Yesterday This Was Home: Reinventing the Wheel

The sound of the bus accelerating grows louder as we cut to this close up of the wheel spinning. I am showing the various layers that were used in the animation that I assembled in Adobe Premiere Pro. The background is dark grey with just a shadow painted on it. The wheel well was animated separate from the wheel itself to give some added motion of the bus suspension. The wheel was surprisingly difficult to animate simply because the first two times I didn’t draw perfect circles. The slightest imperfections were instantly noticeable with the oblong wheel wobbling out of control. The final pass still wobbles a bit around the central axis, but I wasn’t about to start over so I lived with it. I discovered that it is possible to draw a perfect circle in Procreate and that is what helped me finally assemble a decent wheel.

Animating in Premiere Pro was easy each time. I just rotated the tire around it’s central axis and set key frames in the timeline. That was easy, but with the wheel wobbles, I had to go back and redraw. I considered animating the wheel in Callipeg, but it seemed like it would be harder with a whole lot more steps involving a lot of copying and pasting. I considered adding paint to the black wheel areas to show motion as well, but the painting of the tire was partly transparent which achieved the same effect quite by mistake. I am always glad for happy accidents.

When working a scene in Disney’s Animated Feature Film Mulan I got to show the world class animator, Mark Henn the cleaned up drawings I had done for his scene. The scene was of the bath lady pushing Mulan into the tub. I had thought through what her legs might be doing under the long skirt. Mark simply remarked, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.” It is a quite that has lingered with me. Sometimes you just have to trust in the grace and flow of a scene without getting caught up in the mechanics. It turns out that this scene with the bus tire was all about mechanics, so I had to reinvent the wheel several times.

This film is now on display at the Orange County Regional History Center (65 East Central Blvd Orlando FL) for the new exhibition, Yesterday This Was Home, about the 1920 Ocoee Voting Day Massacre.

The exhibition is open until February 14, 2021. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.

Events unfolded on Election Day 1920, when Mose Norman, a black U.S. citizen, attempted to exercise his legal right to vote in Ocoee and was turned away from the polls. That evening, a mob of armed white men came to the home of his friend, July Perry, in an effort to locate Norman. Shooting ensued. Perry was captured and eventually lynched. An unknown number of African American citizens were murdered, and their homes and community were burned to the ground. Most of the black population of Ocoee fled, never to return.

This landmark exhibition will mark the 100-year remembrance of the Ocoee Massacre. The exhibition will explore not only this horrific time in our community’s history but also historical and recent incidents of racism, hatred, and terror, some right here at home.

The content will encourage reflection on a century of social transformation, the power of perspective, and the importance of exercising the right to vote, and will ask what lessons history can inspire moving forward.

To promote safe distancing, the museum has implemented new ticketing procedures for this special exhibition. For the run of the exhibition, the museum will have extended operating hours to create a safe viewing experience for a greater number of people. On Sundays the museum will open two hours earlier at 10 am. and stay open two hours earlier until 7 p.m. And on Thursdays, we will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Yesterday This Was Animation

Cross dissolve to the character now walking to the Orlando Bus Station. This re-used the animation form the first shot but the animation had to be repositioning. I was hoping I could move the animation as a whole in Callipeg but that solution evaded me. Instead I re positioned each drawing one at a time making sure the foot positions lined up on the pavement.

Today was a good day of production, I got a bunch of boards done and several of those seem animated since I used the Procreate video playback feature to recreate the process. I get my best ideas as I am waking up in the morning lying in bed and this morning I came up with the idea of having negatives playback when the character reflects on our countries history of racism. I had one of these Ah-Ha moments each day when I was doing my COVID-19 series of illustrations. It was hard to stop the COVID-19 series since the ideas keep coming, But now that I am animating again, I am loving the process and getting lost in the work all day and into the night.

At first the project seemed impossible on the tight deadline, but I keep chipping away and things keep falling into place. There is a definite sense of serendipity that comes with making a film. Working from the oral history makes boarding a breeze since the length of each shot is determined by the narration.

Again all this work is being done of the exhibition titled, Yesterday this Was Hone: The Ocoeee Massacre of 1920. The Exhibition is on display from October 3, 2020 to February 14, 2021 at the Orange County Regional History Center. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history. This exhibit is sadly still relevant today with the election coming up in November,  since America has never been able to fully address racism.

Yesterday This Was Home: Learning to Walk

The first scene opens with a close up on the Christmas star in Downtown Orlando. I created the sketch and painting in Procreate. The great this about that program is that you can play back a movie which shows every stroke creating a time lapse replay of the painting as it was created. I tool that movie and panned town to the street level. The sketch is created as the camera move happens and when I got to the street I lap dissolved to the final painting to save some time. A young boy walks across the street with a suit case in hand.

I fully animated this scene to test out thee program I plan to use to do all the animation for the project. The program is called Callipeg and it was designed to be used on the iPad. The program is surprisingly intuitive if you have animated with paper and pencil before. That reminds me, I am writing this entry because my Apple Pencil has run out of battery life and I am waiting for it to recharge. A good old wood and graphite pencil never needs to be recharged and sharpening it takes just a second if yo have an electric sharpener.

I animated my character taking four strides across the street and the scene required 97 drawings. I am learning by trial and error discovering ways to save time each time I animate a scene. Since I decided to keep the head and torso still, I could cut and past those elements from drawing to drawing and just animate the legs and arms. Having him carry a suit case had the added advantage of fewer arm swings to animate. I  used the standard timing I teach most students at Elite Animation Academy. Each stride takes about one second or 24 drawings to animate. I am experimenting quite a bit with timing to see when I can get away with animating on twos and fours when possible. That means each drawing is held for two or four frames of film. It can save on the amount of drawings that need to be done.

In traditional animation you flip the drawings as they are created to watch the motion as you work. In Callipeg, three fingers scrolling up and down the screen accomplish the same effect. For some reason my pencil turns into an eraser unexpectedly while I animate so I have to be very careful with how I touch the screen. Just selecting multiple frames in the timeline was a challenge. You have to touch and tap twice very fast and drag to make the selection. I had to practice most of an evening because the selection would just move the frame I tapped on.  So much of my time is being spent training myself on developing just the right touch so the computer knows what I want.

This scene is part of a short being show at the Orange County Regional History Center for their exhibit on the 1920 Ocoee Massacre. The exhibit is titled, Yesterday This Was Home. This special exhibition is on display October 3, 2020 – February 14, 2021.  The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history

Visual Fringe

The Orlando Fringe Winter Mini-Fest is January 9-12, 2020 inside the Lowndes Shakespeare Center at Orlando’s Loch Haven Park.  I saw several Facebook posts about the Visual Fringe tent and had to head out to see it for myself. The Visual Fringe is headed up by the incomparable actress, Melanie Leon whose comedic prowess has livened up several of the shows I have sketched at Fringe and around town. In front of the Visual Fringe tent were about a dozen orange lawn chairs so that an audience could sit of they liked to watch all the at happening.  I was happy to sit in a chair (theater seat) and started sketching. Melanie and George Cudo were seated in front of me. She joked with me and made me feel very much welcome.

I sketched Warren Hart (Famous After Death) who was working on a bold robotic image painted on a board covered in newspaper clippings. I loved the Famous After Death tag an wish I had thought of it. Also working was Osha Awesome who was doing a mixed media piece with melted crayons. Famed beside her were several framed Yin and Yang symbols with rainbows of melted wax.

After sketching Famous After Death, I checked out his portfolio on the table. It was a thick book full of gorgeous bold poster imaged from movies and other themes. I heard that he produces the work in Illustrator but he also explained that the iPad and Procreate have changed the way he works. He is desperately hoping that Procreate eventually gets vector based features which means images created could be blown up to any size. Since I have fallen in love with the program as well, we had much in common. It was awesome to meet another artist who is embracing technology in their everyday creative process.

Tonight is the last night of the Fringe Winter Mini Fest. To see a show you need to buy a $3 Mini Fest Button. Show tickets are separate and prices vary. Some shows I had sketched before during the 2019 Fringe.

The remaining shows…

12:45am Staged Reading Series: Gertrude Stein’s Do Let Us Go Away, a play.

12:45am Staged Reading Series: Spider Queen.

2:15pm Winnie’s Roch Cauldron Cabaret.

2:30pm 90 Lies an Hour.

2:45pm The Myrtle Sisters – Out of Time.

4:00pm St Kilda

4:20pm Danny Darkly’s California Screaming.

4:30pm The Dissection of a Mixed Heritage Woman.

5:45pm Six Chick Flicks. (SOLD OUT)

6:15pm Eddie Poe.

6:15pm The Lightweight.

7:30pm How to Really, Really, Really Love a Woman.

8:00pm Larry.

8:00 My Left Tit.

9:15pm Becoming Magic Mike: An Action Adventure Comedy.

9:45pm Flori-DUH.

Orlando Tech Week at Church Street Marketplace.

I walked over to Church Street Marketplace (101 S Garland Ave Orlando FL 32801) for what I thought would be a tech demo. The place was deserted except for the caterer. I asked him what he knew about the event and he was pretty clueless. A large screen was set up, and when I arrived, it was projecting a computer desktop. I figured that had to be my center of interest.

Procreate, the digital sketch program on my iPad had updated several days ago and a new feature showed up called the perspective tool. It allows you to place several vanishing points on the sketch and the program automatically sets up a perspective grid to use as a drawing guide. I used that feature for the first time on this sketch, which is a pretty high tech leap for me. I was utilizing a bit more tech to cover Tech Week.

Only later that night did I learn that what I was sketching was the Black  Orlando Tech Hip Hop Happy Hour. DJ Nigel John shouted up a welcome to me, shouting “Thor!” I shouted back and then sketched him as he set up his DJ mix station. Janessa Gursky must have been an event organizer because she also greeted me. About six round high top tables were set up and slowly people started to arrive. This was slated to be the
chillest, happy hour event of Orlando Tech Week 2017. It was a chance for everyone to unwind from the
nonstop tech events of the week with a drink and conversation. I was a little disappointed not to walk away with some miraculous tech enlightenment but the music was pumping as I left for dinner.