grand evening - could see how much you’ve put your heart and soul into the work . Always true to your roots - good on ya lad xxx
grand night that.
Congratulations on such a successful event and fab project John! It was really inspiring.
You
may remember we had a great morning at Full Of Noises in Barrow,
recording a traditional Afghan dance for an animation. Ellie Chaney
has been working on this, and we have compiled her drawings as part
of our Reverb Sampler project video. The end product will be a
Flipbook. The dancers were the nicest bunch of lads you could hope to
meet, so thank you to Sartoor Shaman Said (photographer)
Hamidullah
Mangal,Abdul Razaq Sagan,Rahim Ullah Jabarkhail, andNoorsalam
Arabzai. Hopefully we'll see you in Barrow for the Seahouse show.
Thanks to Linda, Pat and Pete from Furness Refgee Support for the introduction, and Amy at Full Of Noises for the introduction.
Here is a special post from Ellie, describing her methods...the results are beautiful, what you see here is just a taste. And if you want to see more of Ellie's wide ranging practice...here she is...https://www.eleanorchaney.com/
“While I've made lots of animations before, they have always been stop-motion using puppets and I had very little experience making a flipbook or a frame-by-frame cell animation.
Looking at the video John recorded with the dancers, it became clear the first step was to extract the still frames for the 80 pages of the flipbook. After a bit of research it seemed like the best way to do this was to use FFmpeg, which is able to take a small edit of the footage I gave it, and export the frames at even intervals.
The
next step was working out what the drawings should actually look
like. This part was definitely more difficult.
I initially tried drawing the dancers in a few different ways on Procreate using my iPad - using loose sketchy lines, using ink tools to look like images created with a dip pen and using charcoal tools to try making tonal drawings...but nothing really worked.
Feeling a bit stuck, I researched animation techniques to find a more effective approach. I knew I really wanted to capture the sense of movement in the dance, and I could image something that was less linear and more tonal would create an feeling of atmosphere and energy.
This led me to looking at two animators - Caroline Leaf and William Kentridge.
Caroline Leaf is widely recognised for her innovative approaches to animation.
In 'the Owl Who Married A Goose' from 1974, Leaf used sand on using sand on glass creating lightboxes that formed organic, tonal images full of movement and fluidity. https://youtu.be/FbFD-3GCnVI?si=zjADfD2TSBIqGj6Y
Whereas in 'On The Street' from 1976 she used paint on the glass, adding glycerine to watercolour to keep it from drying out so she could move the paint around. https://youtu.be/Xsb29V2ecj4?si=HoF4KAC93XPeaOTx
William Kentridge is also an award winning artist who is well-known for his labour intensive technique of drawing onto large sheets of paper with charcoal, then creating animations by smudging and erasing his work before drawing the next frame on top of this. This creates animations where images emerge from one another with visible marks of the process. https://youtu.be/Xsb29V2ecj4?si=HoF4KAC93XPeaOTx
My main goal with this work was to create a flipbook though, and this project didn't have the time or budget to create something so demanding. However looking at both artists helped me to develop a technique I could use on the iPad to find that sense of movement I was looking for.
The method had to be something I could do in under 30 minutes for each frame (because I needed to make 80!), and it also needed to be accurate so the flipbook and animation would be true to the choreography of the dance, and work at the end when all sense together.
So I ended up creating each image in four stages using Procreate on my iPad.
Step 1 was to import the image on to a black canvas the dimensions of the flipbook.The dancers moved across the page so I also needed to make sure they would fit from start to finish, starting at the far edge of the paper.”
Thanks Ellie
REVERB is entering the lead-out groove..., our project on pop culture, the agency of souvenirs and ephemera is coming tp a close. First, there's a nice night in the offing at the Laurel and Hardy next week...we will be presenting a video compilation of animation, performance excerpts, new music, video and images from the project, including John Rennie's video piece from the Dock Museum show and Jim Alexanders "Song Of David" animation and the marvellous Artfly Jukebox, a kind of audio documentary in a beautifully crafted format. We'll be previewing the new lathe-cut 45s from me and Shaun, Alex's pop tribe sculptures and the video versh of Ellie's Dance Flipbook, using video we shot with five Afghan lads last year in Barrow. There should be a book available too, on pop, its products and place, and oooh, allsorts.
Admission is by a donation to the Ulverston Food project, doors open at 7 so you can sample the museums excellent bar, and we'll be down at about 9 so we can come to the Hope.
There'll be another event in Barrow next month, and then we will be following up the responses and spinoffs.....I had a piece in the Radiophrenia festival last year, Shaun's tape release "The Keening" has had an excellent review in Wire mag, and we had an enquiry from the National Museum of Youth Culture about Alex's work and the project in general.
Come and see us on thursday.
The first two of Alex Blackmore's Youth Tribes editions, along with a bit of stout packaging in progress.
These figures are really beautiful, 6 inches tall, detail and clobber dragged from Alex's memory and from photos loaned and uploaded by friends.
You'll get a detachable period graffiti'd brick wall, for the figure to glower in front of, and a badge for your Lewis leather or Donkey Jacket.
Ideal for intimidating your Star Wars figures.
This is almost unbearably exciting. 2 boxes of Lathe-cut 45s arrived today, the AOIRE single Appyali / Organ Doner, and my Familiar Music EP, which is actually about the length of most singles, but you get four tracks.
If you heard AOIRE at FON in Barrow just before Christmas you'll have an idea of the deepmined intricacies of this music, which is sourced from local band demo tapes, rehearsal cassettes and recordings made by our much loved and missed Ali Rigg, whose home recordings were among the most popular recordings on the Artfly Dock-ola Juke Box during the Play One Of Your Own exhibition. At the same gig you'll have also heard versions of the 4 instrumentals that make up Familiar Music, played on Dulcimers, Guitar and Psaltery. You also hear a Yamaha keyboard and last years Bees in my garden.
The recordings were mastered by Matt Kassel at Seahouse in Barrow, and cut in real time by our friend Ben at Plastidisc.
The quality is marvellous. As is the music, obviously... but Ben and Matt have done us proud here.
So, now we have to assemble the sleeves and get the records into them. There'll be a launch event, but before that there'll be other news on REVERB.
We'll be back after this short break.
Images from our event at the Laurel and Hardy Museum the other week. A lovely turn out, next stop is cando Fm with Deb Henry, and Seahouse i...
