120. Patterns
How we break 'em (and how they break us). Heat, sanity, repetition, supernovas.
The heat broke briefly before closing back over New York City last week. It felt like watching a gift being tendered, in reverse.
During the reprieve, it rained, deliciously. The steadiness of it commingled with throaty birdsong, which for many days had been limp and scarce. I remember opening all the windows and standing in the breeze that began to flow through the apartment, north to south, south to north; alive and immense and numinous.
Though I’d been dragging through malaise, chronic fatigue, injury (and physical therapy for the eighth week); that day I felt sharp and awake.
Everything feels very up and down at the moment. Cyclical patterns—in weather, body, relationships—feel particularly pronounced.
I’m going to break some to feel new again.
In the Studio
I went half-batty the past few weeks locked in eye-wateringly tedious labor.
So tedious that I broke my rule of no background tv1 while working.
A test sheet for background texture:
Because I’ve finished a chunk of animation, and because animating on paper is new to me, I wanted to make sure (before I make any more drawings) that I’m not going hundreds of hours down an undesirable path.
Sanity checks that had to be done, and had to be done now:
Does it scale and project OK?
Do I need to shoot in RAW (v. JPEG)?
How do overlay textures feel?
Can I do everything I need to in post-production (make whites white, refine contrast, add texture, fills)?
Is there anything I need to calibrate before moving forward?
Life, at 20x speed:
The moment a done pile gets taller than the todo pile. At over 64x speed 😂:
Anyway.
Everything (at least technical), turned out ok.
Even after all this time, I’m taken aback by how long experimenting can take in animation. Some days the process feels meditative, other days draining. I remind myself that things will go faster the more hours I put in; this has always been the case.
I tried out various kinds of paper, including tissue, for texture and details:
While a lot of experiments ended up in the recycling bin, everything led to iteration.
At some point of course, the process moves to digital. Importing image sequences into After Effects, for the first time as a regular part of the workflow:
Compositing:
I squeezed in a crit session with Amanda Bonaiuto last week as well, and it was, as usual, edifying and propulsive. We talked about how details and texture (should) provide another layer of meaning; and about leaning into the internal logic of the house, the idiosyncratic physics of the film. We also touched on technical things like adjusting the field guide to expand the frame.
I’m a little blind now. I’m craving a change of scenery—and play—to get my eyes back.
Investors, take a look below at what the composited sequence is looking like, with placeholder ambient sound. Plus “Provisions” (what I’ve been consuming). In closing, “Supernova,” a microessay.