Animated Thoughts: Art Comes in Many Forms, pt. 6 - the "end of year" edition

I had hoped to end the old year and begin the new with some art and peaceful introspection. The Flint Institute of Arts did not disappoint.

Now I'll cop to it, looking at the main art museums in the Mid-Michigan corridor (Grand Rapids/East Lansing/Flint/Detroit), I vastly favor the Detroit Institute of Arts. But the smaller art museums here in Michigan have their charms. The Frederik Meijer Gardens has their yearly butterfly and orchid events as well as a wonderful outdoor Japanese garden. I haven't yet been to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, though I do hope to change that oversight later this year. The Broad Art Museum is a quick five minute drive from my home with a basement area housing older works of art and a video installation--and it's a quick walk from the MSU Library, good for research. Detroit has the DIA as well as the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village--all three had been invaluable resources when I was writing my animation history class. 

But the Flint Institute of Arts has some really appealing qualities, not the least of which is a 45 minute drive from my home (as opposed to the hour/hour-and-a-half to the DIA, depending on traffic). They've also got a well-stocked library with comfortable chairs and a sofa for reading.

"The Sheltered Path", 1873
Claude Monet

The decision of where I would spend my day was resolved almost immediately when I checked the FIA's website and discovered that they had a painting on display by my favorite artist: Claude Monet. Turns out, "The Sheltered Path" was on their visiting artwork list and would be on display until February.

As I stared at Monet's painting, I was struck by the impermanence of digital. There I sat, looking at a painting from 1873. The colors may not be as vibrant as when it was first painted, but still a beautiful work of art that, if properly handled, would still be there long after I am but a memory.

Over the past thirty years, I've witnessed countless works of art brought to life through computer software. I've been there during software releases and upgrades, and yes, witnessed software once touted as the 'latest and greatest' denoted as reaching their 'end-of-life' before being relegated to the dustbin of digital history. 

3d CGI, polygonal modelling, NURBS, metaballs, texture mapping, bump mapping, non-linear video editing, Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Painter, Kai's Power Tools, Director, After Effects, Future Splash/Flash, Moho, Bernoulli drives, iOmega Zip Drives. I was there for much it. Oftentimes on the sidelines, sometimes in the trenches.

The march of technology is relentless. It's partially why I maintain a number of old computers with obsolete operating systems that are still capable of running some of this older software--so I can still access old copies of animations and imagery that I produced during my college and grad school days.

The computer has brought us works of art that were hitherto undreamt of. I doubt that even the old masters could have conceived of what is being produced by contemporary digital artists. I have to wonder, how constrained were their imaginations by the technology of their time? Thought for another day.

Back when I was in grad school at R.I.T., I had been playing with a freeware 3d rendering and animation software package called POV-Ray. It was a text based system where you'd plot everything out on graph paper using the Mark I pencil, then create a text file containing all the objects, their coordinates, and their properties for your scene. I was big on stone textures back then, so spent a fair amount of time making marbles using the various texture settings. This would serve me well when I needed objects to animate in my basic animation classes--like learning the squash and stretch principle by animating bouncing balls using Macromedia Director.

Squash and Stretch assignment

Since then, I have tinkered with lots of 3d modelling and animation packages like Alias Wavefront/Maya, Ray Dream Studio/Carrara, and Blender. But while useful and entertaining, none of those programs produce anything of permanence. I do still like to walk through museums and look at sculptures--mostly those of stone and glass--and think about how I would recreate them using 3d CGI software. It's a fun thought exercise and it adds an extra dimension to museum visits that makes them more enjoyable for me.

"Hadros", 2006
Petr Hora

Sculpture, paintings, celluloid film, animation cels, photographs from the early 1900's, even the hand-drawn paper cels from my MFA thesis, they will all outlive me. My thesis film is digital. Unless I do a transfer to celluloid film stock, one day, it will likely be gone with only the hand drawn cels and a couple printed images in my thesis paper as evidence that it ever existed. If care has been taken to preserve them, one hundred years later, we can still watch films from the 1920's. One-hundred and fifty-two years later, I can still spend an afternoon looking at one of Claude Monet's paintings hanging there on the wall. Over five hundred years later, we can still travel to Florence and appreciate Michelangelo's marble sculpture "David".

"Still Life with Fruit", 1855
Severin Roesen

I have to wonder, five-hundred years from now, will people even know about all the art we created in the late 20th/early 21st Century? Or will there be this huge cultural gap where art was being produced in physical format up until the 1980's and then it largely ceased. What will the museums of 2525 say about us? Will they even remember that we existed or will we just be a footnote in history, this big black hole of nothing called 'the digital age' where very few items of cultural significance survived to be appreciated by future generations?

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Animated Thoughts: Art Comes in Many Forms, pt. 5

Did something a little different this holiday season. For a couple months now, Fever has been advertising a candlelight music program at one of the churches in my area. I'm not really into "people" events, per se, but I do love attending the church candlelight midnight services on Christmas Eve. And I have been listening to a lot of Mozart and Vivaldi lately--in addition to the Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 soundtracks. So, after a little back-and-forth where I looked for legitimate excuses not to go, I begrudgingly bought the ticket a couple hours before the performance (Bah, Humbug!).

Wasn't sure what to expect and I admit to being a little crestfallen about how it wouldn't be a "true" candlelight performance--the "candles" would be those fake candles with LED lighting. Not a big deal, really, but over a short period of time you start to see repeating patterns in the "flickering" of the LEDs. Again, it's a minor quibble, but it kind of takes me out of the immersive experience when the candles synchronize for a second or two and the pulsing looks like a wave of light and shadow washing across the candles more akin to a stock ticker. It's kind of hard to explain, but the 'Beta Movement' was there, I assure you.

In the end though, it was a very nice program and I'm glad I attended. The performers were very skilled at their craft and effortlessly built a rapport with the audience. The playlist itself was solid. In addition to a couple traditional Christmas songs, they added in a little Vivaldi, some Debussy, and some Tchaikovsky. But the highlight of the evening for me was when they played a selection from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Op 71.

Once the string quartet started playing that set, I was instantly transported to the world of animation and saw dancing flowers and faeries in my mind's eye as I heard "Russian Dance", "Waltz of the Flowers", and "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy". Forty-six years after the first time I saw it, Disney's Fantasia is still one of my favorite animated features of all time and it still holds such a treasured place in my heart. 

Pixar director, screenwriter, and storyboard artist Madeline Sharifian once said "Classical music makes tiny worlds feel so grand." I would add that there's just something about animation that makes classical music so accessible.

As we prepare to close the books on 2024, I hope everyone out there has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year filled with wonderful memories of family and friends. :)

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Animated Thoughts: Art Comes in Many Forms, pt. 4

So while the weather was still good, late last month I drove out the John Ball Zoo. It was one of the final weekends for their 'Dinosaur Hunt' event where they had this big open-air display containing life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, along with a number of others scattered around the rest of the zoo. 

They did a decent job with the interactivity. There were motion-sensors and pressure-sensors near some of the models. And when you passed by or intentionally moved into one of the sensor fields, the dinosaurs would come "alive".

It was all relatively basic motion, head and tail movement, mouths opening and closing, stuff like that. We're still dealing with the limits of the technology, you know? So it didn't bother me. And all the kids running around still thought that they were pretty cool. I could've done without the background music though. Got tired of hearing the Jurassic Park soundtrack real fast. But, that's what headphones are for.

As I wandered through the exhibit, I pondered some of the advice I received from the R.I.T. professor who taught me 2d hand drawn animation: former Disney animator Jack Slutsky.

One of the exercises that Jack had us do back then was go to a public place, sit down on a bench, and do multiple gesture drawings of people.

Later on in life, I would expand his advice to doing size comparisons at museums and zoos. It started with figuring out how a normal-sized human compares to a dinosaur skeleton. Then finding size-comparable animals at the zoos and observing how they moved. Obviously, there's a big difference between a T-Rex and an elephant. However, you can get a feel for certain things--like how their muscles would deal with gravity when they're moving all that body mass. Or how fast they might be able to move. I don't have a project that requires such knowledge right now, but it's a good thought exercise and I'm glad to have in my back pocket just in case I need it in the future.

Afterwards, I couldn't leave the Zoo without taking some photos of the flowers while they were still in bloom. Winter will be here soon enough.

And the critters at the John Ball Zoo are always interesting. I spent a fair amount of time watching the new lynx enclosure. Apparently though, Mom wasn't in the mood to play.

Then there was this chubby chipmunk outside of the lynx enclosure.

The Otters also decided not to play while I was watching them, but rather they got snuggly for an after-lunch nap.

This visit to the zoo left me with a lot to think about. I have to admit, once again I was more interested in how the technology worked than the novelty of the exhibit itself. Might look up motion and pressure sensors and see how they operate--more to the point, how they could be tied into animation installations. Chapter 24 in Maureen Furniss's book deals with animation in art and it does cover animation installations--like the ones Elainie Lillios and Bonnie Mitchell used to bring to KAFI back in the day. Would be fun to set one up for my students to experience once we get to that chapter. Even moreso to show them how it's done. Another tool for their animator's toolkit.

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