Animated People: Carl "Skip" Battaglia

Carl "Skip" Battaglia, Stephanie Maxwell,
Marla Schweppe, Me. (l to r)

So it's Fall and I'm back teaching again. 

One of my colleagues said that I should consider working on a film during my spare time and then showing it to my students on the last day of class. Sort of a "hey, I did this over the past four months in my spare time, think about what you could accomplish." Well, as I was shuffling through the backlog of stalled ideas and "y'know, if I ever get the time" sketches, I came across this little gem from my former professor Carl "Skip" Battaglia. Back in 2008, I was toying with the idea of an abstract animation but it didn't fit into the mold of narrative animations that I was used to using when designing films. As Skip is an accomplished animator who is very knowledgeable about experimental techniques, I reached out to him:

Hi Skip, Hope this letter finds you well. It was a real treat to talk to you and your daughter at Ottawa and see what you've been working on for the past year. Sorry that you didn't win the award for experimental/abstract animated short film, but was very happy to see your film in the competition. Well, after watching your latest film (and reviewing your Skip's Pics DVD), I've bumped up an abstract/experimental-style animation on my list of projects. The entire short animation deals with the techniques and artistic style that I'm learning about in my Oriental Watercolor class this semester. However, as I'm working through the planning stages of this film, I'm finding that the traditional treatment-script-storyboard-soundtrack method that I use to plan films just isn't lending itself very well to abstract expression. I'm getting kind of frustrated trying to get a film to fit into a mold that it wasn't designed for. So, I was wondering if you could suggest a couple of books that you use to plan your films that I could read? Thanks Skip, and see you in Ottawa '08. Hopefully by then, I'll have a couple of films to run alongside you and Stephanie. And please give your daughter our best from me and Ted. Hope she does well in her final class. =) Sincerely, Charles Wilson

This was his response:

Hi Charles: There are no hard-and-fast books in experimental design for animation. I read philosophy and poetry, study painting.  I have always listened to a lot of musics, including experimental, free jazz, South American, and African.  My notebooks and sketches provoke some things.  Knowledge about film continuity (which you have), animation production, storyboarding (pay attention to the vectors of movement; I arrow them in/over in red pencil) are helpful as the storyboard will come directly in response to your premise for the film. Sometimes I begin with a rough idea, then score a musical track via ProTools to give me a scratch soundtrack to animate to for the sake of rhythm, tempo, drama -- and to have a timed track to give to a composer later. Thinking historically, the books which have been most helpful are/were: Rudolph Arhheim, "Art and Visual Perception." H. Marshall McLuhan and Herley Parker, "Through the Vanishing Point." "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." books on graphic design, painting process... ... and everything I teach, and films I've viewed. I'd also think about designing the film in reverse or out of sequence from your usual methods.  It would enable a new approach (which seems to be what you're looking for). Good to see you.  Let me know how this goes. Get loose! Skip

Now, as I'm currently composing a short book on the importance of mentors for my nephews, I could go off on a rant about how important it is to maintain professional relationships with your professors after graduation and how important mentors are in your career. But to be honest, the main reason I posted this e-mail is because Skip has since retired and I want his knowledge to be shared with a much wider audience.

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A Year of Animation: Some things lost and some things found

Carl "Skip" Battaglia, Stephanie Maxwell,
Marla Schweppe, me. (l to r)

My first experience with an Oxberry camera was in my Introduction to Animated Film and Graphic Film Production class under Carl "Skip" Battaglia.

Throughout the quarter, I had some great times while experimenting with these "old school" under-the-camera techniques -- even moreso because it was all non-digital, since up to that point in my education, almost all of the animation I had created was in the computer. Back then, Skip would give us the assignment, then we'd shoot our films during the week, watch them during the next class, and then he would cut the 16mm film stock into individual sections so we could take our films home if we wanted them. One of my few regrets from my time at R.I.T. was that most of those films have been lost, either during the class when I didn't pick up the film stock or during the time since I moved back to Michigan.

Fortunately, I still have a lot of notes and paper records from that class and even some models and cels. Admittedly, not some of the ones I really want, like the drawing I made for my direct-on-film project, but enough to reconstruct these films.

The projects that stuck out in my mind the most are listed below. I've recreated a couple of them using some materials from Skip's class that I still have in my files, and some were remade using all new materials using my notes as a framework. All of them though were recreated using present day software and equipment in order to make the production process a little easier.

Project 2 was a direct on film animation. I used clear filmstock and a fine-tip marker to create an animation where the "camera" panned left to right across a reclining nude woman from toes to head. Only, the shapely woman's figure had one of those 1970's smiley faces for a head. I'm still looking for the paper model I created for this assignment. I'm sure I kept it somewhere and, now that I own my own 8mm/Super8 film projector, I would love to recreate this direct on film animation just for fun. Would be an enjoyable way to spend a rainy afternoon... hunched over a light table... squinting through magnifying lenses... drawing a figure frame-by-frame... eh, it's not for everybody.

Project 5 was kind of a "trickfilm". Skip defined this project as:

"The production of a sequence approximately 10 seconds in length dealing with some aspect of color." (1)

I made the following film:

My goal was to make a play on the color reversal/retinal afterimage trick using a skull and both red and green colors. The viewer's attention would be focused on the movement of the eyes while the red/green skull image was "burned" onto the viewer's retina. Then, when the eyes finished their final move, the whole image was removed and the viewer was left watching a blank screen -- with the reverse image of the skull from their retinas filling up the screen where the visible skull image once was. The only thing I didn't do during the reshoot is the opening and closing fade to/from black that was part of the assignment.

Project 6 was intended to explore traditional ink-and-paint cel animation:

"The production of a sequence of approximately 10 seconds long involving a figure with movable limbs. The figure must be executed in the traditional ink and paint process." (2)

I remember being stymied originally, fortunately, it was Preston Blair to the rescue!

Money being tight back then, I skipped the whole "paint" element and went with good old reliable Sharpie markers! The original film had the guy walking in place -- set in the middle of the screen. But with access to DragonFrame some twenty years later, I used the onionskin feature to line up the character a little better and I even added a couple frames at the end where he walks off the screen.

Project 7 was a stop-motion film, described thusly:

"The projection of a sequence of approximately 10 seconds in length dealing with some aspect of type and typography." (3)

Decades ago, my sister sent me a small jigsaw puzzle with a funny "ransom note" on it. The plan was to write a date, time, and location on the back and then send it to the girl I was dating at the time, a few puzzle pieces at a time. When it was put together, she'd see the funny picture and then the date information on the back and we'd get together for an amorous rendezvous. Well, I don't recall ever using the puzzle for it's intended purpose. Thought it was too funny to give away so I ended up keeping it. In grad school, I would use it as the inspiration for project number seven.

I went into this project thinking that it would be "much" easier to animate in After Effects than it was under the Oxberry camera back in the mid-nineties... mainly because I'd be able to take my letters/words, attach them to motion paths, and then tweak the animation until it played out exactly like I wanted it. So I got to work, cutting out words and letters from magazines, just like I did back in 1995. But this time, instead of animating the pieces of paper under the camera, once the final image was assembled, I captured a high-resolution image of the completed note, and started to cut apart the individual text using Paint Shop Pro. They would then be imported as assets in After Effects and animated digitally.

Well it didn't take more than a few minutes until I realized the folly of doing this project digitally. It would take far too long to select the text, copy it to a new image file, and then mask out the background. After several unsuccessful attempts using Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, I then abandoned that plan and instead wrote out the timing by hand, drew my motion paths on a couple images of the completed note, printed them out, and then drew the increments on the motion paths with a pen.

This "failure" turned out to be a very happy accident as I spent the next half hour using my printed images as a reference to create an identical set of "motion guides" in DragonFrame using the guidelines feature. Since DragonFrame allows you to specify the number of increments on your guideline (so you can line up your model from frame to frame), once those overlays were in place, I flew through the animation process in record time! Working under the camera was totally worth it in this case -- and I learned a lot about DragonFrame's onion skin and guideline features in the process.

A look at my downshooter setup

Project 8 was the last film I remember creating -- our final film project in the class. Here's how Skip described it in the syllabus:

"The production of a sequence of approximately 10 seconds in length through some experimental, non-standard process, e.g. sand, feathers, weeds, glitter xerography, wax block, rubber stamp." (4)

To this day, I still don't know what Skip meant by "glitter xerography", but I keyed in on the word "xerography". Having practiced the martial arts for years, I had a small library of books covering the many martial art styles that I've studied. Well, back then, you could find lots of these books with black-and-white photographs of martial art techniques and katas. So, armed with a book on Shaolin Long Fist Kung Fu, I went to the local Kinko's and Xeroxed a bunch of the pages. I then cut out the images of a Kung Fu kata and photographed them in sequence under the Oxberry. It didn't come out as well as I'd hoped, and the camera jammed near the end, but I got a good grade for the assignment, so it all worked out in the end.

This is one of those films that I think would've worked better digitally. Given the difference in size between some of the images, I would've liked a bit more flexibility in both scaling and aligning the images before finalizing the shot. In DragonFrame, the best I could do was use the onionskin mode and try to line it up as best I could. Additionally, I really would like the opportunity to change the frame rate on some of these individual images. With the exception of the first and last pose, everything was shot on threes -- as I did back in 1995. Given the fluidity of martial arts techniques, I think this film would've worked much better if some of the shots were two frames long, some were four or five frames long, etc. But, all-in-all, I'm pleased with the results.

Well, those are the films I remember producing in Skip's class. I wish I had taken better efforts to preserve the original films and the material used to create them, hindsight being 20/20 and all that. If I had, they would've been very nice mementos some twenty-odd years later. Still, it was a lot of fun rereading my notes from Skip's class and recreating these four animations.

One of my friends didn't enjoy their time at R.I.T., even though their education seems to have paid off rather well in light of the career opportunities they've been given over the years. However, every time we talk and the subject of R.I.T. comes up, they always seem incredulous about how fondly I remember my time in Rochester. I'm sure that if I mentioned how I was spending time recreating films from Grad School, they'd probably sigh heavily and make some remark about how it was twenty years ago so why bother. But for me, reliving the experience is worth a few hours of my time. I still have all my other films from R.I.T., and they still give me joy every couple of years when I watch them -- joy that goes far beyond the nostalgia factor. And how much I learned this past week about the under-the-camera production processes working with DragonFrame goes without saying (though I'm going to say it).

Another benefit of reshooting these films is what they taught me about aligning my DSLR camera with my camera stand, or using hotkeys in DragonFrame that allow for shooting multiple frames so I don't have to keep pressing the 'capture frame' button again and again and again (really good for those multi-frame holds), or the best placement of my side-mounted lights so that I get enough light to illuminate my images clearly but not so much as to wash out the colors.

As I was sifting through my notes, I came across some of the detailed plans that I wrote out for these films -- timing, frame to footage calculations -- information and rules that I can process and integrate into my current production workflow. I agree that we shouldn't live in the past, desperately yearning for a time gone by, but that doesn't mean that we should eschew all the lessons that we learned or ignore the new ones that are still there, hiding in our old textbooks, notes, and assignments just waiting to be rediscovered.

There's always something important to learn, or relearn... or find.

During the whole process of consolidating my notes and recreating these films, I located the only 16mm film from Skip's class that survived all those years: project #4--which I had digitized.

Skip described film #4 as:

"Production of a ten second black and white sequence using black and white still photographs. This is an exercise in recognizing abstract elements in representational images through the use of visualizing masks." (5)

Additionally, I also located my last two missing Animapasses from the Ottawa International Film Festival--one being the pass from 1994, my first OIAF. Not sure what I'm going to do with them exactly, but I'm leaning towards making a display that I can hang on my wall. As I've only missed one Ottawa festival since '94, I think a display like that would be a really nice momento from this period of time in my animated life.

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Footnotes:
1) Project 5: slate, guide, paper model, production notes from 1995. Paper eyeballs, DSLR camera and DragonFrame from current day.
2) Project 6: slate, guide, cels, production notes from 1995. DSLR camera and DragonFrame from current day.
3) Project 7: slate, guide, production notes from 1995. Paper models, DSLR camera, DragonFrame from current day.
4) Project 8: slate, guide, production notes from 1995. Book/paper models from identical book (Shaolin Long Fist Kung Fu by Jwing-Ming Yang and Jeffrey Bolt) purchased on Amazon.com. DSLR camera and DragonFrame from current day.
5) Project 4: Original footage from 1995 shot on 16mm film. Digitized at the local Camera Shop. Cost me $37. Was worth every penny!

Animated Thoughts: Thistle Threads Goldwork Class

Well, the Goldwork Master Class project for Thistle-Threads is officially over. This project started back in 2008 when Dr. Wilson-Nguyen approached me about creating an animated zig-zag/ladder stitch for a museum display. The video was so well received that she came back to me a couple months later and asked me if I'd be interested in creating another twenty-seven animations for an 'online university' that would be hosted on her website.



So, what did I learn from creating twenty-nine animations of 18th Century English gold-and-silk stitches using Adobe Flash? Tons about creating and manipulating masks in Flash. But one of the most important things I learned during this multi-year project was how important it is to make a schedule and stick to it. One of my mentors from R.I.T., Carl "Skip" Battaglia, once told me that you should always leave the last drawing on your desk unfinished, that way you would know exactly where to start the next day instead of wasting time trying to figure out what to do next.

Following his advice, I broke the project down to two stitches per month, then separated them further into their component parts--the work to be performed in a two-week period along with checkpoints for each day. Working this way, with a series of checkpoints and checklists to mark off when each stage had been reached helped me stay on task for each stitch--some of which would vary greatly in scale and complexity. It also allowed me to work ahead when time presented itself. If I could finish a simple stitch in one week, I did so, then identified another simple stitch that could be animated in the remaining week or I worked ahead on a more complex stitch (which would invariably give me three weeks for a more complex stitch rather than just two). Then, as Skip suggested, when I was done working for the day, I would identify exactly where I needed to pick up on the stitch the next day, and then shut the computer down. Whenever I deviated from these practices, my animations suffered for it. I was still able to complete the stitch animations, however, sticking to the schedule provided me the necessary time to solve problems, polish animations, and even fit in an extra "bonus" animated stitch (the original project called for twenty-six animations).

Another thing worthy of note is the value of templates. Once I identified the parts of the Flash animations that were identical for each stitch animation, I created a template that would be used for the basis of each stitch animation file. Not only did I not have to duplicate work each time a new stitch was started, but I also was able to maintain a high degree of visual consistency between each stitch animation.

So. Where do i go from here? Well, apparently Doc Nguyen has another idea for a class that will need a whole lot of web development and another nine to twelve stitch animations... Time to apply those lessons learned!