Stop Motion, Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes and animation tests with Mrs. Basher.

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Pierre asks: "I like the stand used to keep the models upright while doing the walking animation. Could you explain a bit about how you got Mrs. Basher to scowl? I'm assuming there was some way to manipulate the face and that it wasn't done digitally?" Thanks. All the stop-motion is shot outdoors in-camera, animated straight-ahead on a timer with no Dragon Frame. During the jump-and-tumble sequence, motion blurs are captured with stills shot in burst mode with 1/10sec exposures, compiled in Time-Lapse-Assembler. VO is in post. The first scowl on the little stop motion puppet is just a head swap for another sculpt held in with neodymium magnets. The expression in the last shot is from a latex-and-wood, live-action rod puppet that's twice the size of the others with glass beads for eyes.

Latin Woody Meets Mrs. Basher

 Meanwhile, from the land of stop motion....

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Barge Graveyard

The wild bank of the channel is called Sleightsburgh Spit. This was once a busy passage for barges carrying bricks, coal, and bluestone over the D&H canal to Philadelphia. 

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But the railroads killed the maritime traffic, leaving the carcasses of the wooden canal boats to rot in the shallows of the Hudson River near Port Ewen. At low tide you can see plenty of old timbers and iron spikes in the barge graveyard.

Digital Bioacoustics

Animals are able to communicate in the realm of sound with much more complexity and nuance than scientists had suspected.

Using new digital tools, researchers have begun to decipher auditory communications from many non-human life forms, such as elephants, birds, bees, bats, and even plants. A few examples:

• Strawberry rootlets will grow toward the sound of running water, even where there is no moisture gradient.

• There are distinctive patterns in elephant vocalizations that correspond whether the elephant is in the presence of a friendly or unfriendly human, an adult human or a child, or a male or female.

• Owl hoots contain markers identifying both the speaker and the listener.

• A researcher using a voice-recognition program for bats vocalizations found that adults lower the pitch of their squeaks when they're communicating with babies, the opposite of us humans. Our baby talk is typically higher in pitch.

Male peacock displaying colorful feathers, Image via 123RF

• Most of us have assumed that male peacock displays were sending primarily visual signals, but in fact there's also strong acoustic messaging in the infrasound range, to which females are strongly attuned. What precise information is contained in the feather-shaking display is just beginning to be deciphered.

This work raises profound philosophical and ethical issues, arising from the fact that machine systems can generate sounds that animals clearly understand and respond to, even though we can't recognize those nuances with our own ears. Should we use machine-generated animal sounds to send specific messages to animals, such as warnings, greetings, or invitations?

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Google blog: "Separating Birdsong in the Wild for Classification"

Book: "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" by Karen Bakker

Francis Coates-Jones

Francis Coates-Jones (1857-1932) and his brother Hugh Bolton Jones (1848–1927) were born in Baltimore, but later studied in France under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

Francis Coates-Jones, Spring Day, Oil on canvas

36⅛ x 30⅛ inches, currently available at Questroyal Gallery in NYC

He set up his studio in the famous but now demolished Sherwood Studio Building on in New York City.

Albert Collins, Artist and Actor

 Albert Collins (1883-1956) was an Australian painter who worked in watercolor.

He taught at Redlands School in Cremorne, where his design course was popular.

He was also a radio actor, known for playing the character of "Joe" of the Children's Session in the long-running serial "The Wide-awake Bunyip," which later was called the "Muddle-Headed Wombat."

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Albert Collins on Wikipedia

Why Rembrandt Declared Bankruptcy

Despite charging high prices for his portraits, Rembrandt van Rijn was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1656.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, 1658

Part of the problem was that he often failed to receive payment, which contributed to his financial troubles.

But he lost his fortune primarily by spending too much on rare and costly things, including musical instruments, weapons, paintings (including his own), prints, animal specimens, shells, corals, and plaster busts.

Two Tugs Dockside

Two hardworking tugboats wait at dockside in this small oil study.

Two Tugs, oil on panel, 6 x 8 inches, plein-air

One is still running its engine, judging from the puff of smoke. Hazy sunshine comes in from the left, allowing me to lose the edges in the lower right of the picture. The pinkish priming color peeks through in a few places, but the rest is mostly gray. 

Octopolis

In Australia an unusual society of octopuses has congregated in Jervis Bay, which observers have dubbed "Octopolis." 

Octopuses are normally relatively solitary, so this tendency to group together is not fully understood. 

Marine biologist Peter Godfrey-Smith reports that he's noticed a lot of "ornery" behavior that resembles fighting, boxing, bullying, and even shooting shell projectiles underwater. He's not completely sure if this is just territorial squabbling or something else. 

More at Earth Touch Network.

Russell Flint on Color Harmony

Russell Flint, Cordoba, watercolor

In his book Water-Colour for Beginners Sir Frances Russell Flint warned that a painting will lack color harmony if it has too many colors in it. He said: 

"You must aim at getting tone and harmony in your work, although it may not be easy. All pictures may be divided into masses of bright color or light, medium-strength color, and shadows. It may be difficult to trace the exact places where they occur in a picture, but they are there all the same. It is obvious that when you are working out of doors on a bright sunny day all the colors will be strong and bright in tone, and even the shadows and middle tints will be strong too. The opposite occurs on a dull day, when the whole scene is changed to one of low tone, when both colors and shadows will be soft and subdued. In each case the colors will harmonize and all complement each other in tone. Mix the colors of these two scenes together and the result is a discordant picture which will be unnatural and unbalanced."