Report and recomendationsEnd of Family
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ACAD Class
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October 5th Quick Kids Class |
 
Scratch My Shorts at the Calgary Film Festival |
Johanna Dery & Devon Damonte  |
The
fun stuff of drawing on film, the fun stuff of typewriter animation and
the joy of reveling in stupidity, look like they will have to wait for
another time but pursuing the National Film Board with a typewriter will
continue.
Photographed in the Quickdraw Foyer. Those little cameras that usually sit on the Lunchbox and line test stands give amazing results. Digital. Although family history, like all history is written by the winners, this history is told by the losers. The film and the process of the film, is a journey of my Grandfather, an amateur photographer as he develops into an artist, focusing on one obsessive subject, his family, as they disappeared forever in front of his camera. The still photographs in the film represent the beginning and also the end of his life's work. |
"End of Family" almost complete. Article about the process: Confronting a Shoe Box |
Having missed the July first deadline for the Ottawa
festival, Veronique and I struggled together to complete ``End of Family``
in time for the Calgary International Film Festival, but running into camera
problems and running out of money at the same time put us in proposal mode.
Thinking quickly we went to Spike and Mike Festival of Animation.
Proposals to:
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. | The film continually presented us with the greatest
challenge. How do you make still photographs of non-famous people
taken by amatures, NOT Boring and understandable to an international audience
and be innovative animationally
(not a slide show) |
| Yours Truly,
Ed Ackerman June 4th 2002 |
| Length: 5 to 15 minutes
Main Project: The completion of a Canada Council A Grant (1998), finished to a minimum output of a video with sync sound. Materials: Original Still photographs Method: 35mm motion picture film will be shot on the animation of still photographs and of photographs on a computer monitor. The resulting 35mm film will be hand processed. Sounds will be recorded onto 35mm mag stock and synchronized to a 35mm picture. Premixing and maybe all mixing, will be done on computer. Note: The animation (or movement of the still photographs) in this project will entail manipulation of the 35mm film through hand processing in sync to the sound track and the synchronizing of the sound track to match the hand processing effects. The grain, contrast and exposure effects created in the hand processing will be designed to match the emotion and content of the film. Intent: This film will be unique in it's treatment of the process of developing film, in relation to the process of constructing memories. Subject: Photographs taken by Frederick Clardy (my Grandfather) in the1930`s. The photographs exist only as small faded paper prints. There are no original negatives. Most of the photographs have already been scanned into a computer, and have been retouched and arranged into a book narrative of pictures and text. The collection of photographs and story in book form at the moment is TOO personal and self serving. This is to be expected and is normal for most `Family Histories`. If all goes to plan, the animation that will happen at Quick Draw will lead to a film that will transcend the personal story of a single family. The film will speak to the fleeting, ephemeral existence of both `life` and of the `photograph`. The connection between, the photograph of a person and the death of that person is inescapable. With every photograph taken of a person, time stops. The person ages and dies. The photographic record remains potentially eternal. With every photographic click, there is the click of death. Is this morbid? This family history ends in death. The end of the family. The end of the family that existed only around the posed pictures of a young mother, two children and the shadow of the father; the photographer. Though a shadow in most of the pictures, the father is the spirit and flame of the family. At the beginning of the Great Depression working as a chemist near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania the father progressed from being an amateur photographer to an artist. The entire life's work of art became the preservation of his family in a photographic record, as his family disappeared, in front of his eyes. The children were only age 3 and 5 when their mother died. On the day of the beautiful portrait of Nellie laid out among her funeral flowers, Frederick lost his family and lost his photography, forever. This is the way of all photography and of all human history. The photos that exist of dead people will only outlive the people for a short time in the grand scheme of things. Photographs die too, they are not etched in stone. The human spirit exists before the physical body. The human spirit exists before the mixture of silver halide crystals is excited by light and captured on paper or celluloid. The human spirit in the end however transcends photography. We know who build the pyramids, without having to see a actual photograph of them. Equipment: 35mm Oxbury Animation stand
Space:
Quick Draw washroom for minor 35 mm hand processing.
Informal Member Workshops: Every Saturday, all day, specializing in Film Editing, sound transfer, sound editing, hand processing and synchronizing sound with picture. Synchronizing 35mm mag sound with drawing on film. Making a hand processed slash print. Show-and-Tell: Introduction July 13 2002
Secondary Projects: Organization of my life's work onto a few video tapes. Drawing on Imax film. Various little experimental animated pieces along the way. Submitted to QuickDraw
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| Definitions: -Time...the measurement of change.
-Animation... To breath life into. Movement. To make animate. The Disney definition Animation is ``The Illusion of Life``. -Animation My definition... 1) The expression of life through inanimate objects. 2) The expression of life about inanimate objects. At age 3 in Edmonton, the most profound and formative animation experience grabbed hold of me and has not let go. ``Snippy the Dog`` was a tiny black and white television show about paper and scissors. Paper and scissors were the only materials of expression. Although the paper was ripped, torn, wrinkled, crushed, flattened, and bunched up, it was mostly cut. It was cut by scissors. A paper cut revealed simultaneously a positive and a negative space. The animated objects were made of positive white spaces and negative black spaces or of both. For me at age three, the show was real. The show was a documentary discovery of the life that actually existed within the world of cut up paper. Snippy the dog, was the naive speechless narrator of this world. I understood what Snippy was going through. Snippy described "paperness" and ``scissorness``. Snippy also described the interaction of the act of creation and the act of destruction in a way that I have never seen since. For me the importance of animation as a media art form is that animation has the unique ability to discover and express truth that exists within inanimate objects. There are worlds of stories within the confines of just white paper on a black background. |
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``How is animation important within film, video, digital convergence?`` |
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I don't really believe that film, video or digital are converging.
They are traveling parallel to each other with some braiding intertwining
and cross over but I can't imagine them ever becoming one. That being
said, animation tends to transcend ``media cross over`` and can
actually benefit and thrive within multi media. Animation has the
ability to both transcend media AND to reveal Media. In times of
new media and media change there is nothing better than transcendence and
revelation.
``Snippy the Dog`` was shot on film with black and white children's lunch time television distribution in mind. Black an ?d white television actually strengthens the inherent meaning of the show by reducing the range of transmitted tonality. Because the shadows on cut up paper did not transmit, the show was more about the ``idea of paper``, than about paper itself. The medium, in this case television, set the audience on a course of contemplating the dog`s sensibilities and spirit rather than the technique and physical material of the animation. If ``Snippy the Dog`` could be presented in film format, the effect of a dog in a ``paper/scissors world`` would be weak. A modern animation festival crowd would undoubtedly focus on inferior technique. On the other hand if ``Snippy`` could be presented in either video or digital, the effect would be closer to the ideal crude black and white television transmission that the film was intended for. Film --> Film
Video --> Film
Digital --> Film
In this case the animation is improved by a limiting of information. What is special about animation is that it can be tailored to exploit the limitations of a media. ``Snippy`` for instance was obviously tailored for black and white television. Other animated films such as ``Primiti Too Taa`` (especially the 70 mm version) are tailored for theatre. The most extreme example I can think of a film made precisely for projection is ``Two Taa Too`` ( a film about three pieces of film). In ``Two Taa Too`` an audience gets the treat of realizing that they are actually watching four frames of film: three frames of film projected within a projected frame. The audience is encouraged to see the jitter and frame line of the actual projected film frame line itself.
On the other hand for many types of animation the exact opposite is true.
In spite of the diversity of viewing methods and environments some animation
has the ability to transcend any medium and may be played forward, backward,
fast, slow, in sync, out of sync, mute, upside down, or even inside out,
without an effect on the meaning. This duality of purpose or ability
of animation to retain meaning in spite of presentation or media and at
the same time being extremely presentation dependent is a unique feature
to animation. This ability and susceptibility, make animation
extremely important especially in the face of changing media.
Ed Ackerman April 2002 |
