101. Joy

How we get it back. Reconsolidating ourselves, the special hell that is compositing on paper, the gift of constructive critique. Walking home alone at night.

Taking a break, drawing on hanji.

Summer in NYC is usually, for me, a time of excess and overwhelm. I once likened the breakneck feeling to being on a runaway-train.

Everyone seems to be launching a book or getting married; Shakespeare in the Park reconvenes (splashier than ever with multiple headliners and a newly renovated Delacorte); beloveds rotate through town with a sequential brutality that feels pre-meditated. In addition, big things tend to die in summer: the refrigerator, the A train, the HVAC system at my mother’s house. This requires detours, cross-country administration, funds.

I myself become a blur.

I develop a strange feeling of disassociation. My center feels dislodged (off, if you will), and the disequilibrium has a domino effect. I sleep and wake late, my Sundays disappear, my attention span struggles to hold a long article. Deep work becomes elusive; I’m distracted by text messages and Instagram reels.

As summer begins to cool, the spell starts to lift; I emerge from the extended fugue. I say “No,” more often. I put away the phone. I start to pull myself together.

This happens every year.

In the studio

I'm gearing up to animate my next film. I share progress every two weeks; I’m almost done with the primer¹. In the previous issue I shared what it’s looking like so far, to temporary soundtrack, with Members. In the primer’s final segment, the night outside shifts to the inside. This update is about compositing.²

Blueprints.

During crit today, I said: Animating can be so joyless.

Making things move on paper can be very, very slow-going. I’m impressed by how soul-suckingly removed from story it can get. The process is further stymied by the fact that I’m drawing everything on paper, and shooting versus scanning, for the first time. I’m figuring out methods of iteration as I go.

We left off here:

I cleaned it up a bit since then:

I want to retain the look of childlike mark-making, so I’ll continue with graphite on index cards (versus paint / ink on cels, or transparencies). Drawings will be blended³ using “darker color:”⁴

The result is not a perfect match:

So I use curves to adjust:

Before, and after, curve adjustment (animated GIF):

In any case, I have to draw each layer, or “track,” separately. I can lean on the lightbox a little, but because I’m using complex camera movement and morphing, where shapes and layers interact in ways that are hard to predict, it’s somewhat like drawing blindfolded.

It’s remarkable how much suffering it takes to make things move so little.

24memespersecond

A post shared by @24memespersecond

Enjoy the play by play.

Masochism.

A tectonic face:

Another tectonic face (a blip):

Composited:

Right away I didn’t like how synchronized this felt. If the animation had been on a single track, I would have had to redraw the frames with no guarantees. Instead, I was able to simply move the second track a few frames over to play with offset. This is the main benefit of compositing:

Next, rear stairs:

Composited:

The animation was already brisk, but by the time I added the front stairs…

and composited it…

There’s way too much information to process. Story begins to feel muddled, becomes harder to read. So I re-time the base to slow things down:

Significantly slower!

This should give us more room to move without being rushed. By this point though I was going cross-eyed and felt increasingly uncertain about what I was looking at, or how I felt about it.

So I finagled an hour of crit from an experienced animator friend whose craft and opinion I respect a lot. We don’t meet often but each time we do, I get a ton out of it. I walked her through what I had. I complained a little. We discussed scanning v. downshooting, “philosophies” around inbetweening, camera flow. We asked each other questions. I ended up articulating thoughts around paper size for the first time.

A very good session.

What a relief to get visceral reactions to something that hadn’t felt fresh to me for weeks. This exchange not only encouraged and energized me, but in a way, it gave me back my eyes. I can see the work again; I can move forward with renewed momentum. And joy.

Not a moment too soon.

Provisions

• I’m Late, animated short.
  Sawako Kabuki’s work is fun, sexy, irreverent. Cool to see it in the context of a topic like this:

• “Shadow of a Doubt. How anxiety hijacked modern life,” essay in Harper’s.
  ”Perhaps it stood to reason that after centuries of stigmatizing people for mental illness, we would cleave to an innate model that exonerated them from blame. But in the process we did something unwittingly pernicious, deflecting onto the individual genome our collective failings.”

• “The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found,” oldie-but-goodie essay in NYT by Colson Whitehead.
  “History books and public television documentaries are always trying to tell you all sorts of ''facts'' about New York. That Canal Street used to be a canal. That Bryant Park used to be a reservoir. It's all hokum. I've been to Canal Street, and the only time I ever saw a river flow through it was during the last water-main explosion. Never listen to what people tell you about old New York, because if you didn't witness it, it is not a part of your New York and might as well be Jersey.”

• Balsamic mushroom toast, recipe.
  I never knew garlic confit was such a death trap, but it is one of the finest things so I throw caution to the wind and make tiny Sunday batches for myself. This closely replicates the delectable mushroom ricotta toast at Dante WV. Confit is key; top with pickled onion and drizzle with olive oil. I use whipped ricotta which is messier and much more fun. Devour the confit within one week.

  

• Balm Amour, lip balm.
  I’m a lip balm addict and this one is truly special. I’ve been following Violette Serrat’s company VIOLETTE_FR since inception, and all of her products are gorgeous. It’s hard to avoid transactionality as a business scales, but somehow she has kept it personal.

In closing, a girl walks home alone late at night

I attend a wedding in New Haven, Connecticut, on Sunday evening. It’s about a two-hour train ride. I have back-to-back meetings on Monday so I take the 9:30pm back, arriving in Harlem close to midnight. After sitting for so long, I want to walk.

In anticipation, I had on sneakers and something with pockets. I place my ID in my left pocket. Keys in my right. I pull on my cardigan. I pull a sleeve over my watch. I palm my phone with my right hand, and pull down the other sleeve.

I start walking briskly down 125th. I walk next to the wall. I stand with my back against a post while waiting for the light to change.

I reach Lenox Avenue. The whites of someone’s eyes glow in my direction. I pass: teenagers with an Insomnia Cookie box. 7th Street Burger with a tiny sterile vestibule. The Whole Foods sign like a church beacon, neon green. A couple with a baby carriage. Two middle-aged women on the corner of Lenox and 127th, chatting in what sounds like Swahili. They lean on their hips, they talk easy. Some people are walking their dogs. I look over my shoulder five times.

Around 133rd street, something rushes out before me. It is a rat the size of a small dog. I have earbuds in—I know, ill-advised—and Rachel Cusk’s sonorous voice says, reality became malleable, was always giving way and changing its rules.

I make it home in about 35 minutes.

Until next time.

1. At the start of a new project, I make a sketchy micro-short that I call the “primer.” I try out ideas, vet mediums. The primer helps me make decisions for the actual film, e.g., analog v. digital, color or bw, paint or graphite, index or letter. I don’t worry about polish, I move relatively quickly; it can feel very freeing.

2. A merging together of multiple tracks, or layers, of animation into a single sequence.

3. In digital image editing, used to combine multiple layers to various effect.

4. “Darker Color” compares pixels between two layers and keeps the darker of the two: white pixels become transparent, black pixels remain black.