Last weekend I facilitated a stop motion animation workshop at Faucet, the media arts part of the artist-run centre Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick. It's the second workshop that I've given there and I had a great time. The participants were a talented, motivated group who produced a bunch of animations in two days mainly using digital still cameras. It's part of what I like to think of as the inappropriate use of technology. What was cool about the workshop is that I just started things off and they went off in various directions. There was plenty of technology to go round... almost everyone had an iBook or PowerBook and digital still cameras. The animations ranged from cut-outs to pixilation to drawing on a wall. It's great to see people doing cool stuff with relatively cheap tools. I made up a site with links for the Faucet Animation Workshop which is over at my mac.com site.
[/art]
link
Daniel Dugas found an old journal in a box and he's putting parts of it up. 25 years ago he took a trip around Canada and the U.S.A. starting and ending in Moncton, New Brunswick. He obsessively wrote in a journal during the trip. If he did this today he'd be posting to a blog with a cell phone and a laptop. What's neat about how he's doing it now is that the entries are going live 25 years after the fact in blog1979. The other cool thing is that it's not just a documentation, but he's got links as well. In his first entry me mentions the 375th anniversary of the arrival of the Acadians in this part of the world (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) and when I read that I thought about the Congrès Mondial Acadien, which is all over the place here in Wolfville and Grand Pré and he helpfully links to it. It's a link from the past into the present. Sometimes we're obsessed with things that are live or wireless (guess where I'm blogging from!, etc.). This project shows that you don't have to put something up right away. It also makes me feel better about the boxes of stuff that I have laying around... maybe they'll be useful someday. I should have a look at them soon. But for now I'm looking forward to following Daniel's chronologically offset adventures.
[/art]
link
Last week I uploaded Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville to my space at ZeD. The Circular Logic project originally happened for the Digital Dialogues exhibition at the Acadia Art Gallery that was curated by Gair Dunlop. I'd been working with QuickTime VR for a while and was thinking of doing something with that. Then I started thinking about going around in circles and taking stills along the way. When that was combined with stop-motion I thought that I would have something that looked like pixilation but where the camera moved instead of objects.
I tried some experiments and it worked if I made sure that there was a focal point in each image. That's the reason for going in circles around a building or large public object as it gives you something to focus on and gives me a way to keep the image in the frame consistent. I like to think of it as the (somewhat) inappropriate use of technology. I wanted to use a digital still camera to take single frames that I combined together to create an animation. For the loops around Wolfville I took over 1000 stills that I combined together in QuickTime Pro and then manipulated them in Final Cut Pro.
For the show at the gallery I burned the loops onto a DVD that looped and it played on a television set in the gallery. Later I made a shorter, more linear version for a screening at Salvation in Halifax and that's what I have up at ZeD now.
[/art]
link
As I mentioned early on in the life of this site, I've had a strange attraction to the Radio Canada International shortwave broadcasting station in Sackville, New Brunswick. I've stopped there a few times and taken pictures and even have taken a tour inside. Every time I drive by I want to stop, but I usually don't. On my way up to New Brunswick a week ago I stopped and made 3 QuickTime VRs that you can see now. The files are a bit big, so know that when you click on the link!
Close to the sign - QuickTime VR - 1.2 MB
On the road to the station - QuickTime VR - 1 MB
Close to the broadcasting station - QuickTime VR - 940 KB
[/art]
link
I've had the good fortune to be included as part of an exhibition at the Acadia University Art Gallery called "Digital Dialogues: connecting in art and science". The exhibition was curated by Gair Dunlop who is a visiting artist from Scotland who I met in New Brunswick at the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference in May. One of the other people that I met there was Jan Marontate who thought that it would be neat to get Gair back here. Flash forward a year and a half later and thanks to funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art Science and Technology, Gair has been back and he's curated a great show that explores the area around here, which is next to the Bay of Fundy, and explores art and science, science and art, and it gave me a chance to explore some things I wouldn't normally explore. The project was coordinated by the talented Janice Hudson who toiled away in the Peter Gzowski room with Gair. The amazing crew at the Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology also were an integral part of the whole process and they did some neat stuff (as they usually do). This is just the perspective that I have looking from slightly outside the whole process, which always requires a lot of people to make something wonderful happen.
For my contribution I took a series of 1005 digital stills to form a set of 7 loops around 3 locations in Wolfville. I would take a still, step to my right and then take another still and repeat the process from between 60 to 400 times. I then combined the stills together to form animated loops. Then I played with it in Final Cut Pro and made filmstrips that remind me of working with 16mm film. Finally I put it all together onto a DVD that I burned. It's called "Circular Logic: 7 Loops in Wolfville" and it's part of what I think of as the inappropriate use of technology. It involves using technologies is way that they aren't really supposed to be used. It was a lot of fun. Eventually it will be up on the Web and I'll let you know more about it and I've also got to go back and explore more of works as the opening was tonight and I didn't get a chance to explore much. The show runs until September 24 at the Acadia University Art Gallery in the Beveridge Art Centre in Wolfville.
[/art]
link
by Chris Campbell
I have a theory about filmmaking and more specifically, filmmakers. Deep within those who feel compelled to tell stories visually I believe there is a recessive gene. The filmmaking gene. Some people have it and unless you have it, it's hard to explain the drive to fill a screen with a story that moves you.
Errol Williams has that recessive gene, and I think that it's wrapped up into my DNA too. Since you're reading this, you probably have it as well.
I had known Errol casually through being a member of the Film Co-op, but had never really worked him. Documentarian Ron Mann gave a workshop at the coop and it was great. At one point he asked people about their ideas for films and Errol told everyone about Willie O'Ree, who broke the colour bar in the National Hockey League. I was hooked. During a break I talked with Errol in the doorway of the equipment room and I told him that I really wanted to help him with it. I didn't know exactly what I could do on the project, I just wanted to be involved.
The short version of the story is that 6 years later I had moved up from doing sound, some research and some editing to being a coproducer along with Tony Merzetti. The other thing that happened during that period is that I got to work a lot with Errol and Tony to do some of the most enjoyable work I've ever had the opportunity to do. I also made a couple of life long friends.
After "Echoes in the Rink: The Willie O'Ree" story was completed I didn't really get to work with Errol much at all as he was in Bermuda and in 2000 I moved to Nova Scotia. My work there was wrapping up in November of 2001 which I casually mentioned to Errol in an email. I didn't receive an message back, but a phone call. Errol was finishing up production of a documentary about social protest movements in Bermuda and he needed an editor. I, of course, said "yes!"
Following some email exchanges with the outline of the story, Errol came up from Bermuda and dropped off a stack of photographs and newspaper articles in December. I began scanning the material and learning more about the story. In January Errol moved into the house and brought 40 or so tapes of interviews, cutaways and archival footage.
The film tells the story of the Theatre Boycott of 1959, in Hamilton, Bermuda. The two main movie theatres had segregated seating with the balcony and centre section reserved for those whose skin was white and the rest of the theatre was open to those whose skin was darker. Segregation ran throughout Bermudian society and an anonymous group decided to organize a boycott of the theatres. Two weeks after the boycott began the hotels, restaurants and movie theatres all were desegregating. You'll have to see the film for more detail.
We dove in and started logging and digitizing the footage into Final Cut Pro 3, running on my G3 PowerBook running under OS X. With an external 80 G FireWire hard drive and Final Cut's OfflineRT mode we were able to digitize something like 35 hours of footage with the drive only half full (or half empty depending on your point of view). With the transcripts that Errol read every night we were able to quickly view and assemble any shot from all of the footage. It made a huge difference and sped things up a lot.
By mid-February we had the rough cut and started integrating the visuals into the film. We moved over to one of the new flat-panel G4 iMacs to speed up rendering. Initially I thought that we would do some of the animation and compositing in AfterEffects, but we were able to do everything that we wanted to do in Final Cut. Another handy addition was a collection of shareware filters for Final Cut called Joe's Filters. They helped tweak the look of the film.
The film was scheduled to premiere in Bermuda on April 13 and we'd finished off the cut for the festival just before midnight on April 12th. We needed to make two BetaSP copies for the festival so that began just after midnight. With nerves of steel we dumped it out to tape twice... with a 73 minute documentary it takes a while to make a copy! At 3:15am the last copy finished and 15 minutes later we were on our way to the airport so Errol could catch a 6:05am flight. My flight was a few hours later.
Errol arrived at 12:30, just 3 1/2 hours before the first screening and I arrived an hour later on a separate flight. We each had a copy of the film in BetaSP, miniDV, and VHS versions just in case. We quickly drove around to the two theatres and made it to the premiere with 10 minutes to spare. The screening started on time and went over very well with a standing ovation for Errol at the end. It was a huge relief as this was the first audience that had seen the film. It also was an audience made up of most of the people who were interviewed in the film and they liked it as well.
With the editing out of the way the only thing left for Errol to do was screen the film and answer questions. It was show 6 times during the festival and won the Audience Choice award at the closing gala. The day after the festival it began screening in the Liberty Theatre in Hamilton.
The reaction to the film reminded me of the Tidal Wave Festival last November in how people love to see and hear stories that they recognize. While this film wasn't an NB Filmmakers' Cooperative production it wouldn't have been possible without the coop. With the experience, support, and friendship over our years at the coop we honed our skills and discovered that we too had the recessive gene that compels us to fill the screen with stories. It makes you realized that a coop isn't made up of a collection of equipment but a group of friends and colleagues who help each other tell their stories.
You can find out more about the film at the Web site www.whenvoicesrise.com
[/articles]
link
Older Bitdepth
January 2007
December 2006
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
Categorized Bitdepth
art
articles
books
film
film: festivals
learning
magazines
music
people
podcasting
software
sound
television
web
Relevant
Bad Metaphor podcast
Bitdepth Digest
My Vox
Screen Arts blog
My Tumblelog
my del.icio.us links
my 43 things
my tweets
