Last weekend, I reorganized my whole project, and added lots of sound effects, mostly collected from freesounds.org. During Clearing My Mind I added car, camel, chewing, popping, and ocean noises. I also re-recorded most of the ukulele and breathing sounds.

I got some very helpful feedback during this week’s screening. Beatriz and Marilyn both really appreciated the new sound effects and thought the rearrangement was much more coherent. Because the live-action working shots are separated, and the breathing is more pronounced, a struggle is clearer. And then having the animated pieces following the corresponding live-action shots makes it completely clear that the animation reflects the self-reflection of working in animation.

After two full days of final rough cut screenings on Tuesday and Thursday, I went back to the editing suites to do some final tweaking. Friday night I worked on some of the transitions, and took off the color-correction filters. Since the lighting was slightly different in each animation lab, the white balance was off for most of the hand-drawn scenes, so I attempted to correct this by bumping up the blue in the color-correction filter… unfortunately, though the images looked perfectly black and white on the computer screen and NTSC monitor in the editing suite, projected in the recital hall, the black lines of the drawings were obviously blueish. So I decided I’d rather have the images be dingy than blue.

Saturday I finished Thank You For Being. Because the flow still seemed a little off when I presented the final rough cut, I fiddled around with the pacing and placement of all the clips. I came up with this sequence: rushed breathing, the beginning of Clearing My Mind, Time, moderate breathing, the middle of Clearing my Mind, the mountains, the first part of meditation, slow breathing, the end of clearing my mind, and lastly, the whole meditation scene. In this format, the breathing scenes are more evenly spaced, and the middle part is the longest. I think this sequence also makes more sense, in that after showing the cut-out of my mind I show Time and  then Mountains, as if these scenes take place within my mind. The cut-out of my mind is also placed after all the breathing scenes, to reinforce the idea that my animation work was a sort of meditation. As well as rearranging my piece, I made the ticking in Time longer, and added some pops when the doors disappear. I am hoping the sequence really does make more sense this way and it wasn’t just a momentary impulse I had in the suite yesterday…. I did not want to fuss with it anymore… at least for a while. I think it needs to sit and be seen as it is, and if I decide to adjust it more  I will leave that for a couple months down the line so Thank You For Being doesn’t become overworked. 

Unfortunately, I have not finished Nothingness and Emptiness yet. I will continue to read if for as long as  I have the book out from the library…. but honestly, it is not very well written and I don’t seem to be gaining any useful information from it. Today I am writing my evaluations and looking forward to the public screening on Wednesday!

So far, my most frustrating issue with editing, is framing! I kept a careful eye on those little turquoise lines in Dragon, outlining the visible action and was careful to keep the unwanted stuff outside those lines… alas, in Final Cut, the action-safe lines seem to be wider, and therefore pick up the animation pegs and the edges of the paper. I fussed with sizing and cropping for so long, and then when I saw my piece on the projector in the Com, I saw those nasty little pegs and paper edges again. SO I figured out I just need to give all my animated pieces a quaint little black border to cover up the ugly. 

Tuesday (yesterday) everyone showed off their rough cuts. Though sitting in the tiny closet that is com 326 on a warm day with no circulation picking on each other was a little tedious, overall it was a very productive day. It seemed everyone’s audio was a little rough, but all had great video to show. It’s really helpful to see others’ pieces, here about what they struggle with, and see which techniques work and don’t work. After showing mine, Laurie and I watched it several more times and discussed various alternative orders for the three animation clips and time lapse sequences. As I showed it, I had all the time lapse clips at the beginning of my piece. Starting out at a high speed with rapid breathing, the sequence gradually slowed along with my breathing, elucidating my struggle to stop concentrating on the time, deadlines, or my own life issues, and keep my focus centered on the actual animation process.  Ambient nature sounds drift in as I complete my drawing. Then I cut to the balanced world scene, which transitions into the moving doors. After the arrow of time squirms off the page, my animated head pops up, and cut-outs proceed to plague my attempted meditation. After finally clearing my mind, my cut-out conscience slips off and into the next scene. The piece ends with the color conscience scene. In this original version, the flow is unbalanced by the intense beginning, the cut-out scene is a little long and awkward, and the scene of my meditation is too short. So instead, the order will be as follows: time lapse (quick breathing), beginning of cut-out, time lapse (moderate breathing), moving doors, time lapse (easy breathing), mountains (with the transition to one door), a clip of meditation, the ending of the cut-out scene, then  the whole meditation scene. 

I also finished Secret of the Golden Flower. The very last quote sums it up well, “The Way is present before our eyes, yet what is before your eyes is hard to understand. People like the unusual and enjoy the new; they miss what is right in front of their eyes and do no know where the Way is. The Way is the immediate presence; if you are unaware of the immediate presence, then your mind races, your intellect runs, and you go on thinking compulsively. All of this is due to shallowness of spiritual power, and shallowness of spiritual power is due to racing in the mind (pg. 71).” The world is confusing and upsetting and wonderful and flabbergasting. We don’t always know what to make of it, or what to do with ourselves living in it. The only thing to do is work with the present. To accept what is around you and to strive to bet

Now I have started Nothingness and Emptiness and am slogging through the text, which somehow manages to be abstract, yet highly technical at the same time… that’s what I get for reading a book with the subtitle being “A Buddhist Engagement With the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre”. Never fear, I shall conquer!

Sunday I spent the day recording most of my audio. I walked  through the Garfield Nature Trail and recorded some great natural ambient sounds… lots of bugs and babbling creeks and birds… though it was hard to exclude all the sounds of mowers and power washers in the surrounding neighborhood (of course I had to pick the best day for garden improvement). I was also almost ran over by two kids on dirt bikes… brats. I was thankful for the sunny day when I was able to hear and record jets passing over. Then I trundled downtown and meandered the docks listening for appropriate sounds. The only thing I found which I needed was electronic industrial noise made by the fans on top of Bayview Thriftway. Most of the other sounds I will have to create myself (breathing, clicking, popping, ukulele, rumbling, etc.).

Later that night I completely finished drawing my consciousness scene… which I know I will have to slow down a ton in final cut. The minute accuracy needed for animation is hard to maintain while using pastels.

As far as reading goes, I am still chipping away at The Secret of the Golden Flower. On page twenty I found a very good quote that perfectly describes the type of focus meditation and awareness take, “To focus meansto focus on this as a hint, not to become rigidly fixated. The meaning of the word focus has life to it; it is very subtle.” It’s not healthy to live in a state of mind so focused that you become single minded and single spirited. I believe you should be careful, considerate and aware of everything you do. When you concentrate single mindedly, you lose the natural relaxation of doing. If you let go and simply do, you will naturally be focused. I also liked the quote on page 41, “When you want to enter quietude, first tune and concentrate body and mind, so that they are free and peaceful. Let go of all objects, so that nothing whatsoever hangs on your mind, and the celestial mind takes its rightful place in this center. After that, lower your eyelids and gaze inward at the chamber of water. Where the light reaches, true positive energy comes forth in response.” Sometime I feel as if my conscience is not within my body. I feel like it is slightly above and behind my physical head. I don’t know if this is healthy, or not, but from this reading, it seems I need to work on bringing my conscience down and into my physical body, down into the center.  Yesterday I read about oblivion and distraction, the two most frequent problems beginners find. Distraction is more easily dealt with because it has direction. Usually one is aware of their distraction and is able to pull your focus together. However, true oblivion means you lack awareness. How do you fix something when you lack awareness?

I think I made great progress last week, and with some hard work this week I should have a decent rough cut by friday. Yay! Almost done with the quarter!

I haven’t had much time for reading, but I have read a little of The Secret of the Golden Flower, which is the basic guide for Buddhists and Taoists. The Golden flower symbolizes the opening of the light of the mind, the release of the spirit, enlightenment, the discovery of the true self, etc.  Written simply and poetically, The Secret of the Golden Flower verbalizes that which is very very difficult to verbalize. How do you write about awareness and being without giving concrete statements and directions? “Naturalness is called the way. The way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the primal spirit (pg. 9).” How does one write about simply and naturally existing? I have already found the only way to read this book is to read a little bit at a time, read between the lines, and try to let myself gain a sense of the material instead of concrete ideas. “The beauties of the highest heavens and the marvels of the sublimest realms are all within the heart: this is where the perfectly open and aware spirit concentrates (pg. 11).” If your heart and mind are not open to the world around you, good and bad, how will you grow? Anyways, I am really enjoying this book and will continue to read and use these ideas to keep my mind in the now.

As for my animation, Monday I re-shot a few seconds of my hand-drawn scene (the world tilted too quickly) and moved more cut-outs across my mind in the second scene. After shooting, I tried to export my clips to quicktime, and failed miserably! It was VERY frustrating. I’m pretty sure I had all the compression settings correct, so unless there was one big step I was missing, something was not working correctly. When I checked the box to process the images before exporting, Dragon would process the images, and then tell me it failed to export. Then, when I did not check the box, Dragon would go ahead and export, but the video clip would come out black with an occasional flash… I will try to find the animation intern to help me today. 

Tuesday I met with my affinity group and we gave brief presentations on the progress and basic ideas of our individual projects. Everyone’s footage looked great! Even without the HD quality they filmed with, Jeremy and the LA water group’s footage was striking. Almost all of Jeremy’s footage was still shots, which I thought has potential for an interesting style. Jason showed us the first two scenes of his experimental documentary on peace consciousness and we discussed the possibilities for the transitions between his three sections: titles, no titles, audio overlap, segue images etc. I can’t wait to see the final projects. I showed the few clips of scenes that I have, and received some great feedback. I was wondering if the smiling lips were too subtle, but everyone agreed it was just right and they could tell what was happening.

The rest of the week was been devoted to drawing and making cut-outs (I have decided to incorporate some minor cut-outs in my hand-drawn scenes).

After many long hours of drawing, I have finished the first ten seconds of the opening scene in my animation.  This first scene will be the only completely hand-drawn scene in my piece. For 35 seconds I have estimated I will need at least five hundred pages. This week my drawing has been slower, because I am still learning how to draw motion using the millions of minute adjustments essential to animation. Wednesday, I had a test shoot in the 2D Animation lab. For this first shoot I used Istop Motion instead of Dragon, just to keep it simple. I shot the first three seconds of my piece, and I found I needed to add a few drawings here and there to smooth out the motion. Tomorrow, however, I plan on using Dragon, instead of Istop.

This week I have been reading Essays in Existentialism by Jean-paul Sartre. In the introduction written by Jean Wahl I found this concept rather intriguing: “Hegel believed in a universal reason. He tells us that our thoughts and feelings have meaning solely because each thought, each feeling, is bound to our personality, which itself has meaning only because it takes place in a history and a state, at a specific epoch in the evolution of the Universal Idea (pg. 5).”  I call my thoughts and feelings my own because they are slightly different from others I hear or read or see, and therefore they are registered as part of my unique personality.  If we didn’t directly reference thoughts or feelings (like other animals) we wouldn’t be aware of our thoughts and feelings as entities separate from our existence. In the first essay, The Humanism of Existentialism, Sartre writes about existence preceding essence. “For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future (pg. 36).” Because man is conscious of his future and his existence, and because he makes conscious choices, he must take complete responsibility for his actions. I appreciate this concept. Instead of making excuses for choices you make, one should merely accept this choice and move on with whatever outcome you have in this moment. Acknowledging that you are not born with a set of specific talents and personality traits and duties and values means you are completely free to chose your own path. It means every single choice in your life counts.  

Thursday, Marit, the animation intern gave Rowan, Victor and I a run down on the basics of the animation program, Dragon Stop Motion. She showed us how to hook up a canon rebel to the animation stand, as well as the basic format for projects, and the steps involved in capturing frames and navigating through and setting up your images. Even though I have had only a quick tutorial to this highly complex program, I think I am going to jump in head first and just start using Dragon. It may be challenging, but I am wiling to put for the effort if it will enhance my animations and my resume. 

Friday evening, I attended a presentation by Anam Thubetan, a man who grew up and studied Prajnaparamita in Tibet. Very slowly and carefully, Anam spoke about the basic principles of Dharma, the true path to inner freedom. As I have been reading about basic principles of buddhism, the concepts he spoke of were not unfamiliar. Anam told us that Dharma is not the way of doing, it is the way of undoing- of letting go. When you let go of all of your preconceptions, knowledge, habits, history and future, your mind is free and clear to “drop your mind”. I particularly appreciated Anam’s instruction to question everything. When you question yourself, it helps to dissolve every notion of “I”. Near the end of his talk, Anam chuckled and said, “I do not actually teach anything. My job is simply to ask people to drop their minds… isn’t that funny?” After reading about buddhism and hearing Anam speak, I have decided to focus my animation on living in the moment, my struggle with time, and the perceived unbalance in the world around us, also linking in concepts of existentialism (such as existence before essence) which directly relate to these points. 

Wednesday afternoon and all day Saturday were devoted to finishing an old project with my partner Nathan Chinn. Wednesday we previewed and numbered the scenes of our 16mm visual essay. Saturday we cut out all the scenes, wrote a paper edit and spliced all the footage together, viewed the result, made a few edits, and screened the final piece. This piece will most likely be screened evaluation week when our spring projects are finished. 

Today I and tomorrow I am working on finishing the storyboard and script outline for my animation. I have collected many magazines and began cutting out fragments, and outlined three of the four scenes I plan on including in my piece. Later tonight I will screen Frank Film, a cut-out animation which Laurie recommended and that won an academy award. Earlier this week I watched several amateur animations on youtube to look for useful techniques, design concepts, mistakes, etc.

I am now almost done reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Zen Buddhism is not a religion. I would call it more of a mindset. The ultimate goal of this practice is to be completely aware of the here and now. Suzuki (the author) often seems to contradict himself, but then works through this contradiction, and somehow the point makes sense. For example, “If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort. The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize ‘big mind,’ or the mind that is everything (Suzuki, pg. 33).”

As far as my art goes, I have a small storyboard done for a potential scene in my project in which the world seems to fall away in a state of unbalance, and a mouth is saddened by this. The world is soon replaced by the beautiful black of space, which gives the mouth peace and acceptance. “Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony (Suzuki, pg. 32).” To practice some movement I made a couple tiny flip-books. One is a ball bouncing, and one is a black hole grabbing color. For inspiration, I have been watching animation shorts on the Experimental Animation Techniques website and on the Wooster Collective site.

And last, but not least, I finished my proposal packet for week three (which was severely revised this morning).

Shooting commercials for Televasion

This week I have started reading The Animation Book by Kit Laybourne to begin learning the very basics in 2D animation. To start, I am reading about production planning, necessary tools, storyboarding, basic exercises, and the history of animation. I am also beginning to lay out an intricate schedule for my spring studies, and brainstorming simple projects to start drawing. Today I am taking a proficiency in the 2D Animation Lab on TESC campus. As apparent, in class we learned how to design and manage our own blogs as well as how to draw up a detailed budget and production schedule.