My Weekly Reader - Random Front Pages from 1965-1967

Everything old is new again, it seems....

Fallout from Father's Day

Oh those stepkids...

music by Holst, "The Planets," from a 1926 recording - imagine that!

Waiting At The Church (1906)

One more twiddle-dee-dee....

A Brief Observation on the Marx Brothers

When first discovering the Marx’s features, I was rather stunned by the density of the comedy content.  I had seen bits of “Horse Feathers” and “Monkey Business” before, but presumed the clips were from far more films than part of a single release.  For comparison, I remember sitting though a lot of padding when watching W. C. Fields Paramount releases, in order to get to the comedy - a minute here, a minute there, a reprise of a reprise of a vaudeville turn or a sequence from his two-reelers at Sennett, or wholesale remake of his silent features. 

The routines in the Marx Paramount films would, in the hands of other era comedians and their producers, be parsimoniously scattered among a multitude of features.  All that comedic material often crammed into 90 minutes or less was nothing short of amazing when it came to the Marxes.  A few films by others approached their anarchy, as detailed in Henry Jenkins “What Made Pistachio Nuts,” but they lacked the foundation of Marxian talent and personality (even Wheeler and Woolsey couldn’t find a consistency to their characters from film to film). 

Their final MGM films just showed the MGM was tone deaf to comedy - “At the Circus” and “Go West” are funny films, but they’re not funny Marx Brothers films.  Bob Hope could easily have slipped into Groucho’s part in “Go West.”  And Bob Gassel proved through his masterful editing that even those movies would barely run an hour if using a Paramount pace (and they’re the only way I can watch “At the Circus” or “The Big Store” since discovering his edits - although I do like “Sing While You Sell,” a musical piece that could easily foreshadow Abbott and Costello filmmaking tone). 

So while they only made 13 films, in the hands of other comedy teams or cinematic producers, that material would have served as basis for three times as many movies.  Over half of their output is finely distilled Courvoisier in a world of Bud Light.

Kickin' some ideas around....

And then some detail...

And a bit of a tweak to check different timing and playback speed...

Continues to evolve... those wacky deadlines!

Let's add the ending roughed in shot - still working on the intro

And finally, with or without titles....

Say, want to see the evolution of Technicolor? Some links...

Thanks to youtube, you can see how Technicolor went from its two-strip to three-strip format.

Toll of the Sea (1922) - first full length 2 strip technicolor film (complete film) - the final shot was re-created for the film's restoration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNPAB0biktc

Phantom of the Opera (1925) - 2 strip Technicolor sequence.  If you chance upon the restored versions, note the changes on the hallway walls as it cuts from the color to black and white shots.  This film had some insane production challenges...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_lVqP1-Efo

La Cucaracha (1934) - first theatrical release in 3 strip technicolor - 2 reeler 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbsB8yrPds

Becky Sharp (1935) - first full length 3 strip Technicolor film (restoration promotion): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUtY7svHZAw

Third Time's a Charm! Last update: 25 June 2020

Well, this round is in a new location, with a different machine, and different challenges in the full-blown midst of a pandemic, regardless of the opinions of inept knuckle-draggers.
The technicians are doing their best to keep things upbeat, the clinic is providing free valet parking, and the valets are dressed better than I am, providing a layer of guilt for such an unattended-to vehicle for them to put out of sight for the 10 minutes each session takes, from entry to discharge.

The first stop is for a hospital employee to ask a series of CoVid questions, and the interviewer may be from nursing, radiation, or even finance.  Volunteer-created masks are generally available, and once the path to the radiation department was tracked, we generally opted for the stairway for the sake of speed and lessened viral exposure.  Hand sanitizers are placed at 20 foot intervals.

The entryway is festooned with donated art - and even a player grand piano - to soothe and calm the patients undergoing more rigorous experiences than I never hope to see on my electronic medical record.

Stained glass by Mathias Alten, from his Grand Rapids home.  He was reportedly one of my great grandfather's friends, "back in the day"

My new best friend and a new mask to scare the kiddies with, come this Halloween --- 

These treatments have been condensed from 14 to 12, with the same total number of Gray units.  The two fewer visits in morning traffic along another challenging Michigan highway is a welcome adjustment.

Two spurts of radiation with each visit, aligned to predetermined marks, including a black dot tattooed upon the lower sternum (which can be used as a guide for The Stake should the radiation create a vampiric mutation).  Alas, no whiff of ozone, no sensation of scorched bacon. 

Yet.

Session 8 completed, 4 more to go.  At this point, there is some sense of laryngeal swelling by mid-afternoon.  Swallowing is still possible, but anything moving down the esophagus needs to be well chewed.  Mashed potatoes and pudding are very, very attractive dietary options.  Fortunately, the early CoVid stockpiling of catastrophic foodstuffs assured the presence of those particular essentials.

It should also be noted that now, three months after the end of the previous radiation treatment for the MALT in the right eye, that particular eyebrow has almost returned to its earlier configuration without the need for greasepaint.

Some redness is beginning to appear along the neckline at this stage as well.  Eucerin at hand!

Session 11 completed, 1 more to go.  Now the redness has a shade of purple emerging, indicating a heightened level of burn, but still without external pain or itching.  From a local vegetarian restaurant comes a T-loaf (tofu-based), nice and soft and crumbly, and a baked sweet potato, just begging to be lubricated with some freshly churned butter (ok, freshly refrigerated).  The rest of the refrigerator is well stocked with pudding and apple sauce, and some nine ounces of viscous lidocaine is nearby, if necessary.  There are rumors that the deep freeze contains sherbet!   Swallowing has become somewhat difficult, as predicted.  This and the evidence of external burns are expected to worsen for at least two weeks following the final treatment.

Celebrating the Cereal City - 2002 coloring book

This may have only been around a few months during 2002, and the "Cereal City USA" lasted for only a handful of years afterwards.  Ah my...

Pharmacognosy - B/W Sketches 1984-86

Blue Cross Says HOWDY

Well, this is interesting. 

Not sure if everyone with a Blue Cross account received this little care package, or if it is reserved for those over 65, but here, as we are theoretically at the end of the First CoVid Wave, is what came to the house this week: 

a mask, a set of disposable thermometers, hand sanitizer and lip balm, a bar of soap, a deck of cards, a whistle, a stress ball, a doomsday journal, a packet of Basil seeds, a piece of candy (it didn't last long enough for the picture), a sewing kit, a lens cloth for my bifocals, a pair of ventilated loosely-woven gloves, a nail clipper, a refrigerator magnet, a window sticker proclaiming social distancing, and the CREME de la CREME, the PIECE de Resistance, a roll of toilet paper.

Must be they had to wait three months for the toilet paper.

But - no copay!

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:

3 June 2020 Observation on Protests

I have noticed a pained struggle to equate equivalencies between the recent CoVid and Police Brutality protests in many postings on social media. 

First of all, CoVid is still out there, despite the propaganda efforts of flat-earthish deniers and their bully pulpits.  The protesters against Safe-at-home orders by our governor, demonstrating their hand-held surrogate (and over-compensated) manhood and spewed threats, are fully entrenched in ignorance, amounting to a juvenile “I don’t wanna,” and “You can’t make me.”

For what is essentially the demand of getting hair care, or rather, demanding others be compelled to provide that service to them, they risk CoVid exposure - but more importantly, they put others at risk who have the misfortune to come within the fallout of their camo aroma. 

In Lansing, they did block ambulances, they did block healthcare workers, and they did give the impression that the IQ for residents of Michigan had dropped about 60 points.  Ultimately, they proved that they are ignorant, loutish cowards.  But, sadly, none were marched off to prison in a cramped cell, perhaps as a humanitarian effort to prevent them from spreading CoVid among themselves; which, while a useful way to thin the “herd” (as in that “herd immunity” which is working so well around the world), would just throw additional burden to our health care system.

The souls protesting the recent murder of George Floyd, and the underlying culture of brutality it revealed, are however, the true heroes, braving not only CoVid to have their voices heard, but also by risking further exposure to that same brutish culture.  They know CoVid is out there, they know their risks are real, and their peaceful assembly is testimony to their convictions.  They are out to change a rotted culture for the better of all, not to express their disappointment at some issue of personal pomade. 

Attempts to disrupt their unified voice by creating destruction and then ascribe blame upon the protesters is nothing new - it is a common tactic used by authoritarian states headed by goons and goblins with large hats, faux accolades, and an overwhelming need to equate willful ignorance with feckless loyalty.  The feckless can be reckless.  While those cretins are being tracked down, their actions are creating imagined justification for authoritarian push-back on everyone surrounding a protest, including journalists, or even area residents merely sitting on their porches.

If that sort of activity isn’t worthy of protest, I cannot imagine what would be.

Waiting at the Church - a video for a 1906 Edison Cylinder - Now! With ADDED WORKFLOW NOTES!

THE TEDIOUS PROCESS EXPLAINED

- after a half-dozen updates - 

(you'll probably get sick of "Waiting at the Church" by the time you're done here, too)

This was going to be a "quick project" involving a series of 3x5 cards with the lyrics broken down line by line, then flipped and photographed in real-time while the song played.

Of course, they didn't flip properly.

Of course, they all stuck together when trying to pull the cards along, one after another.

SO

The 3x5 cards, which somehow ended up being 655 x 480 pixels, were photographed and placed into the Sony Vegas 15 system, stretched to match the specific lines in the song.

Those results were unsatisfactory.

SO

The cards were processed out as a series of jpgs, again ending up at 655 x 480 pixels, and re-introduced into the Flash CS5 environment, aligned with the 1906 soundtrack, "broken apart" within the Flash software to adjust them to the workspace as a "sing along," and then tied in with a series of b/w public-domain gifs and jpgs (from a low-res 36,000 item library, but considered all "hoo ha!" in 1996), which were then "colorized" with a layer in Flash (colors at a 50% alpha level).

AND

Once things were ok in the Flash environment at 24fps, the entire 2900 frames were exported as jpgs again, reintroduced to Sony Vegas again (with 0.04 seconds per frame equating to 24fps in the edit preferences for imported material).  The soundtrack was slid into place, image and sound worked well, and then back to exporting everything in a 640 x 480 size.  This explains some of the cropping at the beginning title.

This took a day.  

The soundtrack had already been "produced" from the archival cylinder collection here, with some surface noise and amplification adjustments made to the original (and just a touch of echo), along with stretching it to 2 minutes from the original recording speed of 1 minute, 50 seconds (I compared my original transfer with that from the UCSB cylinder archive, which ran exactly 2 minutes, but was very noisy and obviously frequently played, before making the adjustment in Audacity for the speed).

The first draft, with images assembled:

2020 Animating Apothecary

Once having sent that to a local showing with a deadline of June 3, I returned to the original piece again and spent a couple of hours building a "bouncing ball" heart layer to the process.  It still required exporting the Flash frames as jpgs, but it was streamlined by using "motion tweening" to move the ball from one image layer to the next.  Overall, it was beneficial in creating a smoother transition between frames.  The heart was made as a "graphic symbol" and keyframing was applied with an F6 function to the entire layer of frames with the heart.
It took about two hours to create the layer, move the heart around, use it as a bridge for the final appearance of the unfortunate letter, and then render the frames out from Flash, in to Sony  Vegas, and then out again with the same 640 x 480 size.

Here's the version WITH a bouncing ball!  Everybody SING!!!!

2020 Animating Apothecary

It was ok, but the resolution was pretty poor for anything other than internet use.
SO
Searching through the Battle Creek historic image archives, I came upon a low resolution of the Garden Theatre interior from 1910.
I rather like the vaulted ceiling:

It needed to be boosted to a 1920 x 1080 size, but that increased the jagginess of the image, along with making the color of the theatre interior challenging for use as a matte-like overlay image for the two-minute piece.
SO
Back to Photoshop, making a 1920 x 1080 size, turn it to black and white, then using a blur-iris function to smear the image, and then export it again, thusly:

Brought everything back into Sony Vegas, gave the theatre interior its own layer, used their chroma-key function to make the enhanced white screen more transparent, and then ran the animation beneath it.
Also, at this time, I decided to assign it a "Sfumato" number of 1.75, since this whole project was something outlined back in 2002, at which point Sfumato #1 had already been completed (1999), Sfumato #2 was "a work in progress" (still is), and Sfumato #1.5 (Avian Flu) had appeared in its first form in 2006.
Obviously, I let other things get in the way over the years....
Finally, I came across a 16mm projector sound effect for the first few seconds, and here is a version of that completed edit, at a resolution that Blogger can tolerate, for review:

2020 Animating Apothecary