There are certain moments where, when you call them up from your memory, they arrive with such a measure of clarity it's as if you were right back there in that moment. The first meeting we had with Erik on our first day of grad school at R.I.T. was one such moment. I vividly remember him as he stood there at the front of the classroom while all seven of us sat at attention, taking in every word.
During his lecture about what the program entailed, Erik cleared his throat and stated matter-of-factly:
"Graduate school is not about how little you can do, it's about how much you can do."
Of all the wisdom Erik imparted upon me over the next three years, this is the statement that I still think about the most--the statement that meant the most to me if I'm being completely honest. During that first quarter at R.I.T., I had difficulty getting traction as I was thrust into such a new environment. I fell down far more than I ran. But by second quarter, I was learning how to apply his advice towards our classes, and specifically the Photo Core II class is where it really clicked. As Erik was teaching us about the principles of animation, and we were required to animate examples in order to illustrate our understanding, I started pushing the assignments further. Starting with simple animations that just showed the principle, I soon branched out into creating gag films and adding more complex stories and editing. By the end of my third year, I had translated Erik's advice into a five minute hybrid hand-drawn/CGI film that pushed my skills beyond their limits.
Life being what it is, it is not always easy to maintain that level of dedication and focus on projects and on life. But when I find myself lagging behind, Erik's words are still there encouraging me to do more and be more.
Back in 1994, on the first day of classes that Fall quarter, Erik and Marla gathered us first-year grad students together in a room and went over what the program entailed and what the next three years would look like (back then it was a three-year M.F.A. program and R.I.T. was on the quarter system).
During his lecture, Erik made a statement that has stuck with me over the past thirty years:
"You can make a million dollar film with a $10 piece of software and you can make a $10 film with a million dollar piece of software."
Erik's lesson was short and sweet: it's not the equipment you use, it's the skill of the filmmaker that makes all the difference. Now that I'm teaching, I often see students getting hung up on what's the latest and greatest piece of animation software. And on the one hand, I think it's important to know what the studios are using, but that shouldn't stop one from making their film. It's easy to get caught up in the arms race of having to possess the latest computer, the newest camera, or the most recent software update--much to the detriment of improving ones skills as an animator and a storyteller.
Erik also placed a heavy premium on story. Back then, he told a number of us "it all begins with a story." I fondly remember the times when he would start lectures with phrases like "so there's this guy...". Years after his passing, Bill Landers (the Chief Engineer for R.I.T.'s College of Art and Design) had a plaque installed in the Gannett Building to memorialize Erik and his contributions to both the Graduate Computer Animation program and the Scriptwriting program at R.I.T.
At a number of the school reunions in the past, I've had the opportunity to touch base with Bill and reminisce with him about our time with Erik. We both share a knowing smile when Erik's emphasis on the importance of story inevitably comes up in the conversation.
As I have watched a plethora of animated films over the years, and have made a couple myself, I'm often struck by the thought that no matter what genre the animation uses or what form the film takes, there's always a story there to be told.
As I've probably stated before, Erik didn't shy away from teaching me life lessons apart from what we learned in classes. And he was pretty honest about his mistakes, especially the occasional unintentional gaffe. One lesson that he spoke of, I really took to heart.
Erik was friends with one of the Computer Science professors who taught computer graphics. Although I don't remember her name at this point, she was the person whom I had met online back in the day and had introduced me to Erik. I had made an inquiry on a CGI BBS about furthering my studies in computer animation and she was the one who responded. After I replied to her e-mail, she said that Erik's program would be a better fit for what I wanted to do since her program was more geared to the hard-core programming end of computer graphic imagery--basically people who would end up becoming Technical Directors in the programming department of animation studios or doing scientific visualization, things of that nature.
Well, Erik mentioned that during a jovial conversation they once had, he made an off-the-cuff joke about having a crush on her. This was after it was made clear from the conversation that their senses of humor were pretty similar. As she was married, and he didn't have a thing for her anyways, it was obviously a joke. However, he felt that she kind of ghosted him after that. Erik stated how he wished he hadn't said that to her. And it wasn't a 'being unprofessional' thing, after all it was just a humorous remark told during a friendly conversation between two colleagues who were kidding around at the time. But he still felt pain over missing out on a good friendship because of how his remark may have given her the wrong impression.
Simply put: it was a moment of light-hearted humor that unfortunately cost him a friendship with a respected colleague.
I had a similar situation with an associate about a year later while I was still working at the R.I.T. Research Corporation. We were all joking around over lunch and she said something that set the table alight with laughter, something that showed how in tune our senses of humor were. I chuckled and said "if you weren't married I'd be chasing after you something fierce." She laughed, I laughed, and the conversations at the table moved on. However, remembering Erik's story, I went to her later that day just to set the record straight--that I wasn't hitting on her, I just appreciated how in-sync our senses of humor happened to be. She laughed it off and said it was okay, she knew exactly what I meant. And I believe her as we remained friends/professional acquaintances throughout the rest of my time at the RITRC.
I needed more space in the bookshelves for my gaming collection. The plan was to buy a half-sized bookshelf and move my Dungeons & Dragons collection over to the other wall. Thus, I'd have almost an entire bookshelf where my BattleTech collection could expand instead of being split between two walls. Well, on Sunday, I purchased what I thought was a workable solution: a bookshelf with the correct height and width and more importantly a number of adjustable shelves. Only when I got it home and unpacked it, the shelving unit turned out to be scaled for DVDs or CDs.
Now normally that wouldn't be an issue since the bookshelves were adjustable. However, when I got it out of the box, both the sides of the unit and the shelves were only about six inches in depth. Therefore, my full-sized D&D books would stick out and would probably fall onto the floor.
Manga and Memories from R.I.T.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the bottom shelf would work for the full-sized books in my bedroom's bookcase and the upper shelves would fit my manga/light-novel collection perfectly (I'm keeping up with Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Delicious in Dungeon, and Restaurant to Another World). All I had to do was swap out the two bookshelves and I was back in business! Or so I thought.
Assembling the new shelving unit was an exercise in frustration as it broke several times during the whole process. However, it was corner clamps and Gorilla Glue to the rescue! And within two-hours, I had the display all put together and ready to accept books.
Here's where the moment of serendipity occurred. Despite the disappointments and frustrations of the previous two hours, I soldiered on. And while the glue was setting on the new shelving unit, I removed all the books from the old bookshelf so I could move it to my gaming room. And there it was. On the bottom shelf, wedged between the inside of the bookcase and my oversized copy of the Red Cross First Aid/CPR handbook was my original copy of Jack Slutzky's book Mindscapes.
The cover showed no signs of wear or fading. It was as pristine and crisp as the day I had bought it, minus a little bending at the binding from its first reading. It now rests on the shelf in my office, with the rest of my textbooks from R.I.T.--right next to the autographed copy of Mindscapes which I bought as a replacement last December.
If I had taken the new shelving unit back to the store or if I had tried to use the new shelves for my D&D books, it might have been years before I found my copy of Mindscapes. If I hadn't misplaced it in the first place, I wouldn't have bought a replacement copy -- which turned out to be signed by Jack himself.
Back in the day, I was visiting R.I.T. on my way to the Ottawa International Animation Festival. And as my former professor Jack Slutzky had published several books, I bought a copy of one that caught my eye at the campus bookstore on my way out of town. Over the years, I'd pick it up and read a couple pages when I had time, but eventually, I forgot where I set it down. It bothered me to no end that I couldn't find my copy of Mindscapes. I have one of his other books, but that was my favorite. I swear, it's in the house here somewhere, I just can't find it.
Mindscapes by Jack Slutzky
Well, after searching for years, I admitted defeat, hoped that where ever it was, it was being enjoyed, then I bit the bullet and bought a new copy... sort of. As it's been out of print for over a decade, I did a search on Amazon.com--where they had a used copy on sale for a very reasonable price. So, I plunked down the cash and waited for it to arrive.
It showed up a couple weeks early, on Friday of Hanukkah of all dates--an interesting coincidence as Jack was Jewish. Well, I opened the package and the book was indeed "used". It was pretty well used, as a matter of fact. Upon closer examination, it was a library copy--which explained the condition. I leafed through it to ensure that it wasn't missing any pages and discovered that it was from the Le Roy library in New York. The same city that Jack lived in. Another coincidence? Perhaps.
Then I looked at the first page. Written were the words:
"To the LeRoy Library Thank you for being here"
Signed by Jack Slutzky himself.
I quickly pulled out the hardbound copy of my MFA Thesis paper to compare the signatures on the page where my carefully selected committee had signed off on my thesis. Then I cross referenced it with a letter Jack wrote me several years after I graduated from R.I.T.
Sure enough, it was Jack's signature.
What are the odds that the book he autographed and donated to the library in the town where he lived would be blindly purchased at a used book sale on Amazon.com by one of his former students? And not just one of his students, but one of his graduate students for whom Jack served on the MFA graduate thesis committee?
Some see coincidence. Others see serendipity. I see providence.
Erik kept an eye on the players in the Rochester area.
Being as we were smack dab in the land of Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of companies that served the imaging industry, it was natural that many of his students worked in the area--both before and after graduation.
One day, Erik mentioned a local multimedia company in Rochester that we should stay away from. He stated that some of the principles in charge of the company had a serious drug problem that led them to engage in questionable behavior like using company income to support their drug habit. His message received, we all looked for employment elsewhere.
A year or so later, one of my coworkers at the RIT Research Corporation took a job with that company. Who she hired on with was unbeknownst to me. At the time, all I knew was that she had left for a "better" business opportunity. Well, within about six months, she was rehired at the RITRC.
When I asked her what happened, she told horror stories of the company having money problems, unrealistic deadlines and expectations, a pattern of unethical behavior, and an overall toxic work environment that caused her to become so stressed that her hair started falling out. It turns out that the company was the one that Erik had warned us to avoid at all costs. While she and I were on good terms, we weren't exactly "that" close, so finding out all this after the fact wasn't out of the ordinary. However, I still wish I had known at the time where she was moving to, that way I could've passed on Erik's warning and saved her a lot of heartache.
Erik had a number of theories (and witticisms). One of my favorites was shared during our first year.
As we were watching a Disney cartoon in one of our Photo Core classes, during a lesson on the principles of animation, Erik stated that within every Disney cartoon was an 'ass joke'. This remark was made during an analysis of Donald Duck as he swept the floor with a broom. Sure enough, within seconds, Donald turned around and started dusting with his tailfeathers.
To this day, I can't watch a Donald Duck cartoon without the phrase "Disney ass joke" popping into my head. And I've often wondered how difficult it would be to get a University grant and hire a couple students to index and watch all the Disney short films in order to see if Erik was right.
During the years that I attended R.I.T., they were operating on the quarter system--a schedule that I much preferred to the semester system that Taylor University used.
With only ten weeks per quarter, there was really no time to slack off. If you didn't use your time wisely, it was easy to get overwhelmed and fall behind to a point where you couldn't catch up.
Case in point: during my first year's Winter quarter, we had a class where we grad students were taught the process of producing an animation. By the end of Winter quarter, we were expected to have our treatment, script, and storyboards completed and be ready to start animating on day one of Spring quarter.
So there we were, sitting in a circle and pitching ideas for our Spring films. I pitched an interactive comic book--something where I'd scan an existing comic into a multimedia program and then animate certain panels when the user clicked on them. Erik said, rather bluntly, that I didn't have the drawing skills for something like that. It stung. A lot. But he was right. When I started grad school, I could barely draw stick figures. Granted within one Fall quarter of figure drawing class, I had made tremendous progress, so much so that my professor said that she'd never seen anyone come so far in so short a time. Maybe I was operating at that intersection of desire and hard work or maybe desperation breeds miracles. Who knows. Again, if I'm being honest about the whole situation, Erik was right and I wasn't ready to tackle such a project. And that was part of his job, giving us enough rope to stretch and grow as animators but making sure we didn't hang ourselves on a project that we couldn't complete in ten weeks.
So there I was, sitting in a room, getting called out in front of my classmates about the level of my artistic skills.
I then had a choice: feelings or logic. I could react to what my feelings were interpreting as an assault on my personhood (and receive the consequences of said action), like I had done so many times before in my life, or I could shoulder the embarrassment and grow as a person. I made that rare choice to listen to the logical side of my brain and take another step forward towards maturity. I said, 'okay' and then stated that the only other idea I had was about a Chameleon who got stuck in an art gallery. Well, it turns out that Erik loved the art gallery idea and over the following ten weeks, he helped me develop the idea from treatment to finished script. And while "visually" it never matched up with what was in my head, due to both my drawing skills being what they were and the fact that I had to draw the whole thing in the computer using a mouse (these were the days before tablets caught on), The Chameleon would be finished on time, screened, and would go on to win 2nd place in that year's SMTPE/RAVA awards.
Unlike most of my fellow grad students, my background was in English writing and computer programming, not art. So I had to work harder to catch up to their skill and experience level within the visual medium and Erik was always there to help me in that regard by encouraging me through a judicious use of both the 'carrot and the stick', helping me select projects that were within my skillset and skill level AND would be just out of my reach slightly enough so that I had to grow as an artist.
Back in Grad School, we had a class called Photography Core. It was split into three sections across three quarters -- yes, we were on the quarter system back then. Well during the second section (Winter quarter), Erik took the better part of the quarter teaching us several principles of animation. I wasn't getting 'animation on a curve'. At all. So, after screwing up the first attempt at the assignment, when I talked to him about it in his office after class, Erik held up an imaginary gun and then acted out the motion of a gunslinger pulling the gun from the holster and raising the gun -- all the while explaining how the elbow bent during the motion and worked with the shoulder's motion as opposed to locking the elbow in place while making all the raising motion of the gun come from the shoulder alone. He compared how a gunslinger would perform that motion in real life and then exaggerated for an animation -- which led to a discussion on acting in animation and why these extra motions and exaggerations were important in animation. With my newfound knowledge -- though I must admit, I still didn't grasp the concept fully -- I took another stab at the assignment and came up with the following animation:
So, since I've been too busy to make a brand-new animation for November, I decided to tinker with an old one. The original animation had the robot taking a step, firing the gun, lowering the gun, firing a rocket, then raising and firing the gun again, and then lowering the gun -- obviously, different from the above.
As part of my grad school records and films reclamation project, I exported all of the above frames from Macromedia Director to Windows bitmaps. At that point, the animation was "saved" and I can import the frames into any editing program I wish, be it Premiere or whatever comes next a couple years down the road.
This was an interesting exercise. Copy-and-pasting frames to the end of the animation in order to make it longer was easy enough. But in order to get the animation to compile to an mp4 using the H.264 codec at the best resolution possible for an 8-bit image with a gradient for the background, that took some trial and error to get it right.
And that little bit of knowledge will serve me well when I decide to make mp4's of the other animations from Photo Core II or my Spring film "the Chameleon" from Photo Core III.
Oh, and I was on an Enya kick back then, so that's why the title card uses the "Enya" true-type font.
Back in 1993, I was working my way through college and was pretty much adrift with regards to both education and career path. My choice of majors in undergrad went something like: Pre-Med, then Pre-Med & Computer Science, then Computer Science, then Computer Science & English Writing, then just English Writing. And after receiving a rather pointed question from a friend regarding getting credit for all those computer classes I took, I stuck around for an extra semester and finally graduated with a B.A. in English Writing with a Computer Science minor after four-and-a-half years at Taylor University.
Me (l) and Chuck-Bill (r) back in 1992
when we lived on 3rd Morris
However, as computer animation had fascinated me since I first saw Tron, when my friend Chuck-Bill got a copy of (what we both vaguely remember was) Real3D, I finally had someone who could help me get all these thoughts out of my mind and onto the screen. For a year or two, I had taken the only computer graphics class offered by the university, had written some basic graphics programs in C++, had been dabbling with shareware paint programs as well as playing with POV-Ray (a freeware 3d rendering and animation program that required you to plot out everything using numerical coordinates and a scripting language before passing the reference textfile to the render engine so the images could be created). Yep. Times were tough back then... but I was still drifting without focus, until Bill told me to come down to Indy and see what he was doing.
After looking at the animations Bill was creating on his own, I was hooked! On several occasions during those final years of Undergrad, I'd race down to Indianapolis with some crazy idea. Bill would model a set and I'd animate a character. Then we'd start it rendering. We'd crash for six hours, wake up, get something to eat, go see a movie, play videogames, and on Sunday morning, I'd drive back to campus with an animation saved on a 3.5" floppy disk (or two).
Those were heady days filled with the excitement of limitless potential -- we clearly had no idea what we were doing or how the industry worked... but we were becoming animators, darn it! Computer limitations and lack of skill be damned!
The following three animations were the only ones of merit that we produced together during that time and were used in both of our portfolios when we applied to Grad School at R.I.T.
Originally rendered at 320 pixels by 240 pixels and 256 colors (I think), I like to keep them around and watch them from time to time. It's fun, and cringeworthy, to see how far you've progressed as both an animator and as a filmmaker.
"Dojo", the first animation we created was during the weekend of October 17, 1993. Since I was involved in teaching Karate at a local martial arts studio, I had this idea of a guy doing a martial arts routine. So, Bill created the sets for this film as well as did the camera work. Additionally he took a pre-made character model that came with the 3d animation package and gave him black "pants" and I did all the character animation. In our original design, the character was supposed to reach his last move, return to a standing position, and bow to the camera. However, I missed setting a keyframe during the last sequence and he didn't really bow correctly. Eh ,this was my first real experience with keyframed 3d animation using a graphical user interface, so I plead inexperience. Years later, I would revisit this idea during Marla Schweppe's stop motion and puppet animation class at R.I.T. when I made a "ninja cockroach" puppet and animated him through a short kata.
In April of 1994, I raced back down to Indianapolis with another idea: "Escher". This one was a simple camera rotation animation based on an M.C. Escher print. I think I did some posing on this animation, and I vaguely remember Bill and I working on the backgrounds together, though he made the rendered pictures on the walls. This would actually be a fun animation to redo using today's technology.
The "Studio 119" animation was created in May of 1993 as an opening promo for a Taylor University news program that they were trying to put together for the Journalism department. It never ended up getting used for anything more than a bit of pre-viz. They used an Amiga computer for the final copy and added some flair that we couldn't do using Bill's animation software (like having images of the newscasters fly in and out). But it was a fun project nonetheless. As setting up the text was pretty easy for this animation, Bill and I both worked on the camera fly-through on this one.
Unfortunately, my computer is being a little finicky. At the time, this animation was too big for one 3.5" floppy disk, so we used DOS's backup command to compress it across two floppies. And while I still have the two disks, my Windows 98 PC won't recognize the version of DOS used to compress the file. And DOSBox has the same trouble. As does my DOS bootable USB drive... so I'm rapidly reaching a point where I'll say 'screw it' and install a retro hard drive into my Win2K computer, reinstall DOS 6.21, decompress the files and be done with it.
But, for now though, I've got a copy that I digitized from an old portfolio videotape.
Bill made several other animations on his own, which he included in his portfolio when he applied to R.I.T., and which I still have on VHS. But I'll let him post those...
During Grad School, three of my favorite classes were the Intro to Classical Animation classes that I took with Jack Slutzky.
Prior to his tenure at R.I.T., Jack worked for two years at Disney under Snow White animator Shamus Culhane. During class, he would tell us the odd story of time spent with Culhane who, as Jack put it, was driven to near alcoholism while animating the famous "Heigh-Ho" scene from Snow White as he dealt with puzzling out the technical aspects of drawing seven near-identical characters marching in lock-step and yet trying to ensure that they all had their own unique personality and movements.
Jack would later become one of my three thesis advisors and the one who would provide the most help as I struggled through the trials of trying to complete a hybrid hand-drawn/digital animation when I had only really been animating (or doing any serious drawing) for two years.
Jack designed his three animation classes such that the first would teach foundational skills in hand-drawn animation while getting us to start thinking about producing a larger hand-drawn animation. The second class would build on the first as we took a character conceptualized in the first class and get us animating with that character. The third class would build on the first two as we finalized a script, treatment, storyboard and build an animatic.
As I've been going through my filing cabinets to reconstruct (and archive) my animated films, handouts, and notes from Grad School over the Summer, for this month's animation, I decided to use DragonFrame to recapture and retime several animation assignments from Jack's first class.
This first assignment was designed to get us warmed up to hand drawn animation by taking a stack of notecards and creating a pair of metamorphosis animations between a pair of shapes.
Then, Jack had us create a title animation for a fictional company of our own devising which we could use at the beginning of future productions in his class.
The last "animation" assignment we did was to animate a person laughing. Jack provided us with some keyframes for reference material and it was up to us to redraw the keyframes then figure out the in-betweens and animate them.
Jack was a fount of valuable information during my thesis. When I mentioned how I was struggling with drawing my scenes, it was Jack who suggested I draw fifty poses each of my two characters every day before working on a scene. That turned the trick. Within a few short weeks, my creative block was shattered and I was barreling through my thesis. The point that he was getting at through that particular exercise was how I needed to know my characters in far greater detail. And by doing multiple drawings of various poses, I could study them from every angle, every expression, even practice their body language. At that point in my thesis, I was trying to run, but I had barely begun to crawl.
After completing Jack's third Introduction to Classical Animation class, he wrote me the following note.
I saw Jack at Erik's memorial service and spoke to him a couple times afterwards. The last time we exchanged e-mails, about a short animation I had just completed (Stress), he encouraged me to never stop looking at my work with a critical eye and striving for greatness in my animation:
* * *
Dear Charles:
Thank you for sharing your animation with me. I thought for a second I was back at RIT. It was a pleasant surprise seeing you at Erik's memorial service. You look well, and from what you said, and i've seen you're moving on into the future. I wish you luck.
My only criticism of the work you shared with me, including the tape you sent, is your characters are one dimensional. Yes, they move, but with no sense of life. Timing, aceleration/deceleration, speed change, etc. Do more, don't just settle for movement, give me movement that means something. You are too talented to settle for less. End of crit, I'm not your teacher anymore, just a friend.
Hope Ottawa was beneficial, and enjoyable. Lookin forward to being there in two years. I'll buy you a drink and we can toast to old times.
Stay well, happy, healthy and productive. Stay in touch.
Peace
Jack
* * *
On Thursday, April 28, 2016 at the age of 78, Jack died at home with his family. He left behind a loving wife and family and a legion of students who learned great lessons about animation under his steadfast guidance.
Well, last night was like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one.
The label on this disk... it mocks me with
ideas of what treasures it must contain!
For weeks I've been trying to do a sector-by-sector recovery of data from an old Macintosh formatted floppy disk and resigning myself to the fact that I'll probably have to pay to have it professionally done--if there's anything still on that disk at all. It seems that whether I use the tools on my Mac or on my PC, the physical disk simply will not load.
Well, last night, I was poking around some deleted files that I recovered from another disk and not only did I find two lost papers from my 3D Animation I class but the term paper from Stephanie Maxwell's Film History class that I thought was gone for good (and that I thought was locked away on that floppy disk, given what I had written on the label).
Then, when scanning in my handwritten notes from the Film History class, I came across a reference to an additional book that Stephanie recommended we read. I look over to my left and realize that I bought it at a garage sale for $.50 over a decade ago without even remembering what connection it had to her class.
This grad school archival project has been one unexpected blessing after another. At this point, between all the stuff I still have (paper copies of notes, drawings, and physical models), the videos of animations I produced, and the films that I've rebuilt from either my notes or my original material, I think I will have recovered almost 99% of what I lost by the time this project is done.
The only thing I can't recover is my Computer Music project because all of that was on a Zip Drive that I handed in to the professor during class which he accidently lost back in '96 (though I am still holding out hope that I might still have the cassette tape with my three songs on them).
I was in my early twenties during my time at R.I.T.
and my personality had the usual mix of maturity and immaturity that most young men possess during that age.
As I've mentioned before, from time to time back then, and in his own inimitable way, Erik would help guide me into manhood -- this particular time by pointing out some of my ingrained behaviors that were counter-productive to navigating polite society.
Case in point: being someone who was a keen observer of human behavior, Erik once mentioned that I looked like I had been in prison -- this based on the fact that I gave off no body language and would do things like looking both ways before entering a room.
I responded that when you spend your childhood getting bullied at school and abused at home, you develop some self-preservation habits -- such as checking the room before you enter so you don't get jumped by a schoolyard bully or reducing your body language and facial expressions to the absolute minimum so as not to attract attention to yourself and piss off an already angry parent.
But it wasn't until Erik pointed out these behaviors that I really put some serious thought into how people might be perceiving me.
It could have been that I had reached a level of emotional maturity that I could accept hearing that observation from someone without taking offense or getting defensive. Or perhaps it was how Erik said it... or maybe it was just because he was a third-party observer who had no malice towards me and was, in his own unique way, engaging in a simple act of kindness.
Regardless, I had been engaging in those defensive behaviors for so many years that they had become second nature to me.
Moving silently was one of those behaviors.
While at R.I.T., I worked at the now defunct R.I.T. Research Corporation. And unfortunately, one time I scared one of my supervisors so badly that he yelled out when he saw me standing there in his doorway. Course, Rich always had a great sense of humor about such things, so after composing himself, and I apologized for startling him, he quipped that I should wear a bell around my neck when we were working late in the office so everyone could hear me coming. He laughed, I laughed, and then I asked him my work-related question.
But afterwards, Erik's words would come back to me and I made it a point to take his observation to heart. No, I didn't start wearing a bell or anything silly like that, but I did make an effort to smile a little more, lurk a little less, and lighten up a little so those hard lessons from my past wouldn't control my future.
Twenty-some years later, I'm still somewhat guarded. I still look pretty intense when I'm walking around, lost in my own thoughts and not paying attention to how I look while I'm thinking. But instead of pausing at doorways and looking both ways before entering, I pause and look around in order to see if someone needs the door held open for them. And when they do, I'm always somewhat bemused when I observe how surprised people react to that simple act of kindness.
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.
* * *
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!
I'm a bit of a packrat. And though I try to pare down my possessions every year by getting rid of anything that I don't see myself using over the next year or two, it still feels like I'm drowning in "stuff".
Sometimes though, it does pay off.
About eight years out of Grad School, I accidently destroyed the hard drive that had all of the files for my student films, screenplays, term papers, and written assignments from R.I.T. When I realized what I had done, I was crushed. During the process of formatting a hard drive in order to install a new operating system on my computer, I typed a "1" instead of a "0" and so the program formatted my backup drive instead of my OS/Programs drive. Three years of hard work, gone forever, replaced by a series of "0"s in every sector.
Well, sort of.
I immediately turned to my backup backup copies: 3.5" floppy disks, iOmega Zip disks, even a pair of old SyQuest Bernoulli disks.
"Bernoulli disks, who remembers?
Between the Zip disks and the floppy disks, I was able to recover over half of my student films' original Macromedia Director files and all of the screenplays and written assignments (though I had paper copies of that work as well, so I wasn't too concerned about all of those files). Those now ancient disks also had most of the Director files for my first year film: The Chameleon. Most importantly though, in a rather uncommon flash of foresight, I had burned my M.F.A. thesis film Zero and all the files used to create it onto CD-ROM a couple years prior, so all of those files were intact.
Back then, in my desperate rush to recover data, I called upon Lansing Community College and asked them for help in the hopes that they might have a Bernoulli drive. As fate would have it, Program Director Sharon Wood said that they were replacing all of their Bernoulli drives in two days and if I wanted to use one, to come right in and they'd hook me up.
The Bernoulli drives held all but one of the remaining files that were missing from The Chameleon--that file was there, but it was corrupted so I couldn't recover it. Sadly though, I had no back up files for our Photography Core I group film: Mr. Big, nor the final "Animation Principles" film from my Photography Core II class. But, I had video copies of all and those would suffice.
Nothing spectacular, but it "did" win 2nd place
at the SMPTE/RAVA awards...
Looking at what I had lost, I then turned to the best VHS copy of the films that I had and digitized them before the VHS tapes deteriorated any further. All my films were there, so I quickly preserved Mr. Big and that last Photo Core II film.
Additionally... unfortunately... when I reformatted the hard drive, I had lost all the files for Stress, the first animated short film that I created after graduation and moving back to Michigan. However, even though the hard drive files were lost for good, "poor man's copyright" saved me. Y'see, back in 2000, I was operating under bad intel and had burned all those files onto a CD-ROM and mailed it to myself. Of course, that little procedure is a myth -- that of a sealed envelope with a postmark being proof of copyright -- and it certainly wouldn't hold up in a court of law (Yes, I know this "now"). However, that one act did give me a full backup of that film and all the associated files.
Eh, it's not bad. But, after watching it, you can see why I didn't send Stress out to the festivals.
So in the end, despite the mistake and through all the drama, I lost nothing... sort of. Only a handful of files are missing, meaning that I can't recreate some of those films from the original files. And there's a term paper that I wish I still had. But as I have video copies of those two missing films (now digitized and archived), they're all still around in one form or another.
Fast forward a decade or so.
A couple months ago, I discovered by chance that Adobe was discontinuing Director, for good. After seeing those dreaded words "End of Product Lifecycle", I quickly downloaded the last trial copy that Adobe had released and made the unwelcome discovery that it wasn't backwards compatible with all the Director files that I had created back in the mid-90's. Well, at that point, the archiving bug bit me again. I pulled out my old Windows98 PC from storage and got it running, fished out my old copy of Director 6.5, and installed it on the now antiquated machine. The original plan was to export all of those old Director files as individual image files so that the next time the desire struck me, I could just import the images into Premiere on whatever computer I had at the time and make .mp4's out of them.
So, the task of archiving continued. This time though, there was a little gem hiding in plain sight. During this round of archiving, after reloading a bunch of disks to see what was on them, I made the welcome discovery that I had a separate backup of Director files from The Chameleon -- including the one file that was corrupted on the Bernoulli disk. So I can now go back and recreate that entire movie the next time the desire strikes me.
As you can imagine, I now have multiple copies of these files and movies all archived on DVD-ROMs (a full set is on archival Gold DVDs, which are supposed to last for 100 years). Course, as technology continues to develop, pretty soon, I'll have to find another compatible archival medium, cause how long are CD/DVD drives going to be around?
As mentioned in my previous post, last October, I attended R.I.T.'s Brick City Homecoming.
It's a seven hour drive from Lansing to Rochester, so I tend to leave town early. Nexus pass notwithstanding, you never know what kind of traffic you're going to encounter on the bridges to and from Canada. After a last minute emergency at work, I left Michigan almost on time. Was pulling onto the highway when I realized I had no quarters for the tolls when driving through New York. A quick detour to a bank in Flint and I was on my way to Rochester. Got waved though the border and drove straight through Canada. There was a minor wait at the Ontario/New York border crossing, but the Nexus pass did its thing and they waved me through with no difficulty. All-in-all, the weather was beautiful and I made excellent time to R.I.T.
Arriving at my former home, the first step was to check in at the R.I.T. Inn & Conference Center, then head straight to campus. It was Thursday and other than Becky Simmons and my former classmate Leah, I hadn't told anyone that I'd be in town. So while it promised to be a quiet evening, I still wanted to check in at the Student Union.
I parked the car and started drifting through memories while walking through the Gannett Building. As is my custom, I stopped over at Erik's old office in quiet remembrance of my friend and then over to Marla Schweppe's old office. Stephanie Maxwell's office had been moved over near where Erik used to be. And Skip Battaglia has retired, so I have to content myself to catching up with him at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and her via e-mail whenever we have a spare moment or two.
One of the best activities at the OIAF:
the impromptu R.I.T. reunions!
As much as I wanted to linger, I had to pick up my welcome packet before the Union closed. So I ran over, picked up my tickets, swag bag, and shirt. Then bought an extra shirt, just because.
I then reacquainted myself with the Archives office at the Wallace Library. Didn't expect to be there for very long tomorrow, but this was a long time in coming. Was happy to finally move this project forward. Walking around at night, I was struck by how R.I.T. is so different. It has expanded so much in the past nineteen years, added so many amenities and buildings. It was going to look so different tomorrow in the light of day.
With the pressing things out of the way, I stopped by the R.I.T. store to pick up some memorabilia, then off to some old-ish haunts before they closed: Hammergirl Anime and Millennium Games to be specific. Wish they'd been around back in my day. Course, back then we had to get our anime and gaming fixes through Media Play and Crazy Egors. Both are now long gone, but back then they had their charm even though they were very different scenes. Crazy Egors used to be packed tightly with pile upon pile of vintage gaming boxes and books. Before an injury forced him into retirement, I used to see the owner and his son at Gen Con during the early-2000's. Was always nice to chat with them and catch up on the gaming scene in Rochester. While Media Play had a larger selection of animated films and anime (though admittedly on VHS), Hammergirl is still the best place to stock up on Pocky and HiChew for the weekend while browsing their DVD selection.
Then it was back to the hotel for some rest. Gonna be a good weekend.
Friday was an incredible day, from start to finish I almost always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Went straight to campus and started off at Mary Bernard's office. Dropped off a copy of the Detroit Institute of Arts' animation book 'Watch Me Move' for Stephanie Maxwell. Stephanie was out for the day, unfortunately, but Mary said she'd put it in her mailbox. Before leaving, I chatted her up on what animation work we're doing in Michigan and she gave me the latest SOFA student film DVDs.
Then it was off to see Bill Landers.
For my two years as the Graduate Lab manager, I had the opportunity to work with Bill from time-to-time and each time it was a real education. I attribute the longevity of our equipment at my office to those out-of-the-classroom lessons I received from watching Bill working tirelessly on old video cameras, 3/4-inch analog tape editing stations, and finicky Bernoulli drives as well as routing yards and yards of cables and patch cords.
As many of the thesis films from my day have been lost, before driving to Rochester, I digitized every film from back then that I had on tape and loaded them onto a flash drive so he could add them to the SOFATube server at his leisure. Also snuck in a better copy of my thesis film on the flash drive--the VHS transfer they have of my film is terrible because the tape I gave the library wasn't good enough to stand up to the ravages of time. Still kicking myself over that one. Remember kids: never skimp on your archival media; quality costs money but it pays off in the long run.
Well Bill explained about how SOFATube came about and their plans for filling in the films from the '90's. Then I got the full tour of the new facilities. He walked me through the labs: 2d, 3d, Graduate, stop-motion, audio, and live action. In addition to the SOFA archives, set and model fabrication shop, and the theaters/screening rooms. The department is night and day from what we had back in the late-nineties. Was incredible to see what the program has become--and it's reflected in the films that the students are making today.
Bill said the program is based on the premise: "it all starts with the story." Erik would be pleased. I told Bill how after I graduated, Erik said I should teach the scriptwriting courses in his place. When I said that I told Erik that I didn't think I was good enough at the time, Bill said that if Erik recommended me for the job, then I was good enough. Bar none, one of the best compliments I've ever received.
After saying my goodbyes to Bill, I walked by Marla's office and there she was, sitting in her chair, reading before a class. We spent a few moments talking and catching up then it was off on a tour of her 3D Digital Design program. When we returned to her office, she asked for my CV and said there were possibilities of me teaching forensic animation long distance at R.I.T. Then she gave me a very touching gift: a pair of Erik's reading glasses she'd been holding onto. Said that of all the students that have passed through program, he'd be happy to know that I had them. I'm thankful for those six years that I knew Erik, but it wasn't nearly enough time.
I'm still not sure if I should replace the lenses with my prescription so I can use them when I teach, but for now, they occupy a prominent place on my bookshelf right next to my two photos of Erik and the group photo of me, Marla, Stephanie, and Skip from back in 2010 when we all went out to dinner together.
At this point, I had said all my 'hellos' and Marla needed to go teach her class, so I walked across the quad to the Wallace Library. Becky was out running her campus tour on R.I.T.'s campus landmarks but, as always, she was as good as her word and had left Erik's tape on her desk along with instructions to her assistants that I'd be arriving to digitize his film.
It's a kludge, but it works. :)
My recording process is a kludge. 4-head Stereo VCR patched into an old Sony DCR-TRV 120 via two sets of patch cords. The CCDs in the old DCR-TRV are burned out but the A/V inputs and the recording/playback mechanisms work just fine. Though I've tested many over the years, I've never found a really reliable and affordable way to digitize analog video and feed it directly into my computer. That's why I stick with the above setup I put together over a decade ago. The DCR-TRV camera records to 8mm tapes of various quality and can output to computer via a FireWire cable. Fortunately, my old XP laptop still has a FireWire interface port in the side. So, once the analog video has been digitized onto the Digital 8mm tape, it's a simple matter to feed it into Adobe Premiere as an uncompressed AVI. From there, you can clean it up, if necessary, and export it to any format needed.
As evidenced by the images, the recording went far, far better than expected. The tape held up exceedingly well over the past thirty-three years.
There are still some artifacts on the audio, a minute hiss and crackle that's only really noticeable when the dynamics of the music shifts downward.
I'm honestly not sure if I want to clean it up, so the audio is fresh and crisp, or leave it "as is". I'm wondering if it's an artifact of the film itself from when Erik originally recorded it instead of being a consequence of going from film to video to digital video--kind of like how you hear scratches and pops on vinyl records but the music sounds much richer as opposed to the same song when played from a CD or an mp4.
The film is only about four minutes long and I've been tinkering with the audio off and on for about a year now. Time I think to show it to Skip and Stephanie at this year's Brick City Homecoming and ask them for their advice. Skip remembered seeing Erik's film on a movie screen so I'm sure he's going to have some good advice on how I should proceed.
The rest of the evening was a whirlwind as I met up with Leah and we walked all around campus, reminiscing and marveling about how the campus has changed. Since it was after hours, everything was locked up. However, Michelle, a lovely young lady from the animation program, showed us around the labs and chatted us us up about what the program was like back in the nineties and we reassured her that, 'yes', there was job after college!
Earlier, as I sat on a park bench outside the Gannett Building waiting for Leah to arrive, a thought struck me about the current facilities and the quality of work that the SOFA students are producing. If I had to apply to the program now as opposed to nineteen years ago, it makes me wonder if I would've even been able to make it into R.I.T. Leaves me even more thankful to God for the time I got to spend there.
On Saturday, when walking back from the game design workshop I had signed up for, I waltzed right into another session of Becky Simmons' tour. Really appreciated the chance to give her a progress report in person and thank her for all her help on the Roadworks project.
At that point, I think that I did all that I could while I was in town. At the very least, I hit the most important events: digitizing Erik's tape, visiting Marla, spending time with Leah, dropping off some tokens of appreciation to my former professors.
When leaving for Michigan on Sunday, I had much to think about on my way back home: how much I missed Erik, how I wished that I'd done a better job keeping in touch with my friends Leah and Steve after graduation. How I'd like to go back in time and warn the me that I was not to take those days for granted and savor every moment. On the bright side, when I got back into town, I reached out to Norway where Steve was teaching and rekindled that friendship. And on Facebook, I continued the conversation with Leah that we started over homecoming weekend. Am determined not to have any regrets with those two friendships.
R.I.T.'s Frank E. Gannett Hall,
home of the School for Film and Animation
In October 2016, I made the last-minute decision to attend "Brick City", R.I.T.'s annual homecoming. I had been back to R.I.T. several times in the past -- passing through on the way to the Ottawa International Animation Festival, speaking there as a guest lecturer, even doing research at the Wallace Library. But this was the first time I had attended homecoming as an alumni and I used the opportunity to get a side-project back on track.
Some background is necessary.
During one of my classes in Grad School, Erik mentioned Roadworks, the only experimental film he made during his tenure at R.I.T. Don't know if it registered with my fellow students, but I thought the premise was interesting and decided to check it out at the Wallace Library. Roadworks was this short film with an experimental/jazz soundtrack where the viewer was presented with a top-down view of a road and the soundtrack was timed such that nuances of the 'music' were matched with changes in the road markings -- dashed lines, parallel solid lines, etc.
So, I watched it. It was amusing enough, even moreso because of Erik's animated tale of how he had students cranking this roll of transparent plastic (with the road marks painted on it) in step with the music while the camera recorded the production on film. Afterwards, I returned the tape to the archives and filed that memory under another interesting experience during graduate school, among so many others.
As part of my greater collection, I actually maintain a library of films produced by my professors or films that they worked on: single DVDs like Skip Battaglia'sCar Crash Opera or Stephanie Maxwell'stzzzz! as well as DVD collections that they've produced professionally--like Stephanie's compilation: Animated Works 1984-2007, which she released through IotaCenter. Eh, I may not be in school anymore, but that doesn't mean that my profs don't still have lots to teach me.
About a decade after Erik's untimely passing, it dawned on me that as time marched on, nobody would remember his film because fewer of us were around to tell people about it. Professors would retire and new ones would be hired. Students would come through the program, graduate, and move on to their careers. And unless the students were told about Erik and his contributions to R.I.T.1, both he and his film would be forgotten.
So, I set about making Roadworks a part of my collection.
Well, fortunately some of us are bound and determined not to let Erik be forgotten. Case in point: Bill Landers. Bill is the Chief Engineer who keeps all the equipment running at R.I.T.'s School of Film and Animation. Though their relationship was sometimes contentious, Erik and Bill had a respect for each other--so much so that after Erik died, Bill had a plaque to commemorate Erik installed in one of the halls where the SoFA's animation labs are located.
Another example is my friend Leah. Both she and I donated commemorative bricks in Erik's name which were installed on R.I.T.'s Philanthropy Way (the Legacy Walk) -- a sidewalk between the dorms and the campus proper.
Back to Erik's film.
My 'little sisters' got a special screening
at the High Falls Film Festival that year.
In April 2013, I was visiting R.I.T. for the High Falls Film Festival in addition to doing research for my history of Women Animators project. Since I was in the library anyways, I took the opportunity to track down Roadworks and watch it again. Unfortunately, as everything was moving to digital, many of the VHS tapes were being archived and thrown away. The School of Film and Animation's copy had been rescued from a bin by Stephanie Maxwell and mailed to Erik's daughter, Erica, ensuring that at least one of Erik's children had a copy of his film.
The other copy was in the Wallace Library archives. I had done my homework ahead of time and walked into the archives with a printout of the Library's database index entry for Erik's film.
I spoke to the lead Archivist, Ms. Becky Simmons, and told her who Erik was and why I was trying to locate a copy of his film. As it turns out, Becky had never seen the numbering system for Erik's film entry in the database as it hadn’t been used for years. And, even after several phone calls to colleagues, she was unable to locate his film--if a copy even still existed at the Wallace Library. So, she apologized, we exchanged business cards, and she said she’d see what she could do. This was Friday at around 3:00 p.m. I thanked her for her time, and then walked across the library to do my research.
Around 4 p.m., I was elbow deep in the animation section when I received a call from Becky stating that she had found the library’s copy. His film had been located--sitting on a lonely shelf in a box with a couple other VHS tapes. Fifteen minutes later, I was watching Erik’s film downstairs on one of the few remaining VCRs that the library still had hooked up.
As there were only three VHS viewing stations left in the library and they were going to be retired in the not too distant future, I hurriedly ran downstairs, popped in the tape, plugged in my headphones, and watched Erik's film--hoping against hope that the almost fifteen years of sitting in a box hadn't caused the tape to deteriorate too much. Thankfully, it was in excellent condition and I watched Roadworks several times, each time bringing back a new memory of Erik and our time together at R.I.T. I was able to verify that it could be digitized with only minor clean-up needed for the soundtrack.
Afterwards, I returned the tape to Becky and asked about the procedures for preserving Roadworks. We agreed that before any digital copies were made, I first needed to contact one of Erik's children and obtain permission. It took me a couple years to track one of them down, but when I finally did, Erica quickly responded to my e-mail and gave me her permission to move this project forward.
Which brings us to R.I.T.'s 2016 Brick City Homecoming.
I invite you back in August to read part three: "Brick City".
* Erik was the man who started the Graduate Computer Animation program at R.I.T.
By day, I'm a mild-mannered forensic animator, but during evenings and weekends, I work on my own animated films and various artistic endeavors for clients. I'm a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology's M.F.A. Computer Animation program and a current member of ASIFA, MATAI, and the Toronto Animated Image Society.
Building upon the 2008-2009 project for the NY MET and Bard Graduate Center, I am currently animating gold-and-silk needlework stitches and managing lesson webpages for an online course presented by Dr. Wilson-Nguyen for her Thistle-Threads Historical needlework website.
