Post 464 - Deconstructing the Sfumato Otto "Uvula" (2022)

Some festivals have standards, yet they pick my films anyway.  This exercise in slash and paste editing was for those that have a three-minute minimum.  The 55-second "Uvula" just didn't make the grade, so it earned a prologue describing it as 27 days between projects, and viola! a 3 minute, 14 second entry.  Readers of this blog (all three of you) may recognize some of the elements from earlier postings (a Vimeo link): Uvula on Vimeo

The "27 days" were from a countdown to my final day as a full-time pharmacist, a daily project of brief clips, making use of original sketches, or bits grabbed from the archives and integrated into experiments in software.  Some notes:

27 Days - Eleanor Powell jump roped in the 1939 film "Honolulu," directed by Edward Buzzell, who also directed "At the Circus" with the Marx brothers that year.  I think he paid more attention to this film.  I snagged a few frames and did a quick rotoscope of Ms Powell, and for a background used a paint experiment in acrylics that had been lying around the studio for almost 7 years at that point.

 

25 days - Goofing around with how many layers Flash CS5 could tolerate.  The slot machine had seven, the coffee cup had three, the table was a basic rectangle, and the background is another 7 year old acrylic experiment.

 

23 days - A cutting room floor bit from a 2018 anijam that ran too long, so I saved the three-second clip for this experiment.

22 days - Fred Astaire as death, repurposed from a 1984 Super 8mm film Alpha and then multiplied as symbols through the magic of digital animation.  The background is a third acrylic experiment.  I don't throw much out around here.  But, with everything safe and secure forever in THE CLOUD, I should be able to someday.  Yeah.  Sure.  I have a 1984 Super 8mm film I can still play, but most of my pre-2000 *.mov files are foo.

 

20 days - This is a clip from an animatic for an unfinished Creation Legend education film for a Michigan casino.  I sent them a 20 second sample with a request for a narrator on the legend.  That was in 1998.  Kept the drawings, though!

19 days - Another drawing from the same clip, this one a study of a cartoon crane flying.  Discovered in the process that drawing an actual crane's movement just didn't look real when animated - so I moved the head and body as a cantilever around the neck as the wings flapped, and suddenly the unnatural seemed normal.  Oh the challenge of POV!

 

9 days - Melies' A Trip to the Moon from 1902 has been etched into my brain since I first saw it on a Sunday morning documentary in 1968, so I had to draw a tribute to it.  I intentionally made the color and outline layers slightly out of register, to give the illusion of an early Technicolor film test.  It found a use as a clip in the 2021 Seule Tod. 

 

8 days - A quick scribble of me (it's all about ME, of course) rotoscoped sliding from a 1974 vampire comedy, never really finished, called Joy.  Had the chance to experiment with TV "noise" in the recollection of life in an off campus apartment. 

 

7 days - Using a clip of the public domain version of Metropolis by Fritz Lang for the movie, this one had Benny chomping down popcorn from a class exercise template discovered among many a too-disorganized collection of files.

5 days - Wanted to show the abuse the poor slot machine had in the intervening 20 days from its first appearance.

Found in Crumbling Notebooks

Time to clear out the shelves - so these pages fell out in the process, and I decided to keep them for a little longer.  They are color comparison tests using a new batch of Prismacolors (new in 1997), as studies for "Sfumato #1."  Unfortunately, the 256 color palette of Autodesk Animator for DOS 6 had its limitations. 

Here are some of those sketches:

Revisiting Sfumata - Number Two

After completing #1 in 1998, #2 should have been a breeze.  After all, it had been begun two years before that, using the unsupported Autodesk Animator Pro, designed for DOS.  Well, after 30 seconds and 90 layers, this much was finished.  Began with adjusting timing and colors, now that technology permits such luxuries on a budget of $35 and paper clips.

Time to wrap up the last 70%.  Let's hope for fewer distractions this time!  After all, #3 is becoming impatient.