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Q&A Transcript | iotaSalon November 2009
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UCLA Design | Media Arts View the video from this event on our YouTube channel, with captions: Part 1 | Part 2 Q&A with Chris Casady00:00:10 I did this in Flash, with some experiments I'm doing, just playing around. I did it without the music, unaware of the music. I've just been doodling, and then taking my doodles into Flash, and then replicating them and recoloring them, and choreographing them around, and generating several minutes of this stuff. 00:00:36 and I showed it at another workshop that I attend in Culver City. Unrelated to your organization but very nearby. And I was at a loss for music, I didn't know what to do for music. So someone said, 'why don't you try Morton Subotnick's Key of Songs?' So I went out and found that and dropped it on. 00:01:00 And it kind of halfway works. So I'm in this middle position of trying to figure out whether to use that music, and to massage the animation to fit the music. Any synchronization that you saw there between the animation and the music was pretty much coincidental. 00:01:21 I found two sections that I liked, I kind of stuck them together, did them, kind of slid them a little bit. There were a couple places that synched up a little bit, and that's as far as I went. So its, something I have to work with now, finish, solve, try to figure out if I'm going to keep that music. 00:01:44 I like it. Do you like that music? And I just have to get real clever now and try to get the zen flow of the animation, which I was doing, which was unaware of the music, to try to mash it in to fit the music. 00:02:00 And in doing so, I will have committed a real cardinal sin in abstract animation, which is to find a piece of music and make your animation fit with it. Which is in fact what the previous two films did. But you'll find a lot of blanket dismissal of that type of work in the visual music field, because it's considered 'music illustration,' and unless your visuals really drive the structure, you'll find yourself dismissed by a lot of serious people. 00:02:34 So everything I do is sort of dismissed by the serious visual music artists. Anyone who illustrates music is like, [motions to floor] down here. So I count myself among that group. [Laughter] So one day I'll graduate to a place where I can just do the animation, and hand it to a composer. Which I could do now if I knew a composer. 00:02:56 I just don't know anybody as good as Morton Subotnick, or anyone that I trust. He's dead now, so, if you know anybody let me know. Because I'd love to be able to just hand that animation off and say, 'Give me something as good as that Morton Subotnick, that award-winning epic that he did, and have it fit the animation by the way, too." 00:03:17 Am I moving around too much? [Camera Operator] No, I'm really wide. 00:03:22 [Jeremy] Any questions about this piece, anything that really struck you? [Student] Well, that is something that I'd like to see, I'd like to see a [inaudible] from a musician. [inaudible] 00:03:40 [Casady] Um, to have which? [Student] To go out and hire yourself a composer, instead of having to, to use your own words, 'mash' your animation into the musical piece. To have the music match the original intent you were going for. 00:04:01 [Casady] Yeah. Well that would just take a musical partner. In that case I have a lot of stuff that's just ready to be handed off to a musician, if that's the case. 00:04:12 [Stephanie] Did you learn that from Jules Engel? [Casady] Um, no I'm not s--, yeah I think so. Probably, yeah. [Stephanie] There's a lot of quotes on our site from him espousing that philosophy 00:04:26 [Casady] Yeah. Fischinger of course, a real pillar in this work and I suppose a role model for Jules too, was someone who illustrated music. And had a pretty good reputation doing it. He got kicked out of Germany. But he made a certain mark for himself. 00:04:48 [Stephanie] And what do you think of Bute, do you think that he was a major influence on her? [Casady] She was illustrating music, very definitely. She was using the structure of that music to hang her visual ideas on. 00:05:03 There were some very tight things in there, there was a 'ta ta ta ta' and she was doing a little zoom on the checkered background, and a little twist. And she did every beat 'dum da dum dum dum' like that. She was very faithful to paying real attention to it. 00:05:17 [Jeremy] What do you think in terms of your experience of it, the first two pieces we saw the music was written and then the animation was done to that music. In the third piece the music is kind of [Casady] found and thrown on. [Jeremy] Right. 00:05:31 In terms of your experience of the rhythmic quality of that, was that a drastic difference or was it mostly interpreted the same? Would you have picked out the distinction necessarily? 00:05:45 [Student] No. Perhaps if it had gone on longer, but we didn't really have a chance to kind of [inaudible]. Yeah my piece is a two-minute clip, a little shorter than the other two. [Begin YouTube Part 2 video] 00:00:11 [Jeremy] Any other questions about Chris' piece? [Student] Do you always animate in Flash? [Casady] Yeah, so far. Although that middle piece [Oerd Van Cuijlenborgâs 8.1], while I was watching that I was thinking, I have to switch to that program. [LAUGHTER] 00:00:29 [Student] Do you know what he used? [Casady] Yeah, he used Painter. [Student] What do you think is the difference that would make you do the switch? 00:00:36 [Casady] Well, Painter is like Flash on steroids, its Flash just does these solid colors. It's a vector-based thing so it just does solid colors. But in Painter, there's this deep deep rendering engine for the brushes, with all kinds of parameters. 00:01:01 And so, you've barely scratched the surface of what you can do in there in terms of textures, custom brushes, It's insane what kinds of parameters you can put on your digital brushes. You can get halos and after effects and textures. I mean, he's really having fun with the textures and stuff. 00:01:21 And there's also a 3-D aspect to Painter. Painter can work in layers. Its - I don't think it's real 3-D, its just layers. Like cartoon layers. But you can create, he created a pretty good feeling of 3-D just with the layers by having foreground things sliding at different speeds and stuff, and some zooming. 00:01:42 So, he's getting a whole lot of depth out of it. I'm getting depth on mine by just reducing the copies, making ten copies of something and reducing a little each time. Which gives you that receding quality. But that's strictly a graphic thing, it isn't real depth. 00:02:02 [Stephanie] That's interesting because I thought that the second one [8.1] reminded me of Sleeping Beauty. I don't know if anyone else got that. It really ... definitely similar to Tchaikovsky and there was that depth, the multi-plane, it did have that. 00:02:15 [Casady] Yeah, you're right its got [Stephanie] and the floating lights, you know, there are a lot of scenes like that, [Casady] And even the painterly quality in that is similar to Sleeping Beauty, because Sleeping Beauty was I think mid-50s, I think, late 50s? 00:02:30 And Disney was beginning to break away from the super-realism of Pinocchio and Snow White and Dumbo, and starting to get into a stylized thing which had a lot to do with sponge-painting, texture painting, stylized trees, a lot of stuff that looks like Painter. So I see how you'd think that. 00:02:55 Section 2? Questions? [Student] Do you code to animate? [Casady] No. I wish I did, I wish I was as good as that. I've seen some really great stuff done with coding. I've seen some really great procedural stuff. But no, I'm drawing with a tablet, a pressure-sensitive tablet. and using onion-skinning. Onion-skinning, which Painter has also. 00:03:22 I think that's one of the things that's allowing him to do this in Painter, is the metaphor of the light box, to be able to see the multiple drawings. I first learned to do this on paper, where you have a light box and you saw through, you saw the last four or five drawings you did on paper. And Flash can do that for you, they call it onion-skinning. And Painter does it and it has another name. So its a traditional [gestures] technique. 00:03:55 [Student] So in the animation, there's no algorithm that it follows, you didn't [inaudible] [Casady] It's me scribbling. Yeah, scribbling on the tablet. Seeing what I'm doing. And then, I can advance a frame with the extra hand, the spare hand. 00:04:22 Which brings up a new frame to draw on, and shows me the last five or six or however many I choose to look at of what I've just drawn. So, I see the echoes of what I'm drawing. And you know, if you want to draw something going by, you're going to draw you know, dot dot dot dot series in a row to make a sensational movement. 00:04:46 And if you can't see the ones you've just drawn, its not going to move in a straight line. So its just a way of seeing what you've done and creating some smoother animation. 00:04:57 [Student] So you also use Flash for [inaudible] inbetweening and all those techniques? [Casady] Well I am, I am. Yeah that's a good point. Because that's, once I have a sequence of scribbles, that are doing something and dancing around and sometimes they have follow-through in them and sometimes they don't. 00:05:18 Sometimes they're just popping. Then I have a layer, say 150 frames of animation that I've drawn, and then the gimmick that I'm exploiting here is that I'm taking that layer and I'm duplicating it ten times, and creating a path for it to travel on. And so all of that animation is now traveling on a path, but it's staggered from its neighbors. And so the neighbors are all following that path, and they each get successively smaller in each subsequent copy. 00:05:54 So, once I've done the scribbling, then I use a motion 'tween, in Flash, to have the whole thing move on a path. And so that's when you see some of the stuff tumbling and moving, and stuff like that. The whole mass tends to move in general, that's the whole thing moving on a hidden path. 00:06:12 [Student] The reason I ask is that ... when you coordinate that to another set of music, you can [inaudible] to actually adapt the animation to another piece. [Casady] That's where I would do it yeah. I could leave all the scribbling that I've done, 00:06:36 and then make changes in the timing using those paths, maybe the direction it went, the scale it took, or the colors. Or some of the things I could change after I've drawn it. So you're right, that's where I might do some of that massaging. [END] | |