Monday, December 8, 2008

After Effects - Effecient Rendering

The best way for exporting a movie from After Effects is to use the Render Que (Window > Render Que). The default "Best" quality settings are typically preferred for completed projects but can yield a rather large file size even for short movies. The following are some steps to keep your file size down and still get a good quality render. The following screenshots are from After Effects 6.5.


1) In the Render Que Window click the "Best Settings" text next to "Render Settings:"

By default this setting is set to "Full." You can reduce this by selecting "Half." Half will give you great quality but will literally reduce a 640 x 480 movie down to 320 x 240. You will get a smaller movie but the quality might be good enough depending on the elements of your animation.

2) If you have already rendered your movie from the Render Que and the file size is so large that it is difficult to transport or play, you can use a separate program to compress the file size of your rendered movie. Depending on the level of detail in your movie a program like iSquint, free to use on the mac, will give you a greatly reduced file size but could potentially greatly reduce the quality of the movie. Even setting all of the settings to the highest possible level in iSquint will give you a file size that is only a fraction of the original. Use the advanced options to maintain your 640 x 480 movie size. You can download here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19769/isquint

Final Tip: REMEMBER TO CLICK THE CHECKBOX for turning the AUDIO ON by clicking the word "lossless" when you are in the Render Que window.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Inspiring Illustrators

Dan McCarthy
The storybook illustrations of Dan McCarthy find power in their simplicity. Take note of the limited palette he uses and the economy of form. Sometimes less is more. See more of his work here: http://www.danmccarthy.org/

Above Image: Dan McCarthy

Above Image: Dan McCarthy
Above Image: Dan McCarthy

Chris Ware
Chris Ware's meticulous, thoughtful, beautifully designed drawings serve as insightful cultural commentary through the storyboard layout of a cartoon. Check out the Acme Novelty Warehouse and Quimby Mouse for more work by Ware.

Above Image - Chris Ware

Charles Burns
The definitive Graphic Artist. White and Black used at their best. For more of his work check out this article about his book Black Hole at Salon.com. Additionally look for his animation in Fear(s) of the Dark.

Above Image - Charles Burns


Charley Harper
A wonderful use of modernist abstraction found in the simple forms and elegant design of Charley Harper's illustrations. More on him here.

Above Image - Charley Harper

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

More Artists - Ideas and inspiration

Oliver Herring
I showed Oliver's work today in class as an example of how one can use ordinary materials in an extraordinary way. Using collaged photography, pink foam from home depot and the reference of a live model he is able to create sensitive, intricate, delicate and striking pieces of sculpture.

Above Image - Sculpture by Oliver Herring

Above Image - Sculpture by Oliver Herring

The following is a blurb from wikipedia:
For the Styrofoam Photo sculpture, Herring starts with a polystyrene base and pastes thousands of cut up photographs to the base. “Gloria,” one of his most famous sculptures, is of a girl leaning against a wall in a colorful flower dress holding her necklace. Herring took pictures from every angle of her and he cut and pastes them on the base to form the sculpture.


Marlene Dumas
I presented the works of Marlene Dumas in class because she creates passionate watercolors, drawings and oil paintings that typically start from photographic source material. Beyond the fact that she is incredibly prolific I like to use her as an example of how any starting point can be transcended. She is not "copying" a photo but using it as a catylist to start making her marks.

Above image - Marlene Dumas

Above image - Marlene Dumas


Ghada Amer
One final artist I showed yesterday in regards to technique was Ghada Amer. She uses loose washes of color and thread to create sensual and layered large format paintings. From a distance you see only tangles of color and line but as you walk closer and inspect the piece you realize it is composed of hundreds of overlapping sewn drawings and dangling threads. A technique one might use to achieve a similar result could be working out a drawing in Illustrator using live trace and printing out the result as a template to sew from. The printout and a section of fabric could be placed one on top of the other and the needle could weave it's way through the drawing and fabric until the desired image is traced with thread upon the surface of the fabric.

Above Image - Ghada Amer

Monday, November 3, 2008

Artists Update

Charlie White
above: From the series, Everything is American

From Wikipedia:
Using a combination of fiction, artifice, and make-believe to represent the human condition, many of White's photographs explore America’s social fictions and the tensions in identity and perception they generate. White shares a relationship with the directorial forms of photography practised by such artists as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. Applying cinematic techniques, his set-up photographs are directed and staged narrative stills. This narrative focus can be perceived in his previous photographic series like In a Matter of Days (1999) or Understanding Joshua (2001) which employ a pictorial play between reality and fiction, occasionally taken to grotesque extremes. Understanding Joshua is a series of photos of a puppet meant to represent "complete fragility manifest in a body,"[1] placed in various situations related to human relationships.

above: From the series, Understanding Joshua

Robin Rhode

From wikipedia:

Robin Rhode is a South African artist, born 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa, now based in Berlin, Germany. In 1998, he obtained a diploma in Fine Art from Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, followed by a postgraduate program at theSouth African School of Film, Television and Dramatic Art in Johannesburg.

Working predominantly with everyday material like charcoal, chalk and paint, Rhode started out creating performances that are based on his own drawings of objects that he interacts with. He expanded and refined this practice into creating photography sequences and digital animations. These works are characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that brings aspects of performance, happening, drawing, film and photography together. Rhode often returns to his native South Africa, creating work in the streets of Johannesburg and continuously registering the traces of poverty and social inequality. An outstanding characteristic of his works is his addressing of social concerns in a playful and productive manner, incorporating these issues into his practice without simplifying or judging them.

Spencer Tunick

From Wikipedia:

Spencer Tunick (born January 1, 1967) is an American artist. He is best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. His installations are often situated in urban locations throughout the world. He also has done some "Beyond The City" woodland and beach installations and still does individuals and small groups occasionally.

In 1992, Tunick started out documenting live nudes in public locations in New York through video and photographs. His early works from this period focus more on a single nude individual to small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he's now known. By 1994 Tunick had organized and photographed over 65 temporary site related installations in the United States and abroad. Since then, he has taken his celebration of the nude form international, and has taken photos in cities that include Cork, Dublin, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Caracas, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City and Amsterdam. In August of 1997, Tunick photographed a large group of nudes at The Great Went, a festival hosted by Phish in Limestone, Maine.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

James Castle in Context

Homework: To be turned in October 20th. Visit Fleisher Ollman Gallery to view the show Castle in Context. While at the gallery consider the following question:
In terms of the variety of formats and materials on display in the show, how would you be able, working in part with a computer, to achieve some of these formats in your own work? What process could you use? Use specific examples from the show to inform your statements.


Fleisher Ollman Gallery
1616 Walnut St. Suite 100
Monday - Friday: 10:30 - 5:30, Saturday: 12 - 5

"Opinions vary as to whether James Castle was born deaf or autistic. Clearly, he never learned to speak, read or write, and refused to be taught to communicate in any of the accepted forms of signing or finger spelling. What physical signaling he did was a highly personal expression of home signing used within his own family. Language, letters, numbers and symbols apparently meant something to him and often appear in his work, but it's unclear on what level he perceived them."

"Castle's most eloquent means of expressing what he felt about the world around him was through drawing in the works on paper he made for nearly 70 years until his death in 1977. Whether sketching the domestic interior scenes of his home and family, or rendering the rustic architecture and pastoral terrain of rural Idaho, Castle tried to place the viewer within his own idiosyncratic world.
Using stove soot mixed with his own saliva on the tips of sharpened sticks, Castle devised a unique substitute for graphite or ink. Despite the rudimentary materials and eccentric technique, Castle achieves an astonishingly varied sense of light and shade in each work with powerful lines and brilliantly nuanced textures that enliven the surface. By all accounts, Castle's mastery of perspective drawing was self-taught from observation and mimicry. This ability became more assured as his work progressed over the 70 years in which he made art."
- above text by Greg Kucera (http://www.gregkucera.com/castle.htm)

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Jennifer Steinkamp

Above: Daisy Bell, 2008

"Melding aspects of computer animation, video art, abstract painting, structuralist cinema, and architecture, Jennifer Steinkamp creates ravishing abstract and figurative projections that reside in the realm between the physical and the virtual. Technology plays a major role in her art, however it never takes precedence over the desired aesthetic effect. Her computer is the equivalent of oil paint, palette, and brushes. Inspired by the work of light-and-space artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin, she strives to erase the boundary between viewer and object, constructing environments that defy materiality, encouraging total immersion. These installations acknowledge the human body by creating disorienting effects, manipulating the senses, overwhelming with movement, effecting a range of responses from delight and awe to something bordering on vertigo. Steinkamp explores the nature of human sensory experience through her phenomenological installations, using light, motion, and sound to dematerialize and activate space." - JoAnne Northrup, Jennifer Steinkamp, Selections. The San Jose Museum of Art Permanent Collection. 2004






More Videos and information can be found on her website: http://www.jsteinkamp.com
Current Exhibition: September 7 - October 18th, 2008 @ Lehmann Maupin, (201 Chrystie Street, New York, NY)

Friday, September 26, 2008

WALTZ WITH BASHIR - Trailer


The following excerpt is from this article at Cannes Review:
Waltz with Bashir documents the struggle of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, to come to terms with the gaps in his memory surrounding the part he played in the first Lebanese war and the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Where Marjane Satrapi's
Persepolis (to which this film will be inevitably, if somewhat inaccurately, compared) used stark black-and-white animation based on Satrapi's graphic novels to tell the history of one girl growing up during the Iranian revolution, Waltz with Bashir uses vivid, hand-drawn animation to bring to life interviews Folman conducted with friends who were involved in the Lebanese war in the early 1980s to bring to life harrowing memories of death, guilt and regret.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Cliff Evans / After Effects

Cliff Evans’s Empyrean

I was lucky enough to see Cliff Evan's Empyrean on display at LUXE gallery in New York over the summer. I had no idea what I was getting into when I entered the gallery but after spending about 15 minutes watching the video, I left the gallery in a completely different mood than when I had walked in. I was really moved and disturbed by the work. Also I was excited about the powerful and fairly untapped resource of After Effects. The video was dense, layered, extremely well crafted, complicated, political, witty, dark, beautiful and horrible. In other words it consisted of the stuff that makes up a great work of art. He had thrown in everything but the kitchen sink and made it flow seamlessly and with intention. Please visit his site for more amazing work and video: http://www.cliffevans.net/cliffevans/home.html


Cliff Evans’s Empyrean

“Fast-moving images surround and bombard us in every part of our lives as never before,” says Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who invited Evans to live and work at the museum in 2006. “Evans takes complex, recognizable images –commercial logos, pop and religious icons, etc. – and manipulates them using rhythm, motion, and time to create complex juxtapositions that pull the viewer in. Once engaged, the viewer is obliged by the sound, the beauty, and the horror of the animated, highly focused images to look more closely and to watch as a strong political and social critique emerges. It is there, and it is vitriolic.”

Monday, September 1, 2008

Robert Crumb @ ICA Thursday Sept 4th 6-8pm



The ICA will be having it's Fall reception, free to the public this Thursday including the following artists:

Douglas Blau-First Floor
R. Crumb-Second Floor
Kate Gilmore-Project Space
Odili Donald Odita: Third Space-Ramp Project


More ICA Events for this fall listed here