Animated short “Wings”

The Animation Project that I began in 2011 is now complete! “Stop-motion” is both the animation process I used to turn still images into film, and the literal description of the eight year journey it took to finish this 4 minute and 21 second short film.

Storyboard sketches

During the summer of 2012, I made 26 charcoal drawings that I photographed as they were drawn and/or erased. I pared the images down to about 800 for the editing process. This project was often on the back burner while I worked on other drawings, prepared for shows, and investigated editing programs and equipment.

In 2018, after several unsuccessful editing attempts, my son Matt Green (mattgreenfilms.com) came to my rescue. He had the knowledge, experience, and editing program that I lacked.

Still image from animation, charcoal, 22″ x 30″

True to form, I waited a year before contacting  Josh Ritter’s crew to get permission to use his song Wings, which is the inspiration for the drawings. Aaahhh, procrastination!

See two previous posts, Animated Drawing and Animation Continuation, for more info about the development and research for this project.

Animation Continuation

Step 2: Research

I’ve been working since last September on a drawing project that uses stop-motion animation. You may recall that I began this project last summer with a 19 second animated video Train Sequence. That was Step 1, a mini-movie to test the stop-motion process. My goal at that time was to incorporate the 19 second piece into a 4 minute animation, to be completed by August 2012. I  begin shooting and editing in July so I thought this would be a good time to look back at the production process up to this point.

I’ve completed 26 drawings which are the basis of the animation. Similar to the way illustrations accompany a picture book that are tied to a narrative, the drawings are motivated  by the text of Josh Ritter’s song Wings.

Travel

In addition to online resources and library texts, I visited some of the physical sites mentioned in the song.  I began with a trip to the Cataldo Mission, near Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. Originally a Jesuit mission, it’s said to be the oldest standing building in Idaho. Most of my life I’ve lived no more than 50 miles from this historic site, but this was my first visit.

Inside the mission are wooden statues on either side of the vaulted dome ceiling. Carved and painted to resemble marble, they were made by Father Ravalli, a Jesuit priest who was also a sculptor, painter and designer of the mission. Like an elaborate stage set, the building’s interior is full of his faux-finished structures and ornamentation: hand-painted newspaper “wallpaper,” tin can metalwork “chandelier”,  and faux marble carved wooden altar and baptismal font. Working with Schitsu’ umsh tribe members, Ravalli used only the tools and materials that were available, including cat hair paintbrushes, and paints made from plants and berries.

In January of this year, I wandered into the CREHST museum in Richland Washington, looking for a little information on the area since the Columbia River Basin is mentioned in several stanzas.  Not only does the museum cover the history of the Columbia River drainage,  it also has a special collection  of paraphernalia from the Hanford Plutonium Project, enabling me to skip the research trip to Hanford.

The museum docents, former employees of the Hanford Project, encouraged me make the 25 mile trip to Hanford and tour the site.

They said it’s quite safe… hmm. They also said, that as a “downwinder” I’m more likely to die from the affects of radon gas, than anything leaked from Hanford.

And finally, I needed to research the process of how a tree becomes a board. So last week I joined a group tour of the Hull Oakes Sawmill, near Monroe Oregon. It’s one of the last commercial steam-powered sawmills in the U.S.

Scene 17 begins with a drawing of a lumber mill that comes to life with animation. I grew up in a mill town so I’m not clueless about the process, but I thought I better double-check.

My plan is that  trees will “leave” the hillsides, move through the water, up a conveyer, into the mill, and become stacks of boards in the lumberyard.  Of course Hull Oakes has several people (not computers) involved in these steps: unloading the logs from trucks into the river, running machines, grabbing logs with a spiked tool, directing the cuts,  shunting jagged boards to the waste bins, lowering the circular saw, etc.  I have the luxury of leaving people out…it’s only an 8 second scene.

 

Animated drawing

Artists @ Work week 2 and 3:

I switched my focus the last two weeks of the residency from “crowd drawings”  to an animation project, based on the process used by South African artist William Kentridge. I’m animating a song lyric, 4 minutes in length, and this 19 second sequence is about half of the second stanza. It’s like a “rough draft” that allowed me to experiment with the process.

Draw mountain valley, “click”…

I layered multiple drawings and erasures on the same sheet of paper, usually making incremental changes that I photographed at each stage. After 6 days, I had 103 images viewed at 3 frames/second for the train sequence.

Draw gray smudge, "click"...

Enlarge gray smudge, "click"

Use eraser to make white rocks fly from smudge, "click"

It may be fortuitous coincidence, synchronicity, or divine intervention, but the public component of this residency turned my little project into a truly collaborative work. These guys wandered into the Arts Center and shared their knowledge: artist Bill Shumway, animator Matthew Coffin,  film editor Paul Ahrens, and Chris Gray, single-gauge railroad aficionado.