Simple Message= Simple Cartoon

Most people think of Saturday morning loony toons and Disney when they think of cartoons, yet some cartoons are meant to make you rethink your lifestyle. Adbusters.org, a self proclaimed journal for the mental environment sponsored a a “Slow Down Week,” in January of 2006. To promote and spread the week, artists created short cartoon. The “Won’t You Slow Down a Bit,” cartoon blazons a relatively simple message, by using a relatively simple cartoon concept.

The cartoon is mostly drawn in black and white, and the main character of the piece is a stick figure that could easily be drawn by Flash’s pencil tool. Although this might seem like an “easy way out,” the choice to implement stick figures actually broadens the message to everyone. Four and five year olds draw stick figures to represent people. Stick people have no color, ethnicity, religion or other definitions that more thorough or ‘realistic’ cartoon animation might carry. The choice of using a stick figure to depict the average working man, who wakes up early in the morning to sit in traffic, work nine hours and shortchange his wife, universalizes the message.

Also, the fact that it appears to be drawn by a young person, underlines the elementary observation that some people work too hard.
The cartoon character wakes up as his alarm clock on the left side of the screen, a ubiquitous symbol throughout the cartoon. His black eyes are highlighted by vein marks drawn by red lines, this is the only other color in the cartoon. The cartoon wakes up and stares out at the viewer, as his bed and hair kind of move in a liveliness that does not mimic real life, but further drives home the elementary aesthetic of the piece. It also undertones the motif that everyone is in constant motion, without even thinking about it. This element of liveliness in what would otherwise be still shots comes through throughout the piece, in the car the character drives to his desk and the drive-thru window.

The piece is relatively easy to do on flash, I feel like it would take a lot of time, but once the foundation is laid, it could be easily accomplished, by saving certain symbols and setting key frames, I think I could “slow down a bit,” to create a similar flash cartoon.

Deconstructing Hitchcock for the Stage

I recently had the pleasure to sit in on a rehearsal for an upcoming performance piece that integrates, dissects and deconstructs many of the topics we have been discussing in 150 and 160. The director Reid Farrington, who has a residency at 3-Legged Dog Productions downtown on Greenwich Street, wanted to adapt the legendary Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Rope” for the stage.

Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant movie about two friends who murder out of curiosity was shot in what seemed like an endless shot with no cutaways. Hitchcock achieved this effect by filming 10 reels of 10-minute shots that carried the continuity of the action. By splicing these ten reels together, the film appears to be one eighty-minute shot of one apartment in real time.
Quoting James Stewart, one of the lead actors in the 1948 flick, Farrington insists that the integral team for this film was the technician crew, who rehearsed the shots for weeks before the actors were even brought on. To relay their process, four actors play the crew (including a Hitchcock whose blocking affords him to walk into that famous silhouette). The crew runs, trips, gallops and bumbles through the set of backdrops, movable screens and flats while certain clips of the original movie are projected on said set pieces. At times, the “crew” marks through the movie actors’ gestures. At others, screens step in to replace their positioning. The performer’s antics and characters, still in the rehearsal process, are reminiscent of a three stooges routine, as they run into one another and trip. Their lazzi bring to light the hard work and hilarity that happened behind the scene to make “Rope” work on film.

But to achieve the projections, Farrington went through a process he calls “reverse rotoscoping.” Rotoscoping is a technique used to create believable animations by tracing over, frame by frame the subjects of live action film, and translating it into a drawn form. To isolate the actors and shatter the film onto different projections, Farrington took the reels from “Rope,” which he obtained from Warner Brothers, and traced over the actors in order to manipulate their placement for projections. Using programs like After Effects and Photoshop, he is able to essentially three-dimensionalize the film for the stage. Farrington was able to obtain the ground plan from the movie, to lay out his stage. With these processes as a basis, the actorsare free to reincarnate the film technicians’ rehearsal process of setting down the actors and props marks, in a fun and intriguing way.

The piece is only three weeks into the rehearsal process, and only four reels of ten were presented, but Farrington’s project certainly promises to be an media and theatre integrated spectacle to behold. It will preview with six performance in the UNDER THE RADAR series through The Public Theater before opening at PS122 in April.

a balance of spontaneity and strategy: reflecting on the production process.

In reflecting on the process of my creative video project, one lesson sticks out—expect the unexpected and plan to be flexible. Especially given the nature of my video’s premise and style, and despite plenty of planning ahead, my process would have probably gone smoother if I was more aware and creatively open-minded when I was actually shooting.

I set out to make a mockumentary of sorts on the graffiti in Hunter bathrooms. I envisioned a perfect balance of interviews, intellectual stimulation, comedy and aesthetic appeal in a five minute short. I wanted to get janitors scrubbing, artists writing on walls, students caring and agreeing. While I had planned out what I wanted to capture, in a documentary style, I failed at recruiting enough ‘actors’ for shooting day. While I kept specific ideas and shots in mind, I feel that if I had been more prepared to go with the flow and less dead set on getting specific shots the video would have unraveled more fluidly and less stressfully. I did realize about halfway through shooting that if I trusted my gut I could develop a nice short video, based off the candid responses I received instead of preconceived notions of what would be best for my vision.

During the editing process this idea manifested into a guided ‘edit-as-you-go’ process. Because half of the shots and interviews I wanted never worked out, and were replaced with equally entertaining content, I had to restructure the entire storyboard I developed. For example the shot I wanted to begin with turned out to be a talking point of one my interviewees. Therefore I saw it more fit to include the graffito ‘Why do you exist?’ during that segment as opposed to as an opening. Conversely, my filming partner’s idea in shooting the building outside to establish content, proved to be a good way to begin the video. The interaction with the janitors did not go as smoothly as I had anticipated because of the language barrier and their reluctance to be on camera. Nevertheless, a lot of their shots were easily incorporated into my new edit scheme.

To conclude, I am grateful for my meticulous planning ahead; it certainly guided the process. Yet I think the most valuable lesson to learn is that the media-maker must learn to be flexible and always have his creative eyes and ears open because brilliant concepts or ideas my come when the planning is over and execution is taking place.