11 second club 2009 October & November

Watching the 11second club winning critiques for October and November has me thinking about Hand Drawn and CG. I was reminded that somewhere I read the suggestion for hand drawn work to always be squashing and stretching a little, always be changing the shape, to give it the feel that it's organic and alive and a flesh sack filled with liquidy stuff, so always a bit of the feel of a water baloon. Watching Mike Walling in October gave me the impression that the CG equivalent is everything a little bit overlapping, nothing ever settling or starting at the same time (which I think is harder in hand drawn because you try and keep your charts simple so your inbetweeners can follow.)  Kind of like the juice box is the CG equivalent of the flour sack. Food for thought. (wish 11 second club would update their archives with links to the critiques faster, it's always a few months slow.)

Carmen Herrera

This world is so arbitrary. My father in law pointed me to the artist Carmen Herrera, 94 year old woman, she's been painting her entire life, all of a sudden in the last 5 years she's blown up in popularity in "the art world" and is the hot new thing, making money, going to parties. Where were they 20 years ago when she was probably just as good and could have used the money? Anyway, just a great example of doing what you love to do because you don't really have an option, and not looking externally for validation, and being aware that life is very random so even if you are completely amazing it doesn't mean the world will ever wake up to it. Some quotes from the article:

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

“Everybody says Jesse [her deceased husband who supported her throughout their marriage]must have orchestrated this from above,” Ms. Herrera said, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud.” She added: “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.”

“Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing  a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

 

Lighting - 3 point lighting is dead

Just finished reading this tutorial on lighting by Richard Yot. Very thorough and in depth, it's kind of long but it's broken up into lots of little bits with good examples for each bit. I feel like I have a better understanding of things to think about with lighting (and why 3 point lighting is cliche'd and never very realistic in the first place. )

La Queue De La Souris

Beautiful stylish piece by Benjamin Renner




*found by JDH, again, sooner or later I'll have more stuff I find first :P

Phantom Menace Review

So JDH found this review of the Phantom Menace, which is really long, and kind of annoying with the voice, and dumb attempts to be creepy. But this guy does have good points about story and plot, like not being able to describe characters from the Phantom Menace except by job and physical description. (Luke is eager and frustrated, Han Solo is a scoundrel, Quigon is ??)  Watch it if you have something better to do but your ears are free. He's got a great clip of young George saying that effects are unimportant and boring if the story isn't strong.

Anyway, the strongest point I think he made was about the light saber duels being about more then just the choreography, they're about what the characters are thinking and feeling and choosing. Check it out at 6:00 mark. (reminds me of that Lost writing panel talking about making the boring exposition stuff matter because of what it emotionally means to the characters.)