Sky Kiss

Crude Pre-Viz on how I hope to paint the back sky layer. It's a Half Sky, Night kissing Day, but it isn't drawn on half, more like 1/3. Still, we can imagine the scene carries on to the left thereby making it always half if you were standing at a different angle.

There's also now built a starry constellation-ed "Night Hoop" but that's a different story.

Cool Find: Christina Spangler

My favorite Stop Motion clip of all time so far, this by Christina Spangler This clip strikes deeply at the core of what I'm after with Halfland. The natural sunlight, the lack of narrative, the simple doable movement performance, the rack macro focus that mimics our observant eyes while in nature. Did we see what we saw? Yes, we did.

Cool Find: Granny O'Grimm

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty. A really charming solid short. It's well done cgi with a really nice visual style contrast between the film's setting and the fairy story being told within it. Wryly funny and well written and performed by Kathleen O'Rourke, Directed by Nicky Phelan, produced by Brown Bag Films:

From a Pauper to a Prince

One of Cirelle's recent photos of her beloved dog, Jemmy. The very one rescued for her from the mean streets by noneotherthan Shel Rasch! He's a happy, loved, and healthy doggy now. Dig those crazy fun ear wisps!

It's been a full year since the day Shel picked Jemmy off our street after our visit. She cleaned him up and gave him to Halfland volunteer Cirelle. In that year, Cirelle has learned to take superb care of a such a bright, adorable dog and he is enjoying the sweetest pampered puppy life to be sure.

He has the best friend a dog ever could in Cirelle, and she the best companion woman's ever had. They have each other thank goodness.

She told me that the other day on one of his many fun walks in the park, he inadvertently stepped right on a bee in the grass with one of his hind legs and it stung him on a back paw paw. He yelped and hopped as fast as he could go on three legs, leading Cirelle home by the leash the whole way. They got in and he ran right up stairs and dove straight under her bed as his place for comfort and safety. She of course collected him immediately and took him to the vet to make sure he'd be alright from the sting.

She was worried (he turned out to be fine) but to her the episode let her know for certain that he knows where to go if anything goes wrong with life... he goes Home. He has, at last, a real home.

With this new fellow in her life, and her puppet project fully done, I don't suspect Cirelle will have time to work in Halfland much going forward. But I wanted to thank her for all that she has done for it and for her being Halfland's Muse in inspiring other people to come and work for a time.

Good things tend to happen for people when they are around Cirelle.

Frame Rates

Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua from Staatsballett Berlin perform several jumps captured in slow motion at 1000 frames per second.

So, working on Halfland brings a great deal of realization and insight with it. One of the things that is occurring is the sense of life itself being very much like a frame-by-frame animation. It's dawning slowly on me that the only difference between life, animation, and dreams is the "Frame Rate". How many slices of action we can perceive. Too out-there of an idea for you? well, that's why it's posted on the underground.

Case in point. The super slow mo camera technology experiments that are emerging from all over the world are capturing human imagination, I think for a reason. If you watch this captivating, sublimely beautiful clip of young dancers jumping, you may notice how when the 1,000 frames per second kicks in, it begins to imitate or emulate our own mind's ability to see. It becomes nearly a god's eye view (be sure to catch it on YouTube directly after it's all buffered for the effect). I feel that we often see this way in our own dreams. Do you?

Mimizard Puppet Completed!

 
I could not be more proud of Cirelle for actually completing her original puppet character she began here two years ago.

She came over to finish him up especially yesterday and we spent a whirlwind day putting the finishing touches on.

When she saw the date of February 2010 on her initial sketch, she turned to me to say that she finally understood how Halfland has taken me so many years. (YEAH! Tell me about it!) It's not that she or I spend every moment making our creations. Life happens as well. In her case, she became a dog owner over the last year (the wonderful puppy that Shel Rasch rescued for her from our street) and built the cedar-shingled roof on the Halfland cottage.

See her workman's journey over the two-year making of her Mimizard puppet below.

Cool Find: The Fall

Stumbled upon this trailer, The Fall (2006) by director/artist Tarsem Singh. It wasn't available on NetFlix so we bought it because the clip alone is about the most beautiful film I've ever seen.



"In a hospital a little girl with a broken collar bone meets a bedridden man who starts telling her a fantastical story which reflects his state of mind. As time goes by fiction and reality start to intertwine in this uplifting epic fantasy."

It's a mythic fairytale story told with breath taking visuals clearly. I'll know more after I see it. But already I saw several visual games that speak directly to what I'm attempting to do with Halfland.  UPDATE: IT IS THE MOST SPECTACULAR MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN. Master director Tarsem's vision & guts, the genius costumer Eiko Ishioka's mind-bending creativity, the superb performances by the entire cast, the 28 exotic locations it was shot, the story, both reality and fantasy, engrossing and honest. I have since become a Tarsem scholar and hope to enjoy his future storytelling projects. His Snow White is coming next Spring.