13. Attack by ally
14. Apparent defeat
15. Second revelation and decision: Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive
16. Audience revelation
17. Third revelation and decision
18. Gate, gauntlet, visit to death
19. Battle
20. Self-revelation
21. Moral decision
22. New equilibrium

If you understand what each of these steps in the protagonist's journey represents, how is that going to help you? Well, you can use them to inspire you -- the list might suggest scenes that you hadn't thought to write yet... Or it could be used as a check-list, so you can check to see if there's anything important that you might have left out of your outline...

But in general, I feel this list is too formulaic to be of much real use while actually generating a story. It's an editing tool -- and not a particularly sophisticated one, at that.

...

As I said at the beginning, the first hundred pages of the book are quite worthwhile, though. Here are a few of the insights that I thought were useful:

• The premise of your story will structure everything else you do. Don't skimp at this stage of the process -- spend weeks getting it right, not just days.
  
  
• To help find your premise, make a wish-list of everything you'd like to see in your ideal story. [Chris Baty offers the same advice in No Plot? No Problem! -- and additionally suggests writing a list of all the things you hate in a story, and want to make sure to avoid.]
  
  
• Don't develop your protagonist in isolation. Instead, think of your cast as a "character web"... Develop the characters by comparing and contrasting them, so that each one is clearly distinct from all others.
  
  
• Everything works toward the climax. Start the story-writing process by figuring out how things will end, then work out the path to arrive there.
  
  
• A story progresses through "reveals." Make a list of all the reveals in your story to make sure that they build in intensity -- otherwise the story will lose momentum.

These ideas all occur in the first four chapters. Chapter 9 had another useful idea, "scene weave" -- an editing method, where you reduce the main action of each scene in your story down to a single sentence and review the sequence. [Throughout the book, Truby seems to be in love with the idea of boiling your various concepts down to single-sentence "mission statements."]

I had high hopes for the rest of the book... Chapters titled "Moral Argument," "Story World," "Symbol Web," and "Scene Construction and Symphonic Dialogue" all sounded quite promising -- but instead were painfully tedious.

For wide sections of this book, it is quite obvious that Truby had a book outline that he was working from... He dutifully fleshed out each section that was in his outline... But just because you think you ought to include a topic in your book, doesn't necessarily mean that you have anything insightful to say about it! In these areas of the book, there's no sense that even Truby is excited about what he has to say -- he becomes the most boring sort of lecturer.

Mechanically fleshing out an outline is perhaps a forgivable sin. Worse, though, is that Truby analyzes the same films over and over and over again. Instead of illuminating his ideas, it ultimately feels like Truby is padding his book with synopses.

In the penultimate chapter, pretense of analyzing the films seems to disappear entirely, and the discussion degenerates into mere film appreciation... With Truby heaping praise upon:

• The Seven Samurai - "this is one of the great scripts"
  
  
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - "...has one of the great openings in movie history, it also has one of the great endings"
  
  
• Casablanca - "The final scene...is one of the most famous in movie history"
  
  
• The Godfather - "this great film..."

...And so on.

The author spends no time discussing more modest films, or looking at how to take a particular flawed script and improve it. The book blurb claims that Truby has taught his classes to more than "twenty thousand students worldwide." In my imagination, I see this man watching the same great films year after year, developing ever greater appreciation for them... But never writing an original script himself. How could an original work ever live up to the films he seems to worship?

I'm sure my fantasy of Truby is inaccurate and unfair. But I'll say for myself that at the end of the book I was genuinely mad at the author. He abandoned his task of guiding the writer who must generate new, imperfect material, and indulged in simply praising history's "perfect films."

If I'm going to stick with you for all 420 pages, you'd better make it worth my while!

...

Based on the form-factor and title of the book, I strongly suspect that the publishers want to create a feeling that "The Anatomy of Story" is the unofficial sequel to Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting (1997).

I read McKee's book recently, and while I have minor criticisms about it, I feel that it is overall a fantastically clear book -- the first place I'd send anyone who's interested in constructing stories. It's 480 pages -- but it delivered just what it promised.

From what I gather, McKee's book has become something of a bible in Hollywood... I offer a mote of evidence, by quoting a critic of McKee, Mystery Man on Film:

"When people in the biz talk about character arcs, they are talking about a change to the inner nature as defined by the Grand Poobah of gurus whose obscenely invasive influence all throughout HW spans well over a decade now. Right or wrong, love it or hate it, we have to go by Robert McKee’s definition, unfortunately."

Given McKee's standing, it shouldn't be surprising that there will be other story consultants vying to be the next guru... But, in my opinion, after reading "The Anatomy of Story," I believe McKee's book should still be the primary text for aspiring story makers.

Truby's book is an interesting supplement to McKee. Both books share the same core philosophy, which is that story should begin with constructing a solid structure...

My hopes that Truby could build upon McKee's foundation, translating solid story analysis into a trustworthy method for story generation were largely disappointed, though.

posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: writing

March 21, 2008

time is money

by sven at 7:00 am

Time-management is a crucial skill for artists as much as anyone else. Here's a metaphor that I find useful to keep in mind.

...Oh, and don't be too put off by the title -- I'm actually trying to reclaim and redefine that nasty old phrase!


TIME IS MONEY

1. Time is money.
Your time is a currency that can be used to purchase things you want.


2. Don't impulse buy -- invest your time.
Rather than doing whatever comes to mind next, consider investing blocks of time toward purchasing things that you really want.


3. Spend money (time) on planning your investments.
Don't over-plan... But a reasonable amount of time spent thinking about how you want to use your time is a reasonable expenditure which will increase your returns significantly.


4. How much time do I have?
Look at the schedule for your upcoming week. Block out the known time-commitments so you can estimate how much free time you have to spend on investments.


5. Make a wish-list of tasks
Make a list of every task you'd like to complete. You won't be able to purchase all of these goods -- but it's useful to have them all in front of you to choose from.


6. How much do my desired tasks cost?
Evaluate a wish-list of tasks, making quick estimates of how much each thing costs. Know that your wish-list will always outstrip your means.


7. Some assembly required.
Most goals don't come in a single package -- they have to be assembled from multiple purchases. Pay careful attention to what all sub-tasks are required in order to accomplish your ultimate goal.


8. To-do lists are shopping lists.
A useful shopping list categorizes items by which store you have to go to, and how high a priority each item is (so you can ditch low-priority items if you're running out of time). To-do lists are often dysfunctional because they don't specify where you have to be physically in order to do the tasks, or don't specify all the sub-tasks required to get you to the point of purchasing the main goal.


9. Track your investment portfolio.
Keep a list of the big projects that you're working on (typically 15-30 in progress). These are like purchases that you're making on an installment plan.


10. Diversify your portfolio.
If you only make plans to invest time in one area (e.g. writing a book), then when your personal economy crashes you're more likely to lose control of that project. If you are investing time in several different areas concurrently, you have a better chance of remaining in control of your life.


11. I am not my money.
I am more than my projects. Even if they all fall apart, I am still OK. I am the catalyst that effects things around me, but which is not defined by them.


12. The purpose of money is to buy more life.
Money (actual dollars) is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end: getting more life. Similarly, all the things that you can purchase with your time may be valuable -- but actually stopping and getting to feel OK sometimes is most important of all.


Note: I wrote this essay last month (2/21) -- it just took a while to get around to posting it.

posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: writing

March 8, 2008

the process of development

by sven at 3:38 pm

I've been doing huge amounts of work on story development for "Let Sleeping Gods Lie" lately. It has me thinking about the process of artistic development in more general terms. I wrote this reminder list last Friday (2/29).

THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

1. Make art you love.
Why make art? To sell something? To get it "right"? (By whose standards?) Whatever it is that you're working on, aim at making something that you yourself love. Give yourself the room and resources it takes to make that happen.

2. You will discover your solution by accident... But not your first accident.
The art pieces you'll truly love are things that you haven't even met yet. It's not going to be through pure design that you find something that moves you -- you're going to stumble on it. But it's also not going to be the first thing that you stumble on... You're going to need to make lots and lots of discoveries.

3. Make copious explorations.
Don't wait for inspiration to find you -- go out looking for the "Ah-ha!" moment. If the vision for an art piece you love is a discovery, then go and search everywhere for it.

4. Find your vision using cheap/fast methods.
The fastest tools an artist has tend to be the pen and pencil. If you're making sculptures or paintings, sketch hundreds of thumbnail drawings. If you're an author or filmmaker, write pages of stream-of-consciousness and brainstorming lists. (If you can type, then by all means...)

5. Set goals for quantity of development work.
I hate rush and compromise and flailing about, feeling like I'm making crap because I don't really know what I'm doing. But the opposite of this is not to be leisurely, letting inspiration wander in on its own time. Work hard. Decide to write 50 pages of story development in a week, or draw 24 pages of sketches over three days.

6. You can't know what you're going to get out of the process -- it's a risk.
Quantify success in terms of the number of pages you'll produce or hours you'll put in writing/drawing -- not in terms of whether or not you've found the final answer that you can love. When you commit to investing time in a development process, the point is to stumble upon discoveries. Even after 50 pages, you may well find that you need to apply the exercise again in order to get where you're going.

7. Give yourself freedom to go on digressions.
If you feel like you have to go directly from point A (problem) to point B (solution), you're going to feel stressed out. Allow yourself the freedom to go on digressions, trusting that they will ultimately loop back around to the main cause. Beautiful solutions are almost always surprises... You're most likely to find them off the beaten path -- not on the road you thought you needed to travel.

8. Trust that your solution will come to you.
There's a fear of wasting time. When you decide to employ a development technique like writing or sketching, you can't know whether or not it will actually yield a solution you love... So in committing to the process, you're taking a risk. The way to get rid of that nagging fear is to acknowledge that what you're doing is an experiment that may fail. But it's a worthwhile gamble. Trust that the process is worthwhile, and that if you apply your intelligence and imagination long enough (possibly much longer than you initially anticipate) then you WILL inevitably find possibilities -- interesting possibilities -- that you had not initially conceived of.

9. Every dead end you discover narrows down the options.
You're going to find one unusable idea after another... But these are not worthless ideas -- they are immensely valuable. Every one you find helps narrow down your options.

10. Ultimately only one perfect / possible solution will remain.
Art pieces are solutions to problems. How do I express this emotion? How do I tell this story? How do I convey this thought visually? Finding the art that you truly want to make, a vision that you want to take to your final medium, is a matter of finding as many possible solutions as you can and then selecting the one you like best. ...Execution of the idea in the final medium will have it's own challenges -- but if you love the idea, even a flawed end product will be meaningful.

11. Make bad art too.
There is a reason to make art that you DON'T love, too. Sometimes there is an externally imposed deadline that you want to meet -- a challenge. The job in this case is to make the most impressive, technically advanced, creatively outrageous solution you can, given the time available. In this case, set out with the idea in mind that you are making "bad art"; it'll free you up to live happily with experiments that don't live up to the standard of "art you love." You'll grow through engaging with the challenge -- and that's enough... That's a success.

posted by sven | permalink | comments (8) | categories: writing

February 11, 2008

2008 guiding principles

by sven at 7:00 am

Rather than making New Year's resolutions this year, I've decided to compile a list of principles that I want to keep in mind during the next 12 months. I spent January slowly collecting them, and now finally feel ready to assemble my little manifesto...


2008 GUIDING PRINCIPLES

1) I want writing to be at the core of what I do.
The stream-of-consciousness is the origin of all intelligence. Tap into it, write it down, and thought will progress from tangled to untangled. Old thoughts will be acknowledged and inescapably replaced by new insights. "Let me write," I tell myself, "and I'll be brilliant."


2) When I don't write, my feelings about work-to-be-done get impacted, preventing me from making progress and from feeling present.
I don't believe laziness or procrastination are a sign of personal weakness. If I find myself avoiding a task, it is almost always because I am lacking some essential piece of information and feel confused. When I know exactly how to proceed, no task seems really hard. Writing is the means to discover my block -- what it is that I don't even realize I don't know.


3) Turn down the volume on outside noise in order to amplify the interior voice.
I mean this very literally. I find it helpful to wear earplugs when I journal. When I want to really throw myself into a project, it can be helpful to stop listening to music, watching movies, and surfing the internet for a few days. Conversely, when I have a huge amount of information to get down on paper, turning on background noise can sometimes help me pace myself and not hit brain fry too soon. Be conscientious about adjusting level of focus.


4) The more stuff I get down onto paper, the more room there'll be in my head for new ideas.
Psychologists say you can only keep seven things in your head at once. One strategy is to let thoughts compost -- insights occur to you like flowers popping out of the mud. For all that I want to accomplish, though, I don't feel like I have time to wait for ideas to just "come to me." I need a strategy that's more active. I find that by shoveling out the mud, I discover seeds waiting for me down there in the dark -- and they seem to grow much faster when I bring them out into the sun and water them every day.


5) Questions are the essence of thought.
When you articulate a question, several possible answers instantaneously suggest themselves. Often the necessary answer is so obvious, you skip right over it to the next question. I believe this is how thought actually works -- it's just that most of time when an insight occurs to us, we're unaware of having first posed a question. The exercise of brainstorming questions is the fastest route I know to progressing any project.


6) Enumerate all possible options, and the correct solution will make itself apparent.
If there is planning and decision-making to be done, don't do the work in your head. Write it all down. It's much easier to make a choice when you've articulated what your options actually are -- than when you're simply trying to pick the right one out of thin air. Note: Laying out paragraphs is better than single sentences, which in turn is better than sentence fragments or single-reminder-word headings.


7) Thoroughness is more important than brevity.
"I'm sorry I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." I love this quote, variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and others. The ability to write something concisely is the endpoint of exploring your topic in all its facets. Don't skimp on the exploratory phase, and don't feel guilty for being long-winded when writing publicly.


8) Hammer on the story.
In art... All art -- be it painting, novel-writing, cinema, sculpture, or theater... We are presenting the audience with a story. Keep coming back to this: what is the story that you are trying to tell? Your style may be abstract or literal -- but if you are clear about what it is that you're trying to do, and what it is that you want the audience to feel, your art will always be more powerful.


9) Know your subject inside and out.
In fiction, discover every detail about the world you are building. In the technical skills of art-making, discover every possible variation for a particular technique -- and what the pros and cons are for each one. Capture what you are learning in writing, as you're learning it: both as notes and as fleshed-out essays.


10) Health is not optional.
Writing is physically demanding. Sitting for hours on end can weaken circulation and even lead to heart problems. Break it up. Make sure that mental motion is fueled by the physical motion of walking. Lubricate the mental gears by drinking lots of water. Look at every leaf of kale or spinach as another page in your book of writings.

posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: writing

January 12, 2008

the advantages and drawbacks of cg

by sven at 12:01 am

During the past decade, we've seen an enormous amount of computer animation in feature films.

Among the stopmoes at StopMotionAnimation.com, I hear a lot of frustration about this. We've lost ground. Seeing stopmo in feature films is rare now. Many of the artisans who used to have the skills for doing feature-worthy effects haven't been able to find enough work, and have had to move on. Hard-won craft knowledge is dying off. There are regular rants about the "suits" in Hollywood not understanding what can be accomplished with stopmo, and not putting money behind it.

My strongest love and loyalty is to stopmo. Yet, part of my mind wants to get beyond the rants and understand in depth what's behind the rise of CG. Call it playing the "devil's advocate" -- or just really wanting to know "why?"


INTRO: CG HAS DISPLACED MONSTERS AND CARTOONS

Where in feature films do we see computer animation?

It seems to me that there are two areas where CG has come to dominate: monster films, and "cartoon" animation.

For three generations, if you wanted to have full-body monsters on screen, you needed to use stopmo. Willis O'Brien was the progenitor of this heritage, animating the 1933 King Kong. He was followed by his protege Ray Harryhausen, who single-handedly produced the effects for such classics as "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," "Jason And The Argonauts," and "Clash of the Titans." Ray's mantle as master of the art form was passed on to Phil Tippett, working within the company Industrial Light and Magic. His style came to be known as "Hyper-Harryhausen" -- more photo-realistic monsters, but with the addition of motorized "go-motion" to create blurs (e.g. for the taun-taun in "The Empire Strikes Back," and the dragon in "Dragon Slayer").

"Jurassic Park," (1993) effectively ended the tradition. A few more films used stopmo for monster effects after it came out... But Jurassic Park's success began the swift transition over to CG.

The other area where we see CG films dominating now is in what I'll call -- for lack of a better word -- "cartoon films." Films like "Ice Age," "Finding Nemo," "Over the Hedge," and "Monster House" previously would have been done using hand-drawn cel animation. The landmark film that began the shift to CG was "Toy Story"... The death-knell signaling that cel animation had seriously lost ground: when Disney dissolved its cel animation division.

I hasten to point out that "cartoon" feature films are a genre that stopmo has NEVER dominated in the USA. Stopmo feature films have always been rarities. If I'm not mistaken, the first feature-length clay-animation stopmo film was Will Vinton's "The Adventures of Mark Twain" in 1984. The first feature-length puppetfilm in the USA followed in 1993: "The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Since then, we've seen further feature-length puppetfilms and claymation -- but coming from an astonishingly limited number of artists/producers. "James and the Giant Peach" and "Coraline" come from Henry Selick, and "Corpse Bride" comes from Tim Burton -- the same two individuals who produced "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Will Vinton studios has dissolved and reemerged as Laika, which is employing Selick to produce "Coraline." Meanwhile, it seems to me that the spiritual successor to the Vinton Claymation tradition has manifested in the UK in the form of Aardman studios -- whom we have to thank for "Wallace and Gromit."

Thus, when we look at "cartoonish" CG films and wish that Hollywood producers were making them in stopmo instead, we would do well to recall that this is not a genre that we have lost ground -- rather, we are only beginning to make our first inroads.

PART I: USING CG FOR MONSTER FILMS

THE MERITS OF USING CG FOR MONSTERS

What are the advantages of using computer animation to create monsters and other similar effects? Here's the list I come up with:

1) Editable.
Whereas a stopmo creature delivers a performance which you cannot go back and tweak, computer animation can be tweaked and edited endlessly. Given the financial risk associated with producing a feature film, this is a huge plus.

2) Crowd shots.
Ray Harryhausen pushed the limits of what can be done with stopmo by having Jason fight seven skeletons simultaneously. Stopmo is best suited to dealing with just a few puppets at one time. With CG, on the other hand, you can produce whole armies of creatures.

3) Less dependence on master animators.
When you have to get a shot right on the first try, you hire a master animator to accomplish it. When you have the freedom to edit, you have a much broader pool of talent to hire from.

4) You only need to build one model of a character.
When "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was being filmed, there had to be a dozen or so copies of Jack Skellington, so different animators could be working at the same time on different sets. When your "puppet" is a data file, you can give duplicate copies to many animators, with no further expenditure of time or money.

5) Simplification of materials.
When you do computer animation, everything is made out of pixels. When you're building stopmo puppets, there are many materials to procure: foam latex, silicone rubber, paints, steel and silver solder... And each of these different materials requires specialized tools: brushes, ovens, spray booths, lathes... This is not to say that CG doesn't require specialized softwares and specialized skillsets (modeling, rigging, animating) -- but things are simplified nonetheless.

6) Less physical storage space needed for props.
After you've made a film, what do you do with all the puppets and sets you constructed? Some might be auctioned off -- but a lot will go into cold storage, which consumes space (which also costs money). Keeping data over the long term is highly problematic -- but in the short-term, it's a huge space-saver.

7) Models don't degrade over time.
Puppets get dirty or break and need to be cleaned or replaced. After a few years, foam latex starts to rot. CG models remain immaculate during the course of filming. (In the long run, "bit rot" is a problem, though.)

8) Lighting.
One of the more tricky parts of compositing a stopmo monster puppet with live action footage is getting the lighting to match -- it's a delicate art. With CG, you can use virtual lights on your subject... Another instance where being able to edit CG sequences inside the computer makes the filmmaker's life easier.

9) Shadows can be accomplished without miniature sets.
In stopmo, if you want a puppet's shadow to fall on something, you can't do that with a green screen -- you have to build a miniature set. With CG, you can create transparent shadows that get composited in over live action footage. You may need to model planes that the shadows fall on, but this is usually a fairly simple matter.

10) Dark shots.
When you shoot against a blue screen or green screen, you need a fairly high level of illumination in order to make sure that the backdrop is a uniform color. You probably can't shoot a monster that's supposed to be in a darkened room and just green screen it into your shot -- you'll probably have to build a miniature version of the set. With CG, shadowed creatures are easy to composit.

11) Key-framing.
Both cel animation and computer animation allow you to pose key-frames and then make "inbetweens" to connect them. This isn't an option in stopmo -- which is one of its special challenges. You can plan an animated sequence in stopmo by shooting a "pop-through" -- but you don't ever get to use those actual photos in the final.

12) Complicated sequences can be animated piecemeal.
In CG, you can animate in passes... First just animating the monster's spine, then going back and doing its limbs, then finessing its claws, and finally working on the facial expressions. In stopmo, you have to pay attention to all of these things all at once.

13) Reusable sequences.
After you've animated a monster in CG, you can re-use that performance many times, looking at it from different camera angles. (For instance, if you have an army of monsters fighting.) With stopmo, because you only get one camera angle, you are almost never able to reuse a performance.

14) Algorithm-based motion.
With CG creatures, certain motions can be accomplished through programming rather than key-framing. A millipede's legs or a robot's walk, for instance, are good candidates for this technique. Obviously, it's not an option for stopmo.

15) Easily combined with other effects.
Because CG already exists in the computer environment, it's relatively easy to combine it with other special effects -- e.g. fire, smoke, water, explosions. Fire and water are notoriously difficult to accomplish with stopmo... It's often easier to use other means to create such illusions -- but then you're left with the difficulty of how to fuse them with the original stopmo performance. (Imagine getting a dragon to realistically breathe fire, for instance.)


THE DRAWBACKS OF USING CG FOR MONSTERS

What about the inherent drawbacks of using CG? My list is much shorter:

1) Less textural.
Most of the textures we see on CG monsters are simulated. The scales on a dragon generally aren't modeled in virtual 3D space -- they're painted onto flat polygons. See, the more polygons you have, the longer it takes to render out frames. To an extent these painted-on scales can be programmed to catch light and shadow -- but this strategy produces less convincing results than when you do actual 3D modeling. Stopmo, on the other hand, uses real textures -- which have an inherently "real" look to to them.

2) Unrealistic lighting.
CG lighting often has a flatness to it. In real life, shadows are often stark and whites are blown out -- but you hardly ever see this in computer animation. To an extent, it's the result of aesthetic choices. In a "good" image, you don't choose to have blown out whites -- but that's not necessarily the most realistic choice. Rendering lighting conditions such as "radiosity" (ambient, reflected light) and sub-dermal glow (flesh's subtle translucency) require a lot of computation... In terms of the time it takes to create these effects, they're very expensive. Stopmo, on the other hand, by using real light, bypasses many of these problems.

3) "Floaty" animation.
From its earliest days, computer animation has fought against its tendency to look "floaty" -- as if things are moving around without being impacted by gravity or friction. Much has been done to improve this tendency -- and yet, its roots are inherent in allowing the computer to create inbetweens for you. Stopmo is often accused of being "herky-jerky"... But in reality, living animals move with some jerkiness. To an extent, what has been perceived as a flaw of stopmo adds to its feeling of "life."

4) Not hands-on.
There's a computer screen between you and the thing that you're trying to animate. To me at least, it's easier to relate to how a thing is supposed to move when I can actually touch it.


WEIGHING THE ADVANTAGES VERSUS DRAWBACKS

When I spell out all the advantages of using CG for monsters, it seems like a really staggering list to me. I don't find it surprising at all that CG would become the first tool of choice for a filmmaker when confronted with a special effects challenge... And I can understand why, over time, there would be an impulse to just do all of your effects work with CG and forget about the other options.

On the labor-supply end of things, I can also see why CG has become so successful. There's a uniformity of software -- which makes it easier to train potential employees. Learning the art of stopmo has largely remained a master-apprentice process (or perhaps even more often, a matter of being self-taught)... Learning how to use a piece of software like Maya, on the other hand, is easily accomplished in a classroom context. Hollywood needs an army of interchangeable CG modelers, riggers, and animators -- so the institutional schooling system responds by offering relevant majors to students.

PART II: USING CG FOR CARTOON FILMS

Stopmoes should remember that computer animation is not just displacing our own work -- artists who make hand-drawn cel animation are also in jeopardy.

It seems that computer-created cartoons are evolving in two main directions: ones created using 3D modeling software such as Lightwave and Maya -- and ones created using 2D vector-based software, such as Flash. The 3D cartoon look is exemplified by films such as "Cars," "Ratatouille," "Happy Feet," "Veggie Tales," and "Barnyard." The Flash cartoon look is exemplified by TV shows like "Powerpuff Girls" and "Samarai Jack." For this essay, I'll limit discussion to 3D productions.


THE MERITS OF USING CG FOR CARTOONS

So: What are the advantages of making something like "Mickey Mouse" or "The Secret of NIMH" using computers rather than pencils and paint?

1) Characters are guaranteed to stay "on model."
When you're hand-drawing characters, it takes a lot of skill to keep mass and shape looking correct. With CG, this is a non-issue.

2) Elimination of the inbetweener's job.
Instead of having to pay people to draw the inbetween pictures, all you need is someone who'll do the key poses (in theory).

3) Ease of editing.
When you want to make a minor edit to a sequence, instead of having to re-draw it you can simply push your digital puppet a bit more this way or that -- and the computer will take care of the rest of the fixes for you.

4) Easier to rotate geometrical shapes.
In hand-drawn animation, it's much easier to rotate objects that are round and squishy... Hard-edged rectangular objects are difficult to rotate accurately. Not so for a computer.

5) Lighting effects are easier.
Want a shadow? Want to change the color palette of a scene from high noon to midnight? No problem.

6) Savings on film stock, cels, paint.
Computers aren't cheap -- but (theoretically) they represent a one-time expense. In place of materials costs you have... Electricity bills.


THE DRAWBACKS OF USING CG FOR CARTOONS

What about the disadvantages of using CG for cartoon films?

1) Fewer cheats.
You can't just imply a location impressionistically with a few lines and swaths of color -- everything you want on screen has to be modeled.

2) Less life in the inbetweens.
A lot of the exciting character of animation happens in the inbetween poses. If you leave that work to the computer, the product is going to be more boring at a very fundamental level.

3) Less squash and stretch.
Yes, to an extent you can squash and stretch computer models... But if you go too far, the rigging (digital armature) will break. You can rig special models for special effects -- but it takes a conscious effort to create the extremes that a pencil can draw with complete ease.

4) Fewer lively "off model" poses.
There's a school of thought (championed most loudly by John Kricfalusi) that focuses on creating truly unique poses and expressions for animated characters. These are, almost by definition, "off model." It's an approach that is contrary to what computer animation does best: uniformity.

5) Absence of line quality.
A huge amount of expressiveness is conveyed through the hand-drawn lines that an animator makes. These don't exist for CG characters.


AGAIN, WEIGHING THE ADVANTAGES VERSUS DRAWBACKS

When the problem is how to create a monster that interacts with live-action actors, CG and stopmo offer two different solutions -- but there is a common criteria for judgement: do the results look photo-realistic? All other considerations aside, CG will usually win out because it is able to provide images that are on the whole more complicated and better integrated into live-action sequences.

When we compare CG and hand-drawn cartoons, however, the products don't look remotely the same. The shared goal? To tell a story that can't be told with live-action. [I'm tempted to say "a story with talking animals," since that is a frequent commonality -- but it wouldn't include a film like "The Incredibles."]

CG cartoons and hand-drawn cartoons ought to be able to co-exist as two separate and unique forms of animation... And yet, how can we ignore Disney dissolving its cel animation branch?

It seems to me that while CG has not delivered the deathblow to hand-drawn cartoons that it's dealt to stopmo monsters, displacement and domination are apparent. Personally, I would say it's largely due to the entertainment industry's aspirations to be... Well, industrial.

The same art school students who are being trained to do modeling, rigging, and animating using Lightwave and Maya for special effects -- they're easily repurposed for CG cartoon films. Companies like Disney were essentially factories to begin with -- but with the standardization that computers (and computer training) provides, the working parts of the entertainment machine (i.e. animators) become even more interchangable.

For an entertainment corporation, the only purpose that "artistry" has is to win Oscars, which act as a form of advertising for the product. So long as the product is "good enough," selling enough units to turn a profit, artistry is expendable...

At least so long as brand recognition doesn't suffer. If different companies' products don't look different from each other -- then there's a reason to start bringing artistry back into the mix!


OUTRO: NEW NICHES FOR STOPMO TO SCRATCH

The phenomenal success of CG as an animation technique is also its Achilles' Heel. Because all of the big entertainment companies have rushed to embrace it, the old techniques have essentially become new again.

There is room for stopmo to be revived for monster films -- and not just as retro pastiche. However, it can never again be the default. From now on, it has to be used as a conscious choice. A name-recognition director very much has it in their power to go this route.

An example: Wes Anderson. Anderson is known for his unique vision; people go to see his films in part if not largely because he's the author. In "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," he bucked the trend and used stopmo instead of CG for all his underwater creatures. The most important of them all -- the Jaguar Shark -- is essentially a monster. This isn't your typical (read "cliched") monster film -- but it's an example of stopmo being used for realistic monster effects, nonetheless.

With regards to cartoon films, again, because the big studios have all rushed to embrace CG (for fear of being left behind?) there's now a void ripe for a daring entertainment company to exploit.

Enter Laika. See, Pixar's doing CG, Disney's doing CG... If Laika starts pumping out stopmo features like "Coraline," it doesn't have any competition! If it does well with this film, it has a chance to quickly establish market dominance.

So how will the other big players in the USA respond? Well, rumor has it that Disney's agreed to do a stopmo remake of Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie." [There's Tim Burton again, one of three-or-so individuals who's currently getting free reign to make stopmo films when he wants.] It seems to me that Disney has seen their blunder... And rather than letting Laika get the upper hand, it's going to counter with its own stopmo product.

Laika and Disney both putting out stopmo products? Remember, there's only been a handful of feature-length stopmo films made in the USA -- EVER. This is an unprecedented scenario... Which, optimistically, could lead to a new boom for stopmo.


A SURPRISE ENDING: "IT'S THE DIRECTORS, DUMMY"

I think the year that "Wallace and Gromit" and "Corpse Bride" were both up for Oscars represents a turning point. "Coraline" will build upon that momentum... And if we're very lucky, we might be looking forward to a decade or more of a stopmo film coming out ever year or two.

This would be an excellent thing because -- (and this is a surprise ending to the essay that I didn't see coming) -- what I think we desperately need is more big name directors who have an affinity for the stopmo artform... Because right now, all we've got is Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Nick Park, and Wes Anderson.

If the big studios commit to producing stopmo product, then some new blood might have a chance to rise to the top ranks... And once the directors have had a chance to taste the process of making stopmo films, how can they not wind up pushing to do even more of them?

posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: stopmo, writing

December 27, 2007

monster month book for sale!

by sven at 12:47 am

book cover

Monster Month 2007 is now available in book form, for sale at lulu.com!

I'm really proud of how it turned out. It really looks and feels like... a book. Gretchin and I put in some crazy hours during December, secretly slaving away so that we could get copies to people in time for xmas. Now that the recipients have unwrapped their surprises, we're making the book available to anyone who wants it!

stack of books

For the book version of Monster Month, I wrote up a new foreword, assembled 7 gorgeous new maps, and did a new painting for the cover. The book's a bit pricier than I'd like -- but ya gotta understand: everything's in full color!

Here's the promotional text for Scarlet Star Studio's first publication:

Monster Month
by Professor Ichbonnsen

Thirty-one days, thirty-one monsters: Monster Month!

After a lifetime of trekking jungles, climbing mountains, and spelunking caves, the world's foremost cryptozoologist at last reveals a selection of his greatest discoveries. Herein you will find the Adameve, the Dark Strider, the Opium Gore Golem, the Trick Squilligoss, the Zompire Bat... And many more fantastic beasts!

With the keen mind of a scientist and the bold heart of an explorer, Professor Ichbonnsen provides illuminating descriptions of how the creatures live -- and astonishing tales of how he found them.

Both adults and children will marvel at the Professor's adventures... And be left wondering what else remains yet undiscovered in the unexplored corners of our rich planet. Like the map-makers of old, you will understand: "Here be dragons!"

Monster Month is lavishly illustrated with 32 full-color paintings by Sven Bonnichsen, and 7 full-color maps tracing Professor Ichbonnsen's travels.

Again, where can you get it? At lulu.com. Here's the direct link: http://www.lulu.com/content/1744791

Thank you to Gretchin for the fantastic help laying out the book... And thank you to all the readers and supporters of Monster Month!

posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: bestiary, painting, writing

December 10, 2007

the business of stopmo: a primer and a manifesto

by sven at 11:59 pm

[Reprinted from a thread I started at StopMotionAnimation.com... This is an essay I wrote in response to the "How about it - can we make a little scratch in today's digital media environment?" thread, here.]

PART I - Making Something to Sell

OK, let's get down to basics... Givens: (1) You're a person who loves filmmaking. (2) You want to make money while doing it. ...What we're talking about here is running a business.

1. PRODUCT & INVENTORY

So, let's think like we're running a business. First off, you need a product to sell. Your product is your film. But filmmaking isn't like painting, where you would ever sell the original... We're in the business of selling copies. I'm going to assume that means making DVDs.

If you were a world-renowned painter who could sell a single painting for $20,000, maybe you could earn a year's worth of living expenses with one sale. No one's going to buy a DVD for $20,000 though...

So, it looks like you're going to need to sell many DVDs in order to make this endeavor profitable. That means keeping inventory on hand. Suppose for the moment that you want a hundred copies available for sale. Right now I can see three options:

(1) buy a stack of blank DVDs, cases, and labels for about $100 total and deal with production and order-fulfillment yourself;

(2) have a professional service burn the discs and print the labels for you, at a cost of ~$7.50 each, therefore $750 total (different deals will vary);

(3) use a print-on-demand service like lulu.com, which allows you to produce each DVD when it is ordered -- and which will take care of fulfilling orders for you, too -- thus, an out-of-pocket cost of $0.

[Personally, I know which means of production I want to pursue. ;-) ]

Let me point out that most of the folks on SMA don't even get this far in terms of creating their stopmo business model... Which drives me nuts! Here we have a message board full of stopmo enthusiasts -- the people most likely in all the world to buy a stopmo film -- and we don't even make it possible to buy films from each other! I'd love to buy DVDs from Nick, Lio, Strider, Paul, Mysterious Ron, Jriggity, Toggo... I'll stop there -- but you get my drift.

Folks, I WANT to buy your films -- but I can't, because there's no physical product there to buy! PLEASE, pick a means for producing some inventory, even if it's just home-burned DVDs, and make them available to me!

2. BUDGET & INITIAL INVESTMENT

OK, so let's assume that you want to be in the business of creating DVDs to sell. You first got into this art because you love it, not in order to make money -- so to make the transition, you're going to have to change your perspective and start thinking about the budget.

Here's the challenge that every maker of art must face: in order to make a profit, you have to bring in more money than you spent on creating your product. Easy enough -- except for one horrifying glitch: stopmo is astronomically expensive to produce!

How expensive? Let's look at a hypothetical 5-minute film and talk about what your initial investment is.

Tools of the trade, a computer and camera, you probably owned anyway -- so I'm willing to ignore those. Sculpey, aluminum armature wire, plaster, wood... I'll bet you could make a fine looking 5-minute film for under $100 in material costs. Even if you move up to foam latex and silicone, the material costs probably won't kill you...

It's TIME that's the killer. How many hours does it take to make a stopmo film, when you consider both fabrication and animating? Let's say you work at 12fps, and can pose a frame every 2.5 minutes. That's 2 seconds of film produced per hour. A five minute film, then, takes 150 hours to shoot. Fabrication usually takes longer than shooting the film itself -- I usually estimate 3 times as long -- so, we'll say that this 5 minute film takes 600 hours total to make.

If you were paying yourself a bit better than minimum wage, say $10 per hour, that means this hypothetical 5 minute film is going to cost you $6100 to create. That's how much money you're going to have to make back, just to break even!

Oh, I could talk about cutting corners at this point -- using cheaper materials, stories with fewer characters, filming at a lower fps... But who am I kidding? If you don't love the film, you're not going to go through the hell of creating it. Just accept that, yes, stopmo is painfully expensive to create.

3. PRICING, PRICE POINT, & VOLUME

Pricing is not guess work. It's math. Deal with it. Embrace it. It's not that damned hard.

If you were making one-of-a-kind paintings, this is the formula you would use to price your products: cost of materials + cost of labor + mark-up to whatever the market is willing to pay.

The accepted price point (what people are willing to pay) for feature-length DVDs is $10-$25. People might be willing to pay less than that, but they're not going to pay more. Your film is only 5 minutes long, so you're going to be doing pretty well if you can get people to spend $10...

But, if you sell just one copy of your film for $10, you've just made negative $6090. ...Which is why you're in the business of selling DVD copies, not the original. (Duh.)

OK, let's set our sights on just breaking even. Let's say that you use an online print-on-demand service, where it costs $7.50 to produce a DVD -- but whatever you charge on top of that is money that goes to you. If you can sell your DVDs for $10 each, that means you're raking in $2.50 each...

Which means it's an easy calculation to figure out how much volume we need to move. To make back your initial investment of $6100, you're going to have to sell 2440 copies.

Ouch.

And to make a modest living of $20,000 per year? That's another 8000 copies that you're going to want to move.

Double-ouch.

4. SELLING OUT

I assume that the people I'm writing this for are artists. We have visions that we want to share on film. However, we also have craft skills that we can sell... Which, sadly, is a much more profitable route to go.

As far as I can see, there are four ways to try to make money while doing stopmo:

(1) make your own film and sell DVD copies;

(2) work as an animator/fabricator at a studio that does stopmo;

(3) start your own stopmo studio, which produces and sells TV commercials and music videos to companies with deep pockets (deep because they're moving huge volumes of their own products);

(4) create a film and sell it to a media company that makes its profits either by distributing a catalog of films, or which broadcasts content and makes its real money off ad revenue.

I've done a little bit of freelance work for a local stopmo studio... If I recall, I was making $15/hour before taxes. Freelance work, kinda by definition, isn't steady... But suppose I wanted to make $20,000 a year doing that. If we assume that taxes are going to take about a third of my pay before it even reaches me, then it's easy to figure out that I'm going to need to work for 2000 hours each year. ...Which translates into fifty weeks of 40 hours each.

Nice work if you can get it... But of course, that's not going to leave a lot of time in your life to make that hypothetical 5-minute film I mentioned earlier, which would take 600 hours to produce (fifteen 40-hour weeks).

Running your own stopmo studio, you can get big money coming in, which hypothetically you can channel into a side project -- possibly making a film even with the help of other animators... But the level of complexity grows too, in terms of getting people their paychecks, dealing with insurance, etc... Well, I don't know enough to go that route.

Plus, if your own studio could make a film, you'd still have to find a media company that will buy it for distribution. At that level, you're not going to risk making a film before finding a buyer -- you're going to court potential buyers with a pitch, and try to sell them on investing in you up front.

Are there media companies interested in buying short films from people who've already created a product? Probably. But I don't personally know anything about them. All I can do is ask: How much is any particular company -- who is primarily interested in their own profit -- likely to pay for 5 minutes worth of content? ...$50? $500? $2000?

Maybe broadcast media are different -- but if the company in question sells DVDs, then they'd be subject to the same math that we talked about earlier: To earn $20,000, they'd have to move 10,440 copies.

Granted, they can probably get volume discounts during production -- but that's still a truly phenomenal number of units to sell when your product only lasts 5 minutes. ...And did I mention that your royalties are going to be skimmed off the top? Probably something like 25 or 50 cents per unit?

PART II - Who's going to buy what you make?

OK, now that we've taken a fairly in-depth look at the options for making things to sell, I want to turn attention to consumers -- the people you're going to try to sell your products to.

5. MARKETS ARE EITHER GROWING OR SHRINKING

Let's start with the big picture.

Markets don't simply exist -- they grow or they shrink. ...And, in my opinion, we have it in our power to help make the size of the stopmo audience go in either direction.

I believe that at the heart of every consumer movement there is a core of die-hard enthusiasts. Be their passion for stamp-collecting or for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, wherever there's a shared passion, you've got the seed for a money tree. For stopmo, that essential core of enthusiasts is us -- the 6000-odd lurkers and contributors at SMA.

Look at science fiction. Back in the 30s it was viewed as badly-written kid stuff, not to be taken seriously. It was printed on pulp paper, the cheapest material available, because both the paper and the content was so disposable. Sci fi films have followed a similar path -- look back at attitudes in the 60s -- before 2001 and Star Wars -- when it was all B-movie stuff, not taken seriously by the general public. Where is sci fi now? It's a huge force in the book publishing industry, and it's raking in billions of dollars world-wide in the sale of films. Why? The enthusiasts were determined and won out.

More recently, look at how anime has taken root in the US. It wasn't very long ago that it was just a handful of enthusiasts who even knew what anime is... Now, go into Best Buy, and there are shelves of the stuff for sale.

Why can't the same thing happen with stopmo? In Eastern Europe, the puppet film tradition (I'm told) has a long heritage and continues to thrive. It's a different culture, with stronger ties to traditional puppetry... But even so, why couldn't it happen here too?

6. HOW TO SELL SHORT FILMS

Stopmo certainly can sell. Wallace and Gromit, the Nightmare Before Christmas, Robot Chicken... People are hungry for this stuff.

It seems to me that the real problem that we have in terms of marketing our own home-brewed stopmo films is length. In my opinion, a DVD is generally supposed to provide between 45-minutes and 2-hours worth of entertainment. If I buy a 5-minute stopmo film on DVD for $10, I definitely feel like I'm doing the author a bit of a favor. Mind you, it's a favor that I'm eager to do, because I love the art form.

I want to point out that stopmo is not the only art form that suffers from issues of scale. How about short stories? You can sell a short story in the form of a chapbook -- but generally you're going to have a challenging time selling to anyone besides other short-story enthusiasts.

Even more generally, I'd like to point out that MOST artists are starving artists. Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, makers of short live-action films... We all have to struggle with the time-invested vs. income-generated equation.

Short stories, though, I think are a particularly good analogy for stopmoes to look at. How do you sell a short story? Put it in an anthology.

A DVD anthology of good looking films, in attractive packaging? That could sell.

Enough units to make back what you spent on making your film? Um, honestly probably not. But I'm willing to bet that a 30 minute DVD that contains six five-minute shorts can at least sell more volume than those six films could if they were packaged independently.

7. THE MARKET BEGINS WITH ME

Stopmoes... We love this art form with a crazy intensity. We'll eat up whatever gets produced. And yet we aren't even making our films into physical products and selling them to each other!

The way I see it, we need to stop imagining cinderella stories: starving artist gets swept away by producer prince and lives happily ever after in the castle of film distribution. Instead, we need to take power into our own hands. With home DVD-burners and online print-on-demand services, we now have the means of inexpensively producing the very products that we ourselves want to buy.

Imagine if you will a DVD compilation title "the best of StopMotionAnimation.com"... Pretty sweet, huh?

Then, if we as a community were to continue developing in this direction -- insisting that our projects become actual products, and pressing to make the best single-short DVDs and anthology DVDs we can -- well, then how can we fail to begin attracting a broader audience?

8. A MANIFESTO FOR STOPMO FILMMAKERS

Time to wrap this up. And here's where I step up onto my wooden crate marked "manifesto-brand soaps"...

We who love stop-motion animation and who want to see its influence in the world grow, we must:

(1) Take responsibility for turning our filmmaking projects into more than a just hobby, but rather a business. (Even if it loses money.)

(2) Produce DVD versions of our films, and at the very least make them available for sale to other stopmo enthusiasts.

(3) Gather our short films together into anthologies, which make film-viewers feel like they are getting full-value for their entertainment dollar.

(4) Begin expanding the market for stop-motion animation, first by making our products available to other stopmo enthusiasts, and then by drawing others into the passion.

(5) Keep making films. Because if we don't give the audience products to buy frequently enough, their shopping attention won't stay engaged, and they'll just wander away.

And in my best inspirational seminar voice:

We're all in this together folks, so let's "get down to business" -- and really get to work.

[End of speech. You'll find copies of my book in the lobby. I'll be available for signing after a brief intermission... :-P ]

posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: stopmo, writing

November 20, 2007

one event may hide another

by gl. at 11:59 pm

on saturday i took a "found poetry" class at the 100th monkey, the title of which is based on the beautiful poem "one train may hide another", inspired by a sign the author saw in kenya.

our first exercise was in the format of a "lost" ad:

lost: free time. last seen summer of 2004. may be in the company of homemade meals and long walks on the springwater corridor trail. if found, please contact gretchin@scarletstarstudios... and i will try to arrange a pickup time in the next few weeks.

afterwards, i thought i might write a companion piece called "free to good home: to-do list." :)

the next exercise was finding a sign at the studio to write about: i'm always intrigued by the "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" signs, but we didn't really write a poem based on it.

then we did an exercise where the facilitator asked us to listen and write down what we heard as he slowly moved his way up the AM dial: we could use those words, and those words only, for the next poem we wrote:

an open field
how long ago was that?
no return
solid state now
we were told
we could only go
forward

he also briefly covered a technique called "widows & orphans," which is similar to the above technique. widows and orphans are typesetting terms for the dangling words left morosely at the bottom and top of book pages: you gather a bunch of those and use only those words to make a poem (but again, we didn't write anything based on that technique).

finally we created "blackout poems" like those found on humument. this could have been a workshop all to itself! we found a page in a book or a magazine, highlighted words that together suggested a poem, blacked out everything else with a marker or sharpie, then created art atop it. i copied a page from a book about constellations and found this poem in it:

the goddess screamed.
vengeance gives names
to dark shapes.
but abandon pain
believe in lilies:
gifts of immortality,
the pathway of souls.

amusingly, one of the women i met at this workshop i saw later that night at the iprc text ball, a story about an event that has yet to be told.

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (6) | categories: classes & workshops, writing

November 9, 2007

artist's way guided intent (november)

by gl. at 10:29 pm

on wednesday night we gathered four strands of possibility in our fingers and wove them together to create poetry. using divination tricks like coins, cards, cookies and cups of darjeeling tea, we poured our hopes and hearts onto the page. this month charles won a new journal to continue writing (and everyone went home with an exotic coin or fortune in their pocket!).

["appreciate the good will of others;" click to see the other prompts]

essentially, we spent the evening writing based on these tangible prompts. at the end, we wrote a poem based on one of the writings we did. we only shared the final poem, not any of the writings.

the first type of possibility is binary: yes or no, heads or tails. so i passed around a little bowl of various foreign coins and we asked a question with a yes or no answer. mine was "will i live to be 100?" and the answer was tails: no. so i wrote about asking the wrong question, because maybe i'll live to be 101, or 1001. 100 is like 2 more lifetimes from now for me, and it's hard to imagine even 10 years in the future. i should have asked "will i have a long, happy life?" -- but what if the answer to -that- was no?

then we picked a tarot card, and i was amazed that i picked "the star," the card i coveted so dearly when sven picked it last time. i love the star! unexpectedly, i started writing about harvesting stars like a fisherman, casting my net into the roaring dark. (i had a physics professor tell me once that if space wasn't a vaccum, we'd hear the roar of the sun all day and the chatter of stars at night). the sound of atoms in the dark, chattering waves of ions & photons riding gravity through space, creating tides & eddies. galaxies like mammoth whales slowly floating across the universe, eating starlight & breathing stardust. i hit a little bump when i wrote: "but where do the stars go after that? we harvest to eat, we harvest to consume, we harvest them for dresses that sparkle, coats so soft and flowing they make people cry as you walk by." the vision of a stardust coat was appealing, but harvesting & killing stars to do it makes me shudder. i don't know if star farms would be a very valid option, either, though stars glowing in barns would be sort of sweet.

this year i actually bought fortune cookies to use instead of using the little bag of fortunes i'm saving for an undetermined art project. cracking open a fortune cookie in an irreplacable kinesthetic experience. my fortune read "appreciate the good will of others." and i do! while writing, as i so often do, i compared it to a scientific principle, in this case e=mc²: an equal exchange of matter & energy. the more goodwill i have for others, the more i will receive in return.

finally, everyone picked a tea cup from the center of the table and i passed around a bowl of loose darjeeling tea. we poured ourselves just enough tea to dip the fortune cookie into and slowly sipped until the pattern was revealed. mine looked like land & sky, with stars or birds hovering in the air. i couldn't decide which they were, which lent itself well to the final part of the night, picking one of the writings to use as the basis of a poem:

the quantum mechanic takes tea

wet and moist with possibility
the tea leaves swell & swarm
leaving land on one side
sky on the other.
there is no tempest in this teapot
only monet or van gogh
each leaf a dab of paint
from an impressionist's paintbrush.

up close, the story is unclear:
swifts chasing a hawk
or stars gently glowing
above a fragrant field?
like a double exposure
each is true but when i choose one
the other will cease to exist.
stars
or
birds?

--*--

the next event is collage night, which is already full, but the next guided intent is one of my favorites: blind painting! and then i'll team up with bridget to teach a wordwear workshop: the strong silent type. whee!

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (3) | categories: artist's way, writing

October 12, 2007

HPLFF drinking game

by sven at 9:00 am

On the last day of the 2007 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, I said to myself: carpe diem!

I've been fantasizing about creating an HPLFF drinking game for two years now... So in the last half hour before heading out to the fest, I assembled my notes into the following document. I made something like 40 copies, and distributed them to the theater-goers.

I'm looking forward to putting together an even better version for next year.

---

THE H.P. LOVECRAFT FILM FESTIVAL DRINKING GAME

by Sven Bonnichsen, 2007

Lovecraftian cliches. We keep hoping for better films... But even when the films are laughably bad, we love 'em despite ourselves. Here's a game to help get you through some of the more unnameable cinema.

Warning: may cause alcohol poisoning. (In the context of the HPLFF, I recommend replacing shots with pieces of candy or popcorn.)

---

THE BIG GREEN GUY
someone says: Cthulhu
someone says: ftagn!
someone says: R'lyeh
a single tentacle reaches from offscreen
crazy rant mentioning names of 3+ Elder Gods

READING IS BAD FOR YOU
evil book
someone says: Necronomicon
we see hand-drawn demons inside book
character finds the Necronomicon just lying around in someone's house
character goes insane after reading book
interior of a college library
someone says: Miskatonic

HUMAN SACRIFICE
hooded robe
a circle is drawn on the ground
worshipping giant demon idol
candles
bonus: 50+ candles
woman tied up, awaiting human sacrifice
boyfriend/husband murders his girlfriend/wife
bonus: girlfriend/wife murders her boyfriend/husband
the end of the world is represented by stock footage of marching Nazis
the end of the world is represented by stock footage of an atomic bomb
the gateway to the Elder Gods' dimension is an actual door in the wall

DOCTOR, CAN YOU HELP ME?
padded cell
hypodermic needle
hypodermic needle used as weapon
a shot of blood hitting the wall
blood splatters onto someone's face
intestines
decapitation

BOO!
woman screams
vomiting in horror
lights turn off menacingly
bonus: the lights in a hospital hallway turn off
a dark silhouette runs past the the camera in the foreground
someone laughs unnaturally long
full moon

I'D LIKE TO WAKE UP NOW
creepy little kid stands staring
recurring dream repeats
time loop circles back to beginning of loop

RUNS IN THE FAMILY
protagonist had a relative purported to practice witchcraft
tunnels under old house

BUT IS IT ART?
faux scratchy black and white
voice-over for entire film
an actor who is at least 10 years too young for the part
bonus: 20+ years too young
out-of-the-box digital lightning effect
the auteur's name appears 4+ times in the credits
bonus: if the auteur's name appears 4+ times -- and is the only name in the credits
hard rock soundtrack during credits
credits say "copyright" at the end, despite use of infringed music

JOYS OF THE FESTIVAL
you see someone from the Church of Satan
have to switch crossed legs because your ass has gone numb
you've forgotten how many years you've been coming
catch a whiff of body odor from someone in the next row
the guy in the row in front of / behind you thinks he's funny
fall asleep during a film
you bump into Cthulhu in the lobby

TIME TO QUIT
"What's wrong, Elwood?"

posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: exhibits & events, writing

October 3, 2007

a beautiful hoax: the lovecraft filmfest acceptance letter

by sven at 10:00 am

[click to enlarge]

I've been meaning to share this for a while: the acceptance letter that the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival sent me for the new Let Sleeping Gods Lie teaser.

I love this!

I think The Hoax is the highest form of fiction. Cinema comes close, creating an immersive fantasy world; but there's always this fourth wall between you and the imaginary place. With The Hoax, however, fantasy breaks out of its cage and invades reality. I suppose it's sort of like guerilla theater in that sense... The artist's dream life can errupt into being anywhere, at any moment.

An elaborate and beautifully crafted Artist's Hoax is different from "viral marketing." It's perpetrated tongue-in-cheek, with a sense of playfulness that invites the audience to play along -- to embellish, even. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is coercive. It's a con job, where shills are planted in the audience purely for the purpose of herding their marks into the slaughterhouse.

[I'm also a big fan of mixing metaphors: the much maligned linguistic mash-up. ...But that's another essay.]

Anyway: Don't forget that the H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest is happening this Friday. Hope to see you there!

posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie, writing

October 2, 2007

artist's way: session 2

by gl. at 4:45 pm

i was relieved when the weather decided to be kind enough today so we could do the poetry walk, which is an exercise where i do a simple loop around the neighborhood and we write down all the nouns and verbs of the things around us (or what they make us think of). the trick is that you can't use adjectives or adverbs. afterwards, we had 20 minutes to write a poem, though it didn't have to use those words or be about the walk. i love that even though we've all been influenced by the same walk, we write dramatically different poems.

falling

with each step
we are escaping
from our boxes
of wood and metal
and fences can't keep us
from the fields
lined with grass
and fallen apples.

we are walking together
but writing alone
each rose glowing red
against its own grey sky.

::oct02.2007::

center (safety): calligraphy pens forming a structure in which art can grow, with the stars shining & encouraging from above, about ready to drop in

music: tracy chapman's new beginning

(and now i'm off to england! tally ho!)

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (0) | categories: artist's way, writing

September 5, 2007

numerology

by gl. at 12:34 pm

last sunday the portland society for calligraphy was asked to write numbers on the participants of the first portland triathlon, which meant we had to be there at dark o'clock. many triathletes said they were really grateful to have beautiful numbers to wear for the next few days: the number they wear is like a badge of honor, but usually they get something scrawled with a sharpie. even the athletes who were wearing full-length body suits wanted numbers!

[smiling in the dark: click to see the other pix from this event]

and even more impressive is that lorinda moholt wrote a poem afterwards, while the rest of us had gone back to bed or were drowning in coffee!

Triathlete Numbers

(more fun than vellum)

5:30 am, dark, no coffee
(do they ever eat donuts),
tall, short, thin, almost-thin
hairy and smooth, they stop
for us to write numbers on
strong, tense bodies.

544, 837, 20l, 683, 219;
on thigh below the shorts line,
then upper arm, always the left
side, age on calf. Calm and
cheerful or focused and silent,
they leave our stations with
right sides anonymous.

20-something, 40-plus, 68,
calligraphers in the still
dark morning tell each
competitor "I only write
winning numbers." Some
say thanks, then walk to
the cold Willamette.

as alesia says, vellum "is old-school calligraphy material: goat-, sheep - or calf-skin to write on. AKA unoccupied skin, unlike what we did this morning!"

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (1) | categories: calligraphy, exhibits & events, writing

August 10, 2007

poem: 34

by gl. at 2:35 pm

i read my "birthday poem" series at the muse talk opening reception last month, so it seems fitting i should share the next poem in the series:

34

this is a season of blackberries,
warm and floral in the sun
unpredictably sour and sweet.
we walk down the hill with
blackberry ink on our hands.

we are on a carousel, up and down
i am the dragon, you are the swan.
i ride glittering bicycles through fairy forests
and hold the hands of women who bleed
and think they are
alone.
no matter how many thorns
are on this blackberry wall
no matter how much they scratch
i will keep plucking these dark jewels
and cry at how we must fight
to keep anything worth saving.

::august 04, 2007::

[see also: 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 & 33]

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (0) | categories: writing

June 30, 2007

muse talk art reception review

by gl. at 11:59 pm

the muse talk art reception last week went really well! there were about 50 people there, which i think is pretty respectable for a coffeehouse show. i was especially pleased (and surprised!) to see so many people i knew: special thanks to kristen & todd; jennifer, julie & evan; toni & matt; mary knight & her friend; and seamus & his family. in addition, sven & michaelmas were there, and leeann was visiting from california! i very much appreciated the support! (alas, kim was sick, serena was at the vet, and anna was at a bridal shower. but i appreciated your good thoughts, too.)

[part of the crowd]

one of the great things about this show is that we had an opportunity for perfomances in addition to visual art. so i read the "birthday poetry" series i began when i was 25 and still in colorado. i try to write a poem every year as the first thing i do when i wake up on the morning of my birthday. sometimes the date slips a little, but this ritual turned out to be very important when i was languishing in california, or i wouldn't have written anything at all.

i was afraid it might be too much: 9 poems over 8 years, 3 states and 2 countries: all in 15 minutes! i wrote the transitions out beforehand because i knew i didn't have time to ramble. but i was very pleased (and relieved!) with how well it went: i heard audience responses in all the right places and several people came to talk to me afterwards times to recall similar situations & emotions.

[reading 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 & 33]

and then, as if that wasn't enough, i volunteered to be "water" in the "salmon dance"! who can resist the swirly scarves? i certainly couldn't. a tribute to the lifecycle of the salmon, alisa created the dance a few years ago with a much larger group, so this was a much smaller reprise. still, her handmade salmon sculptures are amazing, and the large windows were great to illuminate them (though they also produced terribly backlit pix, as you may have noticed).

[wandering water]

oh, and i also have a couple of pieces in the visual arts show. :) the art show will remain up until july 24, so stop by to see these two pieces, which are tucked in the back by the big comfy couch. and feel free to buy the work of one of the other artists! *nudge*

["advice" and "a grace it had, devouring"]

this was fat straw's first art show, and throughout the planning process we could tell the owner was pretty dubious and wasn't willing to help or answer many questions. his tune began to change when the newspapers we sent press releases to began to call, and on the day of the show fat straw was very busy serving drinks & snacks. he was very intently watching the performances and afterwards he said he was impressed with the all the arts & the work we did to set up the show. hooray!

[fat straw sign]

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (0) | categories: calligraphy, exhibits & events, other art, writing

June 5, 2007

poem: the deluge

by sven at 6:40 pm

Big act-of-god type rainstorm today. With the kind of thunder that rattles the lunch in your belly. Stood out on the front porch awhile watching.

the deluge

the unmapped craters of raindrops
remind me of the
moon we will never know

molten and newborn
tattooed by falling stones
from grandfather worlds
shattered long before

my eye is cut in two
when the whip of light cracks
and its wave of sound
rolls through my chest
like the beginning of existence

I grieve for the maps
of this moment
and that before
which will never be drawn

this world
is a burning library
of lost miracles


June 5, 2007

posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: writing

April 7, 2007

stopmo and storytelling skills

by sven at 11:59 pm

Last night I was thinking about making a new animatic for Let Sleeping Gods Lie. I sat down at the keyboard to capture some of that inspiration -- and the following "essay" (?) tumbled out.

(The tone of it sort of makes me feel like I'm standing on a stage, delivering a commencement speech to myself.)

...

STOPMO & STORYTELLING

A puppet is just a special effect.

Its sole purpose is to look good in front of a camera. It doesn't matter how well or poorly constructed it is. Anything that looks good, is good.

The goal is to make stories come to life on screen. Or if not "stories," then at least moving art that can be projected in a movie theater or on a TV.

There is a strong temptation to simply make exquisite dolls -- and dollhouse worlds for them to live in.

There's a strong desire to build perfect miniature versions of your characters, which you'll then -- someday -- breath life into.

It's not an entirely bad impulse... In order to make it through the telling of your story, you want puppets that are sturdy, and puppets that don't fight back when you try to pose them.

But let your imagination and excitement be for the storytelling.

If you work at the craft of making well-built puppets, then that is what you will become good at.

If you work at the craft of telling stories, then you will produce animations that look god-awful -- but you will produce a lot of them.

When your excitement is for making up stories, making up scenes, imagining powerful images -- then you can take that energy and do something that people will find worth watching -- in just an afternoon. It'll lack production values... But that's not the point.

My point is that creating stories is a skill. It is a skill that you can practice and develop.

It's not the same thing as just writing a script. (That's a skill, too.) What I'm thinking of is coming up with a story of some sort, and then getting it on screen -- no matter how rough the production values are.

If that's your passion... Then other skills will still develop (perhaps not as quickly as if they're your focus) -- and they will be appropriately subordinate to the greater cause.

Imagine that you have a collection of sketchbooks. One sketchbook contains the series of armatures that you've made while developing your skills as an armature-maker. One sketchbook contains the series of maquettes that you've made while developing your skills (and style) as a sculptor. And in another sketchbook, are the stories that you've made films of.

You can't learn how to be a painter very well if you spend the first four years of your career making just one painting. You need to make as many paintings as possible -- knowing that your early works won't satisfy you -- but that they are the first links in a long chain that eventually leads to what you want.

So imagine a story, and then get it onto the screen as quickly as possible. In a day. Half a week at most. Use still photographs, or hand puppets, or cut-outs -- whatever you know how to use well enough so that you can get the idea out.

Because in the end, every aspect of film production is about IDEAS.

The story is an idea. Making a better armature -- it's about your ideas surrounding armature-making. Sculpting: if that's what you find yourself working on, then there are ideas there that you're pursuing, too... Or rather, ideas that are pulling you on.

Let go of what your hands are drawn to do... Just long enough to look at all the different kinds of things that you could make. That you could study... Story. Sculpting. Lighting. Armatures. Mold-making and casting. Puppet fab (build-up, painting, costumes). Script-writing.

[Again, making stories and writing out scripts -- they're two different things.]

Be "meta" enough to switch between areas of study. Try to consciously choose what it is that you're going to study next.

posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: let sleeping gods lie, stopmo, writing

December 18, 2006

poem: i am the arrow

by sven at 11:32 pm

I'm in the midst of actually animating the "quick and dirty" film...

Because I'm hunched over in a cold garage for hours on end, I've established a rule that I have to go for a 10 minute walk up Powell Butte every time I finish a clip (usu. approx. 2 hrs). This poem popped into my head while going "up and around." Sort of a chant; influenced by the rhythm of walking, I suspect.

i am the arrow

i am the arrow
have chosen my target
i wake with one thought
move in straight lines

‘til sleep overtakes me
i cut cross the horizon
shot from coiled meditation
through blackness to light

i am the arrow


December 18, 2006

posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: writing

November 25, 2006

asking

by gl. at 8:44 pm

david whyte has a poem i very much like called "everything is waiting for you." but the thanksgiving trip gave me a chance to read the entire eponymous book (thanks, sandy!), and this excerpt from "september 2001" illuminated a part of my heart i feel is oft underappreciated:

You know, I must remember,
until my last breath goes out
to ask. To try, every time, one last time

to confirm the native
human intuition that heaven
is never far away at all,

that it's just a door or a step
or a whole short life to get there.
I must remember

to stop people in the street
as if the most closed,
grey, concrete, commuting life

could be just a skim
on the pool
of communal revelation

and as if, in my continued hurry
I just haven't
given anyone or anything

anywhere, any time
to let me know
what's really about to happen.

...

I must remember

to knock on other doors,
to call out people's names,
to enquire as if my life

depended on knowing
that something
always lies so close

and to remember that it takes
only one requited request
for the extraordinary

to make a hundred ordinary
encounters
up to that moment

more than extraordinary,
rare, numinous,
a harvest

worth having,
no matter how difficult
to sow and reap.

And that the angel always
has to elbow her way
towards us

through a lot of unknowing

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (2) | categories: writing

September 30, 2006

nothing new under the sun

by gl. at 11:40 am

i ran across an interesting quote yesterday while skimming through the winter 1990 issue of Calligraphy Review (now Letter Arts Review). in it, they were lamenting competive practices, something they felt was at odds with most calligraphy traditions:

"When survival depends on originality, that uniqueness becomes something to protect rather than share..."

this probably deserves a longer post, but i've been thinking about artists who are possessive about their work versus those who are generous with what they offer. i have never enjoyed competition. i play collaborative scrabble, for heaven's sake. i've always adopted or adapted best practices & models and have encouraged others to adopt mine. maybe it's because i come from the remix generation, or maybe it's because i worked in higher education for almost 10 years, but i'm generally okay with people embracing bits of creative work to use as epigrams, inspiration, and sometimes even gentle appropriation. (note, for instance, that our creative commons license doesn't mind if you use what we write here, even for profit, as long as you credit us -- and allow the same use of the work you create from it).

even with the same words, we each write different poems. even with the same syllabus, we each teach wildly different classes. i don't think our ideas are so unique that they must be hoarded & guarded; instead, i believe our individual expression & combination of them, like genes, cannot be replicated.

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (0) | categories: writing

September 20, 2006

artist's way: week 2

by gl. at 6:54 pm

last night's activity, motivated in part by the equinox on friday, was a poetry walk. in a poetry walk, you divide your paper into two sides: nouns & verbs. and we walk verrrrryyyy sllloowwwwlllyyy around the block, through the big field, writing down every noun & verb the we see, hear, smell, feel. the trick of it is not to write any adjectives or adverbs, and to write words as quickly as they occur to you. if you haven't written anything in a few seconds, you're thinking too hard. then you return to the studio & write a poem using some of those words:

transformation

some people bury the past
abandon it like a basketball in a field
but i open the door
bite the lock in half

i am blooming and dissolving
a lace of lights against the skyline
as the crickets sing
to the fallen apples
in the dusk

...september 19, 2006...

center (safety): a handmade stamped brick surrounded by calligraphy tools, one of which is a supportive and expansive black feather, waiting to catch you.

music: tracy chapman's new beginning

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (1) | categories: artist's way, writing

September 7, 2006

artist's way guided intent (september)

by gl. at 3:39 pm

cranberry lemonade marked the return of the artist's way guided intent this month, but it was the darjeeling tea leaves that had more of an impact! in addition to other divination aids like pennies, fortune cookies & tarot cards, they formed the basis for short writing prompts that led to poems about possibility.

[tea leaves in my cup: click the photo to see a charming collection of other cups]

for the first prompt, "the most basic possibility is binary," i said, passing around pennies. "yes or no, heads or tails." when i asked the penny if this is what i'm meant to be doing with my life, it came up heads: yes. for some reason that surprised me, and by the end of 5 minutes i had concluded with a sentence about wanting a future without feeling so beholden to others (an odd thing for a facilitator, perhaps, but bear with me).

right on cue, the fortune cookie fortune i picked said, "isolating yourself from others will not prevent you from being hurt." ha! what serendipity! so i wrote for 5 more minutes about how i could achieve balance, how i can maintain both solitude and service to others.

satisfied at the progress i was making, i turned over the random tarot card i picked. the devil? what? after all that? i was angry; i hate it when someone (even a card!)thinks the worst of me because i try so hard to do the right thing. so i spent 5 minutes looking at my flaws and what i do that could cause others to demonize me. i chose to use it as an exercise in looking at my actions through the eyes of others to evoke empathy. i'm not well-acquainted with tarot meanings, so its interpretation as a card of power & desire was lost on me. (sven got the "star" card, btw. i was so envious!)

but the tea leaves were a mystery for me. in order to write about them i had to begin at the most immediate level: a descriptive response, writing simply about the visual characteristics of what i was seeing. other participants described the tea leaves as their favorite inspirational component, so while it didn't do much for me, the intent to provide different stimuli for different people worked.

after the writing prompts we had some time to write a poem based on one or more of the prompts. this is a poem about possibility, even though it doesn't sound like it:

Same time tomorrow

Desire and despair are two sides
of the same coin:
I want to be good
I want to be possessed
but I am a princess in a tower
with DSL.
Keep time from slipping through my fingers
tell me each tea leaf matters
the pattern clumps, then crumbles
a flash of birds across the sky.

september 07, 2006

sharing our works didn't go as smoothly as it does w/ visual responses, in part because when we discuss visual work i have a pretty good structure that reminds people we're not here to "fix" the art of others or judge its aesthetics, but rather our goal is to help the artist find meaning in it. so the responses got a little out of hand at the end, and because i'm still sick i don't have my authority voice (nor do i like to invoke it). we had a couple of writers who were vocally disappointed that they had come to the guided intent that featured a literary exercise when they were looking for more visual stimulus, but i feel strongly about offering a wide range of visual, literary & expressive art offerings, and all i can do is tell people not to come to the ones they think they won't like.

i can hardly believe it, but our next two events are already full! september's open studio has a waiting list, and the next guided intent in october (abundance via blind painting!) filled up the first day it was announced. also, it looks like an artist's way creative cluster will form tuesday evenings. hooray!

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (1) | categories: artist's way, writing

August 27, 2006

poem: on being a lonely planet

by gl. at 6:16 pm

i've been meaning to write a poem about pluto being reclassified as a "dwarf planet," leaving us with eight "classical" planets. i'm such a science geek. :) of course, it's hardly ever just about the science....

On being a lonely planet

Nobody wants to dance with
a planet with an eccentric orbit
and its lopsided satellite
nobody wants a long-distance relationship with
a rejected planet in the coldest, darkest sky.
You scramble to keep up with the warmer lives
of the elite inner planets from afar
watching their round orbits and their shining faces
but they don't want you asking too many questions
and your quiet deviance is mistaken as dimness.
Neptune's as close as he ever was
but he seems more distant, somehow
your paths still cross
but your conversations are stiff and remote.

You never needed to be the center of the universe
you're not afraid to be alone
but loneliness creeps in, anyway.
Once discovered, you thought you'd always
be included, but now neglected
your only friends are other outcast asteroids.
You're a planet with a good heart, and
your years are long ones,
alternating between sunlight and night.
But don't get your hopes up:
I've seen this happen before
and no amount of pennies or pomegranate seeds
will bring you back into the fold.

...august 27, 2006...
dedicated to the planet formerly known as pluto

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (0) | categories: writing

June 8, 2006

poem: what do your answers mean?

by sven at 11:59 pm

collage: "What do your answers mean?" (two-page spread)

I don't think I've put any poetry up on Scarlet Letters yet... I wrote this one last night, inspired by Gretchin's Artist's Way Guided Intent event.

What do your answers mean?

Power
is the hand that writes
"the end"
at the conclusion of a film

(otherwise
the movie would just go on and on
an endless series of questions
each leading to more questions...)

Power
is the definitive answer that
concludes your quest to know
it is the inky dot that stops a sentence

we all turn to this endpoint
like pilgrims on our way to Mecca
Who are you?
What do you want to be?
open your mouth to reply and it's
a decision to take your own life

oh, there's pleasure and pride
in predestination
in holding the pen
making a mark on the map filled with dragons
and arriving at the place you set out for
the execution of a plan with a grand flourish
for everyone to remember

...But I think that I like
not knowing where I'm going

I want to break from the Eastward road
and run headlong into a dark forest
looking only the next few steps ahead
going in this direction
only because I know it makes me happy

maybe I am no one
just emptiness erasing itself
if I'm without ambition to pick the bronze statue
for my headstone

diving into the thick fog of unknowns
where all I can see is my own feet
full of questions
I have no name, only a direction

it thrills me

to live
to Live
is to embrace the unbeing
of becoming


June 7, 2006

posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: artist's way, writing

April 19, 2006

against keeping your film production secret

by sven at 8:39 pm

[I just wrote a long post over at StopMotionAnimation.com that's worth repeating here. Leevi Lehtinen is working on an excellent stopmo film, and my blog brother Ale suggested that Leevi shouldn't show us any more clips from the work until it's complete. I've been roughing out an essay about why I'm against keeping film projects secret -- Ale's comment just opened the floodgates.]

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Keep it up and please don't show so much about the film! I love it, but prefer to see it completed!

Oh! I must respectfully disagree with Ale! PLEASE, don't hesitate to post work-in-progress shots! If a viewer does not want to see the film until it is completed, then it is their own responsibility to not click on those files.

I am of the opinion that getting to see the film as it's being made only enhances the experience. Rather than spending five minutes of attention on your well-crafted work of art, I get to spend months or years enjoying it bit-by-bit. I'm cheering you on -- and when it is completed, I feel that in some small way I was able to help make it possible -- by being a supportive ear / eye.

Telling artists not to show their work until it's done -- this doesn't help them at all! Isolation is a terrible motivator. Look at SMA itself: when we get to share our energy, we are reinvigorated and inspired to do more! Sharing encourages sharing -- and that's where we get our spark.

"Keeping it secret" is NOT a step towards professionalism. Look at Peter Jackson's online "making-of" video diary for King Kong. Look at how Joss Whedon showed rough cuts of Serenity to eager audiences... Sharing the process of creation -- as you're creating -- is an excellent way to build your audience prior to release.

...And after your film is released, showing the "making-of" doesn't somehow spoil the magic. Pick up almost any DVD, and you'll see "making of" documentaries. The viewing public knows movies aren't magic -- we're curious to see how they're made, and only gain respect by learning how well-crafted the film is. The "making-of" is part of the product, just as marketable as the film itself.

The film-viewing public is literate and should get to make their own choices where "spoilers" are concerned. For example, when the new Star Wars movies came out, myself and lots of my friends knew that there would be spoilers -- and we conscientiously avoided them. In the world of blogging, there's an etiquette whereby you warn people that there may be "spoilers" in your post so they can decide for themselves if they want to read on.

The movie itself is only half the story. I want to know about about the people who made it. There are movies that I go to not because I know anything about the film -- but because the film is a Peter Jackson- or George Lucas- or James Cameron- or Steven Spielberg- or Jim Henson- or Joss Whedon- or Martin Scorsese- or Whoever- film. As filmmakers, we shouldn't try make ourselves invisible. Ultimately what we want is for people to be invested in US. Hopefully I'm not going to make just one film. I'm going to make several or many films -- and I want my audience to follow ME as I grow and create.

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