A Day in the Life of a Sketchbook
Join four talented artists with Down syndrome as they tackle the enormously complex process of animated filmmaking with joy and intense concentration.
Archive of August, 2007
Written by
Shira
August 15, 2007
Packing up was hard. It’s been a week since I’ve been back at the NFB in Montreal and I miss the dynamic, hilarious, wonderful gang very much. I’ll be back in Toronto often this fall to meet with the group again - can’t wait…
For now the next step is to go through all of the hours of footage and to start to put together a more complete edit of what we have so far. After that it will be a question of animating the material needed to fill in the gaps…exciting and lovely work.
Here are some photos from our very successful post-screening gathering - it was initially supposed to be an intimate screening for family and friends of the rough material, but we ended up having almost 50 people!
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Category : Uncategorized
Tags: animation, artist, Down-syndrome, special-needs
Written by
Shira
August 3, 2007
I miss the gang already! I will post the screening photos soon.It’s so hard to believe the workshop part of the project is done!
As I’m packing up boxes I realized that some of you might want to try setting up an animation stand on your own. There are tons of great references online, but this is how we did it. I have enclosed rough drawings of the lightbox stands below. Our frosted plexiglass was 12″ by 18″, but i’d recommend 14″ x 18″, to give you a larger drawing surface and also to move the plexiglass closer to the column.
We used fairly high-end equipment - but you can modify this setup to fit a much smaller budget if you buy used equipment, and simpler cameras, which work just fine! We used copy stands on custom-built lightboxes. The columns were modified to give them extra height but this isn’t necessary…
We had a digital SLR camera with a firewire webcam looking through the SLR’s viewfinder, connected to Framethief (wonderful and very cheap image capture software). We used Mac minis as they are cheap and quiet - but any fairly recent Mac will do. You can use either a digital SLR (check to make sure they are compatble with Frame Thief) with a webcam, or a mini-DV or other digital video camera. What is essential for Framethief to work is to have live feed - so any video camera works well but your image quality is not as sharp, while digital SLRs give great quality but you need a webcam as well for a live feed.
Our light source was simple - 23W compact fluorescent spiral bulbs - 4 of them in each box. Use the “warm white” rather than the “cool white” bulbs.
Ventilation is very important! So is having a white glossy surface inside the box.
More soon…
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Category : Uncategorized
Written by
Shira
August 1, 2007
Sigh. Exporting DVDs always seems to be more of an ordeal than it is supposed to be…but the screening will go on! Today we are screening the very rough animation for family and friends.
We had a sad and lovely and hilarious last workshop day today. Everyone finished their last bits of work and then we had a raucous foley sound effects session which ended with everyone in hysterics at Ninah’s sound effects for her film.
Yesterday we went out for a celebratory lunch. While the photos don’t tell you much about the animation process, they do reveal an enormous amount about the group dynamic!
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Category : Uncategorized
Tags: animation, artist, Down-syndrome, special-needs
