Animated Thoughts: ASIFA Central 2019 Retreat

Meet me in St. Louis...

This year, the ASIFA Central retreat was held in St. Louis and graciously hosted by Webster University, home of our Social Media Coordinator: Chris Sagovac. After a joyful seven-and-a-half hour drive filled with discussions about animation and gaming with fellow ASIFA Central members Brad Yarhouse and Robert Sweringa, we arrived in St. Louis for a fun-filled weekend of animation -- starting with a meet-and-greet over dinner at Blueberry Hill between our members and Chris's colleagues and students from Webster.

Keynote address delivered by ASIFA Central President Brad Yarhouse

A lot of the animation workshops we played with during the retreat followed the theme of non-traditional animation techniques: direct-on-film, digital direct-on-film, and pixilation.

At one station, Chris had set up markers and ink with strips of clear 16-mm film where we could experiment with direct-on-film techniques.

Additionally, in one of the computer labs, Steve Leeper demonstrated his Photoshop scripts designed to produce digital direct-on-film animation. Fortunately for me, I remembered my Adobe Creative Cloud username and password so Deanna and I were able to share a workstation and produce some short films using Steve's technique. I begrudgingly pay my monthly "rent" to Adobe for the Creative Cloud but I have to admit that it did pay off this time.

When finished, Steve compiled all of our films together for viewing later that afternoon. My section of the digital direct-on-film animation is below:




In the other room, a group of members and students were producing an animated film using the pixilation technique. Former honorary ASIFA President Norman McLaren would be proud to know that there are kids still using the animation technique that he used to create his award winning film Neighbors.

After a delightful lunch generously provided by Webster University, we devoured the yearly ASIFA Central cake, which miraculously survived the trip, and settled in for an afternoon of screening our films, Brad's update on International Animation Day, Deanna's update on ASIFA International, and a series of microtalks which included my in-memorium presentation of experimental animator Suzan Pitt and a very informative student presentation on Astro Boy.

The next day, we packed up our cars to go home, but beforehand, we all met up for breakfast at the Highway 61 Roadhouse, another St. Louis landmark, for brunch and a little more community before making the hours long trek home.

(Image courtesy of ASIFA Central)

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Animated Thoughts: Time takes its toll from us all

Smudge died today.

When I moved back to Michigan in 1998, my brother was still in high school and working at our parents' auto repair garage in his spare time. One rainy day, a white kitten walked into the garage, sauntered into the office like she owned the place, found a box, curled up, and went to sleep. Ted took her to the vet and started treating her for ear mites. Then, he brought her home. She was white and fluffy with a gray streak down the top of her head that looked like she had walked under a car and gotten axle grease on her head. Our family cat expert, Aunt Claire, said that she'd probably lose it as she matured into a completely white furred cat. She did. But the name stuck.

As I started doing more freelance work, I quickly realized that an LLC had distinct legal advantages over a D.B.A. But I needed a name for my corporation and it was Smudge-kitty to the rescue. Since I had used the Photoshop smudge tool in my M.F.A. thesis film and we had a cat named Smudge, it seemed apropos. "Smudge Animation" would join the ranks of animation studios named after cats, like Carol Beecher and Kevin D.A. Kurytnik's Calgary studio: "15lb Pink".

Well, Ted went to college and I bought a house and moved out. Smudge stayed with Mom and Dad and their other cat, Claude (who I named after the Warner Bros. cartoon character "Claude Cat" from the Merrie Melodies cartoons Mouse Wreckers and the Hypo-Chondri-Cat ). Claude passed on a couple years back and my parents became a 'one-cat-family' with Smudgie doing double duty keeping my parents company when they were sick or bounding downstairs to say "hello... time to feed me" when they came home at night.

But time takes its toll from us all and Smudgie was no exception.

Recently, Mom and Dad were presented with the opportunity to take a 'bucket list' vacation with the grandkids and so I filled in on cat duty while they were gone. I'd feed her in the morning on my way to work, then spend a couple hours with Smudge after work. We spent most of our time in Mom's sewing room, sitting together in the big comfy chair while I read a book and pet her. But after 20 years, Smudgie had decided that she'd lived long enough. A couple days before Mom and Dad came home, she breathed her last while I sat there and stroked her soft, glossy white fur.

I wish that I had been able to convince Smudge to stick around long enough for Mom and Dad to come home and say 'goodbye' but we had to settle for me tracking them down in South America and resting the speakerphone right next to Smudgie so she could hear their voices as they told her how much they loved her and how wonderful it was to have those twenty years with her as their kitty.

I'm not going to change the name of my animation studio. But from now on, "Smudge Animation" will always have this feeling of melancholy every time I say it to people and tell them the story of how I named my studio after a cat.

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Animated Thoughts: Erik Timmerman

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.

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