The year has gotten off to a devastating start, with 2 1/2 weeks of flu and a commensurate backlog of work now nagging to be dealt with. No matter, I’m going to start my new year’s resolution of doing 5 speed paints a week. What is a speed paint?

Well, its painting something within a limited amount of time. Usually 30 minutes or an hour, usually digital. There are lots of variations within that open-end definition – like painting from a reference, from memory of a reference or from your imagination and variations within each of those themes (more in future posts). The talented animator Goro Fujita has some great tutorials if you’re interested. (Check out his blog too. And… please suggest any other generous tutorial makers in the comments.)

I encourage my students to do speed paints regularly. They’re great for learning color and lighting or for polishing communication skills. Among other things, painting a light mood over an openGL screen grab saves enormous amounts of time as opposed to just jumping in and lighting a 3D scene. Because you select colors manually from the color picker instead of from a source photo, you learn to see the colors themselves and appreciate the effect that surrounding colors have. You also learn to see the relations that receding distance, subsurface scattering and specular effects have on light values,  intensity and saturation. Highly recommendable for students, td’s, active artists.

But I like to ponder the speed paint as a metaphor for the production process.

There are important strategies to follow if you want to produce an acceptable image in such a short amount of time, and these seem to apply universally. I’m convinced that speed painting holds valuable lessons for artists, but also producers, managers and of course independent film-makers. First off….

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My progress on Hitler over at the modo forums has triggered some heated reactions which go beyond the purpose of that forum, so I thought I’d formulate my views here. I understand the emotions that can be involved enough to admit that I don’t always understand the emotions involved. I’ve confronted Neo-Nazis at a market in Schadensleben, given the Hitler-greeting in East Berlin. I’ve also been attacked in a Dutch train, ignored in a Paris restaurant and escorted from a party in New York because I “am from Germany”.  My Russian wife was considered a traitor for wanting to study in East Germany. A young (black) German exchange student to America was asked in ernest if he were a Nazi. I’ve been reading about a vigilent policeman who opened his front door to a thug (likely neo-nazi) who stabbed him inches from his heart. I’ve witnessed violent racism in then-Czechoslovakia and Poland, and less violent (but no less volatile) racism in the USA.

I can certainly understand caution when confronted with this kind of portrait and wieslaw_ is very right in asking in what context this figure will appear. It would be one thing to be confronted with Hitler in a heroic pose and another to see him within an ad that calls on us all to be vigilant in defending human rights, which is the case here. Sounds straight forward, but I won’t pretend that there isn’t a large realm of grey zone. The readiness to engage such critique varies greatly from culture to culture.

There are endless facets to consider – freedom of speech being high up there, but also respect for victims or – more likely in 2009 – for the traumatized children of victims as was the case in the New York party. Then there’s the need to differentiate between Nazis and neo-Nazis and the German nation as a whole – a nation that first roused itself to wave its national flag while hosting the World Cup in 2006 and understandably tires from being stigmatized.
There’s the issue of being able to digitally create images of sufficient realism that they can be misunderstood as real. There’s the issue of the rights involved in being able to put words in a historical figure’s mouth and make it look like an authentic documentary. There’s the issue of stylization as a means of implicating further clues as to the author’s intent and intended audience – above we see my own caricaturized take on the more realistic portrait. Of course, these things are progressing full speed ahead; in cinema, documentaries, you tube films, even forensics.

Here’s an interesting and mildly related action from the recent past: a re-print and distribution of a national socialist newspaper “Der Angriff” (The Attack) from 1927 in today’s modern Germany. Imagine going to your local news shop and being confronted with a polemic headline decrying Jewish treason and eschewing the nation’s superiority. At first they wanted to publish the paers uncommmented, but in the end they included a cover page to establish context – making sure no one mistook the message. Personally, I feel this to be an unfortunate but understandable decision.

Having to interpret for one’s self is so much more powerful, I feel. But then… many people haven’t learned such skills.

btw:
That Pinnochio sketch is apparently from Hitler himself, a failed art student and adamant admirer of Walt Disney.

Luckily, I was able to meet Nina Paley and watch her inspirational film Sita Sings the Blues at last May’s FMX in Stuttgart, Germany. Since then, I’ve been following her struggle with distribution, copyright and (if I recall correctly) lice. I continue to be in awe of her achievement in making this film, and the qualities of the film itself. against that background I stumbled across this review by Roger Ebert.

In this wonderful review of a wonderful film, Ebert says something of central relevance to npr and stylistic development:
One remarkable thing about “Sita Sings the Blues” is how versatile the animation is. Paley works entirely in 2-D with strict rules, so that characters remain within their own plane, which overlaps with others. This sounds like a limitation. Actually, it is the source of much amusement. Comedy often depends on the device of establishing unbreakable rules and then finding ways to cheat on them and surprise you. The laughs Paley gets here with 2-D would be the envy of an animator in 3-D. She discovers dimensions where none exist.

The appeal of npr stems in part from limitations surmounting themselves. This is true not only of what happens in the animation, as Ebert observes, but to some degree in the animation itself. The cut-out concentric circles are received by the viewer as two things at once… simultaneously, they are vector cg graphics and Sita’s eye. They are a transformation. While this true of illustration as well, it is more evident when viewing animation. This transformation is suspended, held in levitation – and our brains are subtly tickled in a way that is related to the functioning of comedic surprise. The artist’s pen is a suspended ‘reveal’ – and the eye lingers in hopes of catching the device’s resolution. At least, I suspect so. This would help explain why animated content is repeatedly viewed. .

I very much look forward to Spike Jonez’ upcoming Where the Wild Things Are. I expect it to be a visionary project with Jonez’ unique signature and I see it cooking up some debate about look development in film adaptions – as it has already been doing.

Forest Whitaker says:
It’s one thing to read [scary stuff] in a book, but when you see an itty-bitty kid running alongside a 10-foot-giant on the side of a cliff, it gets intense.

Spike Jonez says:
I wanted it to feel “real,” or not-real because it’s not “real,” I wanted it to feel like… like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice’s books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was… it felt like it was everything, you know? It’s like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that… you’re there, you’re in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up.

Moriarty says (about the Sendak book “Where do I come from?”):
…the cartooning style got the harder things past you, so you’re able to grapple with some of those bigger ideas. What I loved about Maurice’s book and still love about it is that it’s about emotional states, and what a crazy thing it is to write about for children… how sometimes you have these emotions that are just so big you can’t control them.

Witnessing this wonderful struggle for authenticity in story and visual means of transporting a story’s emotion, I wonder how npr might be used to tackle the same issues. Could it transport the feeling of spontaneity? The “rough and organic” feel with nothing of an artificial environment that Moriarty praises? How might reactions to the film’s look have differed had the original Sendak artwork been used more directly as a point of departure? Could a wonderful director such as Jonez work with npr stylistics as masterly as he does with the real Australian landscape?

And beyond the level of look development, there’s the element of communicating this target look within the community team of producing a film. I catch myself grinning that I-feel-your-pain kind of grin when I read this by Jonez: I told the studio, “I don’t think this is gonna be a movie for four-year-olds.” And I think they said “Oh, okay,” but I think that when they saw it, that’s another… you know, that’s something else.”
Determining expectations is difficult in any project, but the clash of cultures evident in Jonez’ art-speak is too beautiful. Just visualize what the ‘family-film’ suits at Warner Brothers had in mind when they hired Jonez and when they saw those grooved, raked talons hovering over a little boy’s shoulder in screening.  Let’s hope they have the wisdom to allow it through as the director envisions it, and not sliding down that slippery slope of second-guessing.