SVA MFA Illustration

This past fall and spring I have been happily studying Illustration with a great group of 17 other Illustrators at the School of Visual Arts. This program is full of inspiring teachers and students, all focusing on developing ways of visual storytelling. We are having a show of the first semester's book project this Tuesday, Feb. 15 at the School of Visual Arts Gallery. The story we illustrated is Alex Rose's Ostracon, and all 18 of us chose a different approach to visually re-narrating the story... if you are in NYC, come see!

Elf the Musical

Elf the Musical, recently opened on Broadway. It is the live-musical-theater interpretation of the movie Elf (2003) starring Will Ferrell. I recently had the opportunity to create illustration and animation for the show's projection designer, Zachary Borovay, who was in charge of telling the parts of the story that needed telling through supplemental visuals. My job was to illustrate a children's book that was projected on the stage while Santa (played by George Wendt) reads it in miniature form from the set on the stage's bottom corner. The picture book that is projected shows the progression of the protagonist, Buddy the Elf, as he goes through his journey from an over-sized Elf in the North Pole, to a New Yorker who finds a new family and then starts his own.
Below is a study for Rudolph, who appears in one of the illustrations.

In addition to creating the eleven illustrations that tell this story, I also had my Broadway choreography debut, animating a dancing penguin who is projected on one side of the stage during a dance number, and a prancing Rudolph who enters on the other side of the stage to be fed a carrot by Buddy. Below is an rough animatic for the Penguin doing his thing.

While it was fun and an honor to work on this project, a magical aspect of this experience is that Elf is being performed at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, on 45th Street in New York City.
Al Hirschfeld has been one of my Illustration Gods since I can remember. His work, which captures
the essence of his subjects in such economical line, has been my favorite since I was a little girl and my Mom would clip his illustrations from the newspaper so that I could hunt for the hidden "Ninas" in his drawings. I have needed to write about him on this blog, and this is a good time to do so.
So, to be continued...

Mustache Sisters go to The High Museum of Art, Atlanta

October 31st is a new Holiday...at the High Museum in Atlanta, GA.  It's called Dalí-Ween.
My mustache sister (Aya Kakeda) and I are in high gear, making our newest mustache to celebrate 
artist Salvador Dalí. His late work has been on display at this museum since early August, and the exhibition garnered a great review in the New York Times in September. The spooky playfulness of Dalí's work feels like a perfect match for Halloween, and Aya and I are both very happy to have this opportunity to create a new mustache in his honor. We are also excited to fly down to Atlanta (unfortunately, not on this mustachioed airplane) to conduct a craft-workshop for museum-goers of all ages. The photo above is a sneak-peek of a Dalí-inspired motif we are using in our costume, informed by works like this.

 

Nice press for GFS

Ghetto Film School got front page of the New York Times Arts Section today!
The article delivers a good description of the basics, except perhaps it didn't clearly explain that GFS is an after-school, weekend and summer program for high school students who are enrolled in other high schools during the day. GFS is also the creator of The Cinema School, which is a Bronx highschool that incorporates film studies/film making into its curriculum.

The article implied, but didn't spell out that in order to run an extra-curricular film school, help run a high-school, and have a commercial studio for alumni (The Digital Bodega) the small staff of GFS is an incredibly energetic, non-stop group of dedicated and inspiring people. I feel very lucky to have worked with them (teaching animation at The Cinema School), as I learned what it means to operate on all cylinders.

I hope that this article will draw interest and support from additional donors, collaborators, and students!

Teachers College

This is a photo of a photo that I love, which I spotted when I recently went up to the Teacher's College up at Columbia University, to hear a lecture on early childhood development and recent findings on how children learn. The photo, of graduates from the 1969 Teacher's College class, holds a great feeling for me, of the excitement and optimism of teaching. Newly minted teachers, ready to go!
There was no photographer's credit, but this was among a series of photos hung in a main hallway there, documenting historical moments in the College. This moment of racial breakthrough adds to the photo's inspiration for me.

The event that brought me to Teacher's College was sponsored by the American Center for Children and Media in conjunction with a New York organization which I love, Women In Children's Media. The talk was given by Ellen Galinsky, who made poignant conclusions of many years of studying children in learning settings, in her book Mind in the Making.  The event was created to help clue-in people like me, who work in childrens' media, about recent findings in how young children learn. This kind of connection of academic study with commercial practice is exciting and crucial, especially in the realm of creating "public" eduction for kids via the screen.

Silkscreen Poster for Jeff Tweedy special concert

This is a silkscreen poster that I illustrated/designed as a commission from my pal Sheldon Schwartz, who co-owns the Chicago shop called Strange Cargo. The concert, 30 Songs/30 Friends, was a benefit for charity to which Jeff Tweedy generously donated his talents and time. Sheldon, one of the 30 Friends, thought it would be festive to have a poster for this event.
The poster was printed by my old pal Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine, also in the Chicago area. The poster project and the evening it celebrate friendships and remind me how we are all connected. Thank you Sheldon, thank you Jay!

Post-It Art at Giant Robot NYC

Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson, are two of my favorite artist-illustrators working today. They recently curated their FIFTH Post-it art show, and first on the East coast, now up at Giant Robot New York. This is my third time participating in one of their Post-it shows, and each time I have been very happy to have the invitation to sit down and pour out my thoughts and ideas onto a surface that is familiar, casual, and small. The pressure is off, and the creativity is on!


Once again, I produced many throw-aways, but this is always a valuable process through which to go, and I am reminded of this each time I participate in one of these shows.
In this respect, I feel Mark and Esther are giving the Post-It show's contributing artists an experience that is very nurturing to creativity. They are also giving the viewers of the show a visual smorgasboard which stimulates the mind and delights the eyes.

The Cinema School Screening at Tribeca Film Center

The Cinema School, in partnership with the Ghetto Film School, had their first official student screening this past week, at the Tribeca Film Center in Manhattan.
As I wrote in a previous post, I have been working with the students at this high school since January 2010, helping to teach them about animation and guiding them through the production of their individual short works. Seventy two brand new animators, born! I am very proud of the students for the work they created, and for braving it through the often repetitive, challenging, and tiring process of creating animation.

My Ghetto Film School colleagues and I chose 17 of the student animations to screen at Tribeca, along with a series of live-action shorts that students wrote, acted, and directed in the after-school Film Credits Program, shepherded by GFS's Derrick Cameron. Sitting in the audience, watching both the live-action and the animated shorts, I was entertained, inspired, educated, and proud.

Here is a photo of the 4-student panel of animators (whose worked screened that night) participating in an expressive Q and A by my co-teacher and Director of the Mid Winter Institute in Animation, Stosh Mintek:

(l to r: Keila Solomon, Ronald Pressley, Wendy Soto, Marquis Hendricks)

While I would love to post animations on this blog, the work belongs to the students and the schools... perhaps down the road I can get permission to post some of this great work. But in the meantime, here are some stills from some of the pieces that screened on Tuesday night at Tribeca:


Lueshen Swainson: "The Last Strawberry"(Claymation)


Ayanna Jones: "Finding Uno"(Hand-drawn animation)


Tasha Ritchens: "Lights Out" (Claymation)


Keila Solomon: "Runaway from the Bronx Zoo" (Flash animation)


Ronald Pressley: "Mr. Mug Goes Hungry" (Stop motion using objects)

Italian Opera Mustache for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

My collaborator/Mustache Sister, Aya Kakeda, and I are up to more mustache activities... we're in the process of creating a new mustache commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for their evening of Italian Opera Music and Art on June 4th. Above is a photo of the mustache under construction. We use felt, glue and thread. This one will have beads too.



As folk art inspired our previous mustache, we tried to find some Italian folk imagery to inform this one. But it proved difficult to pinpoint a typical Italian folk art vocabulary through which we could try to have a visually collaborative "conversation". But we did find the ceramic art of Deruta, Italy to be very inspiring, especially this guy.

We also feature a symbol from Italy's capital, Rome: La Bocca della Verità, who represents a water-god, and whose mouth serves as a lie-detector test for anyone who wants to put their hand in there. Other imagery includes the lily (Italy's flower), and some Italian food items, like the lemon, the olive, and the sardine (see second photo, above).

Grey is the color of this mustache, because this is for Italian Opera night at the Museum, and we just felt that called for an "older" mustache. Aya and I will be there on June 4th, for the Art After Five event, with tables of craft materials for any museum-goers who want to make an Italian Masquerade Ball Mustache Mask with us.


(Felt scraps from making the mustache... I love felt! And working with Aya!)

Animation Dioramas at the CMA!

The Childrens'Museum of the Arts in Manhattan is a hotbed of inspiration and a great place. While I've already given it applause in this blog, I was just there for a meeting, and ran into this powerfully awesome exhibit of clay figures and backgrounds in diorama form, which are from the last 5 years of stop-motion animation activity at the CMA. I was so excited by this work that I took a slew of photos...

BAMkids Film Fest 2010

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has a great offering of live performances of theatre, dance and music... and they also have a cinema. This year I was excited to be asked to teach animation workshops in conjunction with the 12th annual BAMkids Film Fest.

The idea was that BAM, who had invited students from surrounding public schools to screen these films on a school-day, would provide an accompanying education on how animation works. So I was deployed to teach the idea of Persistence of Vision, the visual phenomenon of how we are able to retain an image long enough to overlap it with a subsequent image.





I employed the Thaumatrope, which was a perfect tool for the young kids to grasp this phenomenon, and we followed that lesson with making flip books. The students ranged from 1st to 3rd grades-- some of them I taught solo, and some I taught collaboratively with my pal, animator Tom Eaton. Tom's appealing and satisfying animation "Don't Smash" was part of the 11th annual BAMkids Film Festival, and we "screened" it at the workshops we did together, with Tom showing some of his accompanying drawings. The kids were really smart and fun to teach this stuff to, which made it very festive to meet them again at the screening at BAM. Tom and I were there as a small "panel" to talk about the films we just screened (which included one of each of ours), animation as a practice, and to answer questions. We enjoyed the intelligent questions which came from a theatre-audience-filled room of 6- to 8-year-olds.



On the Sunday of the BAMkids Film Fest, I was there at BAM with a small army of teenage artist/helpers, supervising two tables of Hands-on Thaumatrope-making for visitors. We had kids, parents, grandparents, and everyone in between coming by to make their own thaumatropes. It was rewarding to see people of all ages experience the surprise and excitement of making their images come together when then flipped their thaumatropes. I also enjoyed the fact that the thaumatrope was so quiet and lo-tech, in comparison to the green-screen music video station across BAM's lobby.

Animation, at The Cinema School

This winter I had a unique opportunity to help spearhead an animation program in the New York Public School system, working with the talented and hard-working staff of the Ghetto Film School . Our job was to design a six-week curriculum on the history, techniques, and current industry of animation for the pioneering freshman class at a brand new high school in the Bronx called The Cinema School. This program would be an interruption of the students' normal course of liberal arts studies, and for the six weeks of this "Mid-Winter Institute", they would be screening animation, learning animation approaches, hearing visiting guest animators, and going on field trips to New York animation studios and places of learning.

Technically speaking, the students learned the stop-motion animation techniques of moving objects, claymation, and silhouette puppets. They also learned sequential drawing (working with light boxes) and Adobe Flash animation. While learning these technical approaches, students took classes in storytelling, where they learned methods and approaches which they then applied to writing a short script for their final pieces. They also screened short films, short animations, and feature animations and practiced film analysis. They also had a slew of guest speakers, from animators to storyboard artists, to writers, directors and producers. We also schlepped the students to New York City animation studios and museums.

To keep this from being too much fun, we had pop-quizzes, written assignments, and grades for all of the animation projects accomplished during this institute. At the beginning of the six weeks, students were each given a notebook in which to draw and take notes, and these notebooks were corralled at the end of each week for inspection and grading. Finally, the students were expected to create their own dialogue-less short, using the animation approach (stop motion or Flash) of their choice, following their own script.

As this was the inaugural Mid-Winter Institute, animation was chosen as a way to familiarize the students in this 4-year high school with aspects of film making that they can then apply to future curriculum work creating live-action film. (My hope is that some of them will have loved animation so much that they will want to continue to approach their film making using animation down the road.)

Why I am writing about this on my blog is that this program was completely inspiring to me. I was inspired by the innovative, focused, and tireless Ghetto Film School colleagues with whom I taught, I was inspired by the Cinema School and staff for being there, up and running, I was inspired by the students, who engaged in creating characters, stories and animation (which is hard work), and I was inspired by the many fine contributors to the program who either came to speak, who let us visit at their studios, or who supported the program through funding, interest and/or love.

I would love to share photographs of the students in the process of animating, or their great drawings/puppets/claymation figures, or the many inspiring guest speakers (John Canemaker, George Griffin, Frank Mouris, Signe Baumane, Jeff Scher, Norma Toraya, Ian Jones, J.J. Sedelmaier, Eddie Gamarra, Doug Vitarelli, Dave Levy, Linda Simensky...), or the studio visits (to Curious Pictures, Funny Garbage, Little Airplane, NYU Tisch, Weiden and Kennedy, the Museum of the Moving Image, MoMA's Tim Burton Show). It was a whirl wind of a lot of people of all ages putting their energy into learning and teaching animation and its accompanying lessons. Within the context of a public-school curriculum, this was deeply affirming to the value of Animation as a practice, a story-telling medium, and an industry.

Happy New Year 2010

Sesame Workshop Reception

I recently had to go to Sesame Workshop's Lincoln Center offices, to pick up a hard drive that I had left with a producer, and was happily surprised to encounter Grover taking a nap next to a poster image I illustrated for the Sesame website relaunch.
(Either a nap or a therapy session.)



On another trip back there a week later, to another floor, I saw Grover in the poster. While these aren't illustrations of great visual interest, I am simply proud that they are the vessels for these loveable and favorite characters.

Silhouette Animation

A few weekends ago, I went to the Alliance Francaise in New York City to see a series of cut-paper silhouette animations, "Princes and Princes", by French animator Michel Ocelot. The engaging stories, all folk tales from around the world, were beautifully animated. And especially enjoyable to me, as someone who makes animations, is that Ocelot "introduces" each of these stories with 3 animated Animator-characters, an older man, a boy and a girl, who are sitting in their animation studio discussing the story they are about to tell. The audience was filled with French-speaking parents and kids, as this was a family event. I wanted to write about this because the animations were absorbing for both the very small and the older set-- they were simple AND sophisticated, both in form and content.
There are some posted on youtube-- my favorite story was the 6th of 6, about a prince and a princess who kiss before they marry, the prince turns into a frog, he tries to fix this by re-kissing the princess, she turns into a slug, slugs kisses frog in attempt to get out of their situation, prince frog transforms into another creature, etc., etc. and in the process, they learn to trust each other (and agree not to eat or crush the other one, depending on what animals they have become) until they eventually take on human form again at the end... but the prince is now a princess, and the princess is now a prince. It's a great tolerance tale, and the design of the story is a simple and elegant back-and-forth with movement and plot advancement. In my opinion, Michel Ocelot's simple and elegant visual form is the perfect vehicle for telling this story.


Meanwhile, Michel Ocelot's silhouette animation ancestor, Lotte Reiniger, also enjoyed a screening in NYC most recently, at the Museum of Art and Design, where they are currently celebrating Cut Paper Art with shows and events.

As an illustrator who uses cut-paper in my collage work, I have loved Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animations since I first saw her Prince Achmed. In the history of animation, Lotte Reiniger is significant for her beautiful animation work AND for the fact that she is one of the few independent animators of her era (it was around the 1920's when she started), AND she is a woman (with a husband who assisted her!).

About 12 years ago, when living in Seattle, I was asked by animator Web Crowell to create some cut-paper silhouette puppets with hinged joints, for an animated trailer he was creating for the Grand Illusion Cinema, a small art-house theater. I was just learning animation at the time, and was excited to make these puppets to be animated by someone who really knew the craft. Web's vision for the trailer was to animate 3D puppets he made out of found objects and sculpted heads, using stop motion. In the middle would be a 2D sequence with shadow-puppet references to movies throughout cinema-history. Web requested I make silhouettes puppets of key visual moments from Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Mary Poppins, Dr. Strangelove, and, to my delight, Lotte Reininger's Prince Achmed. This was a great working/learning experience for me, and Web created a beautiful final piece which screened at the Grand Illusion as a theater identity before the movies played.



Lotte Reiniger's predecessors in the silhouette form, the Shadow Puppeteers of Indonesia, are enjoying a show at my favorite museum on the planet-- the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I read that Reiniger was influenced by shadow puppets of China, but I believe that Indonesia is best known for this art-form. If you happen to live near or to visit Santa Fe, this museum is a must-see full of folk art from around the world.

Happy Go Driver!: designing for the iPhone

In the last several months, I've been enjoying watching the iPhone become a place to see interesting art and graphics. Visual artists can carry around a mini digital portfolio on an iPhone, which makes it possible to share one's work on the fly. And visual artists with the technical savvy, can create applications for this thing and find themselves becoming game designers all of a sudden.

I recently had the privilege to witness the development of a beautiful App. Atompatch is a team of two, consisting of illustrator/designer Peter Hamlin and conceptualizer/programmer John Balestrieri who recently released a game called "Happy Go Driver". It is a game about traffic management.


Peter Hamlin created some wonderful creatures, who drive their cars through and beautiful cityscapes that represent different "districts" of a metropolis.



These dynamic 'scapes have animated clouds and birds flying by on a top layer, which add even more depth to the interesting perspective of these landscapes. Excellent details, like a truck carrying bacon, or a single lollipop, keep the eyes delighted while experiencing the weirdly zen process of managing traffic with the tip of your finger. To get your version, go to the iTunes store in your iTunes and search for "Happy Go Driver".



Another App I want to toot, is the Slide-A-Ma-Jig created, designed and programmed by my pal, Illustrator Chuck Gamble. The Slide-A-Ma-Jig is a fun and funny mix-and-match body parts game where there are over 20 original characters whose hats, heads, midsections, and bottom parts can be interchanged. There are hilarious
sound effects for every move you make when "sliding", and backgrounds that you can switch as well. Chuck is the former Creative Director of Headbone Interactive in Seattle, where they developed a great look of digitally illustrated characters who inhabited worlds with photographic backgrounds. In the Slide-a-Ma-Jig, this look translates beautifully into the iPhone context. To get your version, you can visit the iTunes store and search for "Happy Go Driver".

Happiness resides in an Electric Car

As a brief addendum to the previous post: Tiny Inventions' Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter have outdone themselves in collaboration with They Might Be Giants, to create this wonderful animation "Electric Car".

Tiny Inventions will be releasing a "making of" video on their site soon, which I am very excited to see. Ru "crafted" the characters and props by hand, and they were then joyfully animated with great dance moves, to illuminate the poignant lyrics of the song.

How can you deny an Electric Car?
I found a site with a history of Electic mobiles, and reading it, I was struck by the presence of the words "inventors/invention"-- perfect match for the artist-animators who created the visuals for this "let's move forward" song.

Could the power of music and art create in this video's target audience (and accompanying adults) a broader consciousness and love for cleaner vehicles? Let's hope!

Lecturing about Women in Animation, to Women in Animation, New York

Recently, my Parsons Pre-College Program teaching colleague Ru Kuwahata and I had the opportunity to present a lecture to the New York chapter of Women in Animation, about... Women in Animation! Specifically, we spoke about Contemporary Women Animators and screened work created in this decade (and century). This was a survey of work that interests us and to which we've been exposed, but it was by no means an exhaustive look at who is making work right now. We wanted to show work that was made for personal expression, for clients, and for learning/school. And the idea for giving this talk was to share these animators who inspire us, with the members of the New York Women in Animation group, and SVA students who attended our talk, in the hopes that the inspiration would be infectious.

(School of Visual Arts on E. 23rd st., where the talks happen)

Last year, Ru and I gave another survey talk, about the History of Women Animators, which can be seen on Ru's blog, where she documented the main elements. Researching this talk with Ru was a very satisfying experience of geeking out with someone who shared my interest and excitement about animation, history, and Animation History. In the research process we explored work to which we'd respectively and collectively been exposed, and combined our thoughts about the work and the creators into a collaborative lecture. The actual talk was organized chronologically, with us showing clips and discussing the life stories, influences, and techniques of the women animators we featured. The audience at that talk was lively and engaged, and we had a good discussion after wards with some members contributing personal stories of working with some of the animators we featured.

For this year's talk, we approached the research differently as we had the opportunity to ask questions to the living women animators we were presenting. We emailed these animators a list of questions, asking about technical training, process, women animators who influenced and inspired their work, and advice to other animators. In return we got thoughtful answers that informed the bulk of our talk, which we structured with clips and stills. As a bonus, we had 2 of the animators we presented, Signe Baumane and Nina Paley, in our audience, to answer questions and inspire the NY Chapter after we finished the talk.

I am lucky in that in my colleague Ru, I have found an inspiring friend and co-presenter of lectures! Ru works with her husband and partner Max Porter, in their studio Tiny Inventions where they make beautiful, funny, cute and impressive work.


I love to talk with Ru about how things are going on their current project, which is a personal animation that will be about 11 minutes long. Ru and Max are diligent, passionate, and continually engaged in their work. The still above is from their upcoming animation: "Something Left, Something Taken".

Co-teaching, co-presenting, and chatting with Ru, I feel I have a mini-Women In Animation group, where we share information, support and inspiration. The larger organization-- the official Women in Animation, is the same on a larger scale, where resources, motivation, and learning are shared and spread.

El Baile Del Sombrero!

Not long ago, I was asked by some Brooklyn musician pals to make some artwork for their album of children's music: "El Baile Del Sombrero". Charles Mister and Fatima Sfiligoi are the musician pair behind Abbasubi. Their new album is a collection of songs in Espanol, written by Fati, a native of Argentina. Charles composed the music, and together they have an album that is full of very sweet lyrics and festive tunes.
I was very happy to be asked to illustrate this album, as the lyrics are full of imagery and characters. After I created a collection of characters, the talented designer Mariana Canale did her magic with them, and composed the entire cd package:





The title comes from the Fati/Charles musical phenomenon which they originated with their kids, that one must dance wearing crazy hats. The hats are made of felt, and come from a hatmaker in Lujan, Argentina.
Here is a photo of some of these hats, modeled by our friend Flynn and the kids:


Motivated by the fact that they do live shows, Charles and Fati asked me to make them a puppet based on the rabbit, El Conejito Teo, from their album. This was a leap for me, to make a 3D puppet from a 2D design, as I consider myself somewhat spatially challenged. Thanks to this great Internet, I found this page which taught me how to make a mouth board. Many hours of trial and error later, emerged a large, yellow, felt version of Teo.

And he has a carrot: