Canadian Film Vault Opens

The Necktie

The National Film Board of Canada recently released a number of their films and made them available for free downloads and viewing on their website. This is a huge treasury of high quality award winning materials. The site has numerous examples of animated, documentary, feature and short films. You can explore by genre, title, year, length and language. This makes browsing so easy. I enjoy the animation section most. This section features links that take you to educational resources, jobs, festivals and much more. There are some amazing award winning works linked here including: Ryan, Chris Landreth’s Oscar-winning animated short film from 2004. One of my favorites is Caroline Leaf. I especially enjoy the features that not only look at her films but also demonstrate how she made the works. This is great website for students, teachers or just fans of film. Caroline Leaf also has her own website that features a great deal of information. One last note…not all of the films on the Canadian Film Board site are free, but it is still a wonderful resource where you can find quality films to purchase too.

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Inspiration From the Web-Su Blackwell

A friend of mine recently sent me the following website link to look at. http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/ What a cool website and artist. The work is interesting on many levels. As sculpture the pieces are intriguing as they play with the idea of what a book is. The words of a well written book make the images leap to life in your mind’s eye and imagination. In this artwork the images from the book’s page are realized right on the pages of the book. Using books as a form of art has become very popular with the dawning of the altered book craze and the hand made artist book community. These books are art objects themselves with the meaning of the pages and the stories serving as allusions for the artworks. The site also links to several films. http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/films.php Each is interesting as an animated piece. One illustrates the way that an ad campaign was developed utilizing the artists designs and a team of animators. It is intriguing to me especially as I push forward trying to learn the art of animation and pass it along to my students.

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More Video and Animation Fun

Here is a new little animation that I just finished.  It is an example of rotoscoping.  The hands in the paintings are mine knitting the cable cardigan (Central Park Hoodie) that I’ve been working on for many months.  It brings together several of my favorites, knitting, watercolor painting and drawing and technology.  It was time consuming to create, but very fun.  I need to work on sound that could go with it, but for now it’s a cool little thing that I tried.  I will try to post some photos of the actual knit sweater, too.  It is progressing with the shoulder seams bound off together as of today.  I still have the sleeves and hood to knit plus the buttons.  I don’t know if I’ll finish before going back to school this fall, but I will try.  Let me know what you think of the animation!

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New Art Work Finally!

So I finally have begun making new art work, that actually feels like art. I have been taking the class at MIAD all week and have finished two video works this week. They are posted here . Hopefully, you can view them. I’m pretty psyched about the results. We had specific directions as to what we could and couldn’t do. Considering I knew nothing at the start of the week this is pretty cool. Let me know what you think.

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Time To Make Art: Video Class

I’m excited and nervous about next week.  I am attending the Creative Educator Institute (CEI) workshops at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) http://www.miad.edu/.  Why I’m nervous I don’t know.  It is the old demons in my head:  “will I measure up to those in the class?” “am I good enough?” etc.  I am hoping it cures the artist block that I’ve been suffering from this summer.  Work in a new medium can sometimes do this.  That’s what I’m hoping for.  The course will feature a lot of new technology that I am hoping will help build my skills and give me the confidence to move in this direction with my artwork.  I love film and photography, so video seems a natural.  The professor teaching the course is James Barany, http://www.youtube.com/user/jamusbaranus whose work I greatly admire.  I hope to learn how to create the multi-layered effects that he uses in his video work.  The Artist Statement Project and My Most Important Self Portrait project http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C21A7AACC3F0CCAB
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I took a weekend workshop class with him and loved it.  I will also be learning animation techniques I believe, which will be pretty cool.  I hope to begin doing some of this with my own students.  The Mac computers and IMovie make it so easy to do this.  I am looking to increase my knowledge in this area.  I think video will be the art medium of the 21st century.  If you know of any amazing sites that I should see to increase my knowledge I’d love to hear about them.  I know about You Tube, but I’m looking for artistic video, not just the homemade quality.  I would like see more artists such as Ann Hamilton, whose work with both video, film and photography is incredible.  http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hamilton/index.html .  Check it out here:http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/  Her piece called “Ghost” is especially intriguing to me.  The process of what she did using fabric and stitching and then having the environment she set up are all fascinating.  I also greatly admire her pinhole photographs done with the her mouth camera.  Very poignant and revealing of the relationship between artist and subject.  I always think I am hiding behind my camera, but this project puts her right in the subjects face. BRAVE WORK!

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