98. Spectacular
How we get up and do it again. Iterating on my downshooting setup, animating Elizabeth. A burger par excellence, fireflies, and regret.
This is a long issue, and one of the few without a paywall as I spin up my animated film. We can thank Members, and the Jerome Hill Foundation, for making this work possible 🙏
I run each biweekly issue on a loose theme that summarizes the preceding two weeks of work. Every TLB issue goes something like this:
Microessay
Behind the scenes
Provisions (inspo/what I consumed)
Microessay
In this issue I go in-depth on optimizing my downshooting rig (a setup for taking photos of drawings for the film) for a particular resolution (3.5x2 inches).
It’s kind of technical…but not really? Mainly this is a peek into one artist’s life, creative problem-solving, plus reflections on the world we’re making in.
It’s for anyone who’s into process, productivity, making things. Also, NYC, and literature! Feel free to skip around, hit the opening or closing microessay and some Provisions, maybe just the film stuff In the Studio, whatever.
Enjoy.
Want to support what I make?
The first thing I do when I get up these days is put a hand against the window.
When the glass doesn’t feel too warm, especially on the north side, I slide the sash up a little. If what floats in is thermally neutral—however debatably—I do some version of a heel-click and rush to open every other window in my flat.
More often than not, what surges in is angry dragon’s breath. But breath can’t be angry; it doesn’t have feelings; dragons aren’t real. What I mean maybe is that I wish it were angry, that the heat were from reproach or fury; because that would suggest that it’s still alive, whatever “it” is.
Instead it feels like air from something dying, an exhalation of the dead. It scares me.
As the day wears on I hold off as long as I can before turning the air conditioning back on. As soon as I close the windows, I feel cut off; entombed. I’m already thinking about tomorrow, when I might open them again.
Before I shut the last, I listen for birds, or please, cicadas.
They say we’re the last generation to see fireflies. Ironically, due to unexpectedly “ideal” conditions here in NYC—and in a show of defiance, grace, maybe both—they’ve been manifesting in a temporary but spectacular illusion of abundance.
In the studio
I rent a small New York City apartment. The apartment also happens to be my art studio. This means I’m in constant negotiation between eating/resting space and making/writing space.
My reluctance to buy new things, especially overly-specialized tools (there are exceptions), helps a little with turf war tetris: a lot of what I own serves multiple functions. The dining table, as you know, doubles as my work table. Books adorn, press, buttress. Picture frames transform into camera extensions. Kettle bells, when I’m not lifting them, serve as counter balances for downshooting rigs.
I like it this way, mostly. But the situation is heavily biased toward entropy, and clutter drives me crazy.
All this to say,
having a sketchy downshooting setup with multiple moving parts—time-consuming to clean up and recalibrate every time I want to eat—alongside the usual sprawl of paper and paints and ink, was getting annoying.
My first round of experiments say I should continue downshooting, so I thought it was time to invest in a sustainable setup, and to refine technical specifications. After a week of tinkering and no fewer than four iterations, this is where I ended up:
The following are the conclusions and decisions I reached. You can see evolution (e.g., thick to thin line, cleaner border) in the animation test farther down:
3.5x2” drawings on 5x3”, 100 gsm index cards going forward. This gives me a safe area and removes the need to custom cut 🙌
Camera (my old iPhone SE) will sit 5” inch from drawings.
A 12” setup is ready should I decide to go larger format.
11x14” picture frame on three cradled wooden blocks makes for a simple, lightweight, portable, adjustable, consistently reproducible setup.
I finally have the Dragonframe hotkeys I wanted, namely “Insert Camera” and “Return Camera to End” 🔥
Masking tape corners work like a charm for registration (aligning drawings) 🎯
Glass, plexiglass, or acrylic all work great for stabilizing paper before shooting. Acrylic can look cloudy but it’s actually fine; the matte surface diffuses light, and that’s a plus.
While smaller resolutions allow me to finsh drawings faster, the challenge with rendering details may eventually push me to work at a larger one. Everything comes with tradeoffs!
It was a productive week and this is the kind of progress I was aiming for. I’m not mad about it.
The iterations
You saw iteration 1 in the previous issue. In iteration 2, I made the setup portable in order to free up my dining table:
In iteration 3, I made use of a picture frame and cardboard supports, which felt promising:
In iteration 4, I moved the camera closer to the drawing, resulting in a much sharper image:
Compare a shot at 12” (left) to one at 5” (right):
So now I feel pretty dialed in, ready to draw and shoot the final sequence of the primer.
Dragonframe drama 😅
A little side entertainment: during all of this I was having trouble with Dragonframe hotkeys and asked them for help. Their response:
There are no assignable hotkeys for this, as you have seen. We will consider it. However, these are generally uncommonly used in stop motion animation. No one has ever asked for these to be hotkeys in the past.
My response, in part:
I would say that your current communication style is not a good fit for customer service…I think a more useful response would have been along the lines of “How can I help with this problem” and/or “Is there an outcome that would improve the product, make the user experience more delightful” instead of repeating what the user already knows, then implying that their request was irrelevant.
Eventually:
Much gratitude to Dyami, the engineering half of Dragonframe’s founding duo, who pushed a dev build (!) to accommodate my suggestions and requests. A+, in the end 🙏
Elizabeth
I made some drawings in the process of homing in on my downshooting setup. On a whim, I set the animation to a random song. I couldn’t stop watching it on loop.
The lyrics fit: a balmy day, a lost love; how Elizabeth comes into view through a window. Is she on the inside or the outside? Her features shift, subtly; she becomes different people, a stranger altogether—the way old loves do in memory and in life.
Karolina Glusiec says in her essay “Interstellar Bursts and the Non-Spectacular Things” on Mostly Moving:
On that thing that almost everybody has or probably everybody has sometimes stumbled upon within themselves while working on any visual kind of artwork I imagine—the need for making spectacular things.
Spectacular.
Even though we just want to make something simple. Just like that. Just simple. Just a pretty simple thing. Just a ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.
“Oh man what will my family say when they come to my grad show and see these pencil strokes, they would be like: are you joking, is that it? Is that what you’ve been doing in this big school for last two years? You gotta be joking me.”
Spectacular things. The visionary and the universal. The everlasting. The monumental.
There’s always a danger of getting distracted from the main project by an auxiliary exercise; I was tempted to clean this up and develop it, let it continue showing me things. I felt the need to make it spectacular. But this need comes from everywhere. We have to choose.
There are just a few drawings in Elizabeth, on loop for over a minute. I personally find repetition hypnotic and revealing; I could watch something on repeat forever. Try it; what seems like the same picture starts to change, and become new again.
The song, “My Lovely Elizabeth,” is by Sierra Leonean artist S.E. Rogie.
Provisions
The podcast episode On David Foster Wallace from Harper’s Magazine is long but entertaining and dense in just the right way. That is, if you’re into literature, and especially if you’re an OG fan like me of “Shipping Out” (later, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), a hilarious essay about a luxury cruise by DFW, may he rest.
Letting Go (part two) by Edwin Rostron. I always enjoy Edwin’s work, but especially liked reading about “activating” still images through flicker, and working faster than the brain.
Night Club. Animated short, all done straight-ahead. Wow.
I’m investigating cel animation. Lots of opportunities here for rabbitholing! A referenced classic, “Making Cel Cartoons” by Ingo Raschka, looks offlined but I was able to download it from the WayBack machine.
The burger at Nobody Told Me, UWS. I don’t eat a lot of red meat, but when I do, I go where Big Macs go to die. Sometimes I next level it with a dirty vodka martini, and a prelude of oysters.
In closing, firefly
So I was out walking late Wednesday night near a park. I guess you’re always near a park in Manhattan. I looked down, and in the soft darkness saw a spot on my white shirt, just above my navel. I immediately swatted at it with my phone, scraping with the protruding edge of the phone’s protective case. There was an almost imperceptible crackling sound, and to my horror, a streak of green glowed where it had been.
A firefly.
Slowly the luminescence faded into nothing, literally a life’s light going out, and that made me feel even worse.
I stood there disturbed and ashamed. Why had I done that? It was “just an accident,” but why was destruction my first impulse? A magical thing had alighted on me, as if to bless, or even just to be together. And I had destroyed it, like a brute.
My distress might seem overblown, but being wholly responsible for the death of a firefly—something akin to a unicorn in my mind—felt representative of something bigger and darker; of human consequence, and finality.
I couldn’t get the image of what had happened out of my mind. Me, the mariner. To the empty street I said, I’m sorry.
I thought about how that very morning, I had run to the window to put up a hand, something in me appealing—to the universe? the gods? the ancestors?—please let it be cool, let the air be green, and lifting, and in motion. And how, when I’d lifted the sash, what had confronted me was heavy with rebuke.
In a recent Harper’s article “The Reenchanted World,” Knausgård interviews James Bridle, a writer/artist/technologist. They speak at length about wresting free from paralysis about the state of the world, climate, terrors of technology: by making things.
The world is f*cked because we are f*cked. Healing ourselves is part of healing the world.
Digital computers are fundamentally disconnected from the world; they are operating entirely on the abstraction of it…it would definitely be a better and more interesting place if more people were involved in making these things. That’s the fundamental thing: that if more software, more buildings, more social spaces, and more everything were designed by more people, of course it would produce a more interesting and better world! Such an obvious remedy…
After I wrote my first book, New Dark Age, I became quite depressed. More than I realized at the time, probably. One way I got out of that depression was by making things.
Desperately, spectacularly.
Until next time.
I love all the hacks and improv and repurposing of household objects as setup rigs :)
If your curious about cels I've done some fairly basic practice and have talked to one of my lecturers about animating on cel and learned a small few things that might be useful, such as house paint being a good substitute for cel paint