Touched Alive The RecessHOME

Power Tools: A Look at How Three Vancouver Film Animators have Explored Digital Imagery.  An interview by Leslie Bishko. Published in ASIFA Canada, July 1997. This is an excerpt only, of the interview with Stephen X. Arthur. The full article includes commentary by Bishko and interviews with two other independent animators, Gail Noonan and Ruben Moller. Stephen Arthur is an experimental animation director working with photo-based hybrid media.

LB:
In your earlier film Hybrid Vigour (1994) you initated the use of 2D computer animation to bring the work of the painter Desmond Morris to the animated screen. Your film Touched Alive (1996), animating the paintings of Jack Shadbolt, has been well received at film festivals, and you are now producing a second version [Transfigured] through the NFB. How did you begin using computers as an animation tool? How did the use of computers serve your goals with these experimental films?

SA:
I was always fascinated by metamorphosis, surrealism, and abstraction. When I saw McLaren's films in grade 9 (1969), I dove into animating. Initially on paper with characters metamorphosizing from one situation to another. Then abstract forms with ink & paint on acetate, all storyboarded from free-association. Although these 16-mm films won the BC Student Film Festival three years in row, my life took a completely different track for the next 20 years.


1974 (making Anizen)

When I recently gave up on both screenwriting and experimental science, I wanted to go back to my roots. I was planning how to build myself a light table when I was astounded to stumble upon a personal computer in a store that was displaying an actual moving image. That was 1992, when high-resolution bit-map animation was just becoming feasible on affordable computers.

..
play me

The style and content of the animation I planned to do came from my own history. After 10 years writing Hollywood-style features, I wanted to avoid conventional storytelling and cartoon characters. I was resigned to supporting myself solely as a technical writer, so I was not trying to reach any real audience. Since I'm trained as a biologist and not trained in art or drawing, I leaned toward abstracted, "biomorphic" characters. So, as I was learning to use the computer, I had all these pictures by Miro, Morris, Shadbolt, etc., pasted all over my walls as inspiration for warm-up exercises. Then one day I realized that with the computer I could literally animate those actual pictures. They had a built-in theme and tone, and it would be an exciting challenge to try to express that through action. I figured if I sent the animation to the original artists I might have a small but appreciative audience.

The method I need to use is 2-D bitmap animation. I use Autodesk Animator Pro and a shareware morphing program on 8-bit-color images from Photo-CD. As a lone filmmaker doing all levels of the production, computers have the obvious advantages of easy pencil-testing and ink-&-paint, infinite cel levels, and limited forms of inbetweening. The methods I've been using are more akin to painting and traditional animation, as opposed to 3D computer animation (which is like live-action filmmaking with multiple angles of coverage and manipulation of lights). My software is mainly not vector based, so there's really no wire-frame stage, no inverse kinematics, no flexibility of re-rendering a scene after it's animated. With this approach I can't do the refined, fluid, expressive movements that you accomplished in Gasping for Air, but I try to push the tools as far as I can. Its like advanced cutout animation. I can combine several techniques -- cutout, painting, procedural, and hand animation -- into a seamless whole. It allows me to work directly with the images that most enthrall me -- paintings made by great artists. The computer also allows me to create the complete soundtrack myself.

LB:
As Gail Noonan and Carol Halstead have discovered, quality output to video or film is pretty challenging when you're working from a home system. You got great results with Touched Alive by literally plunking the computer monitor beneath the Oxberry and shooting from the screen. The colors on 35mm are warm and vibrant. With Gasping for Air, I used a Teledyne transfer to go from Betacam SP to 16mm. I was delighted with how the reds came out on film, and the warmth and softness of celluloid toned down the CG look and feel of the image. Will you use the Oxberry method again for the extended version of Touched Alive?

 
Shooting off the monitor with animation film camera (35mm), 1996.

SA:
Absolutely. When Svend-Erik Eriksen first saw the results he said "we've got ourselves a film recorder." Prior to that I had designed my computer animation for super-cheap, real-time output to home-made video, and I was fed up with that. I was dying to return to film. I also wanted to create the Shadbolt animation in high resolution to offset the low color depth, so you don't see the pixels. Because of that, it couldn't be output to videotape anyway. I first considered a cheap 16-mm film recorder in Berkley, but that still cost several thousand dollars. Then I was planning to shoot it off my monitor with an Arri-SR 16-mm camera, when I discovered that Carol Halstead had shot the Amiga animation in Why? with the NFB's rostrum camera. So I went to see Eriksen and he agreed to let me use it. He was confident it would work, but until I saw the film I felt a lot of trepidation because everybody else was advising me against it, including Gregory MacNicol, the author of "Desktop Computer Animation." But it worked. Now Belial McGraal has just shot his 3D-Studio animation, Pen and Inkwell, the same way. It's affordable, and you get the film back the next day instead of sending it to Montreal and waiting for months.

As for home-made video output, I could tell you lots of personal horror stories. For example, the television premier of my computer animation on local cable. It went berserk -- strobing and superimposing random frames over the whole thing. I found out the hard way what "illegal colors" can do. I hope analog video becomes obsolete as soon as possible. Maybe then we won't be forced to compose our art for multiple aspect ratios. This is the first time I've worked in 35-mm and I find it painful to have to reconstruct Shadbolt's compositions in the hope that they'll still work artistically in full screen, wide-screen cutoff, and TV cutoff all at the same time.

LB:
Your content and techniques are so intertwined with your current working set-up. Will you continue to explore more film ideas using these tools? Do you have plans (or dreams!) to get new equipment towards furthering your creative goals?

SA:
If you'd asked me that question yesterday I would have said yes, I plan to do more with these same tools. But just today somebody woke me up to the PC systems now available, and the change in the last two years -- while I wasn't looking -- is staggering.

I bought my i486 computer [i.e., pre-Pentium] in 1993. At the time I started Touched Alive, it was a truly daunting task to accomplish such a thing on a PC [50 MHz speed with 32 MB RAM was the maximum then]. Now I discover that you can buy a complete system that will run more than 10 times faster than mine, for less than half the cost. This rampant obsolescence happened in just the last year, even as I began my contract with the NFB to continue animating for another year with the system I have. The question of new equipment is an ongoing dilemma these days. You don't want to just get addicted to progress, because you'll never have time to master your tools and be able to let the real, human, creative juices flow. But on the other hand, I'll give you an example of an ongoing problem I'd love to get rid of by upgrading:

I've declined to upgrade to Autodesk Animator Studio, which can use 24-bit color with sync sound in Windows 3. For me the idea of attempting that on my current computer at 1024x768 resolution is absurd (DOS is much faster). So for now I'm stuck with the problem of a limited palette. It's a problem that most computer animators, I believe, don't face, except for low-bandwidth internet and interactive stuff. With 8-bit color you start with a fixed palette of 256 colors. To a painter or traditional animator that might seem like a lot of colors, but it's not like tubes of different colored paint you can mix to get a range of shading. Those colors ARE the range of shading. Only certain kinds of pictures look okay with that. 3D CGI images look terrible -- for that you use 24 bit color, which is about 16 million colors, no pallettes. But the clincher is when you have to combine several separate full-frame pictures within a scene, with no cuts (such as when morphing or panning between them) -- then you have to combine all pictures into one 256-color palette. Then there's really big hassles with degradation of the image. So it dictates what transitions and cuts you can make. You have to test all the palette combinations ahead of time. I've frequently had to alter the storyboard because a particular sequence caused too much image degradation. [The full five minute film, Transfigured, needed a series of 42 separate pallettes for 80 paintings.]

So when I finish this film I'll be dumping my computer... even though I've only just developed a mature relationship with her.

My plans for future projects are pretty open-ended. I guess everybody wants to try 3D animation -- even Richard Condie has done it. I want to do it too, eventually, but for now it seems I've hit on something with 2D animation, a less occupied niche, so I may stick with that for some time. I approached Coast Salish painter Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun about animating his surrealistic satires about native land claims, but he's already got a deal in the works with a US network -- animating painters seems to be really catching on all of sudden! As a refreshing break, though, I may spend some time animating my dreams, using fast-sketch, hand-drawn animation on computer. Otherwise, I have proposals I hope to pursue, perhaps as NFB investigates, such as "Nature on the Move," a simulated time-lapse animation of the geological and ecological evolution of Canada ["Earth Moves" 2000]. Or "Prime Mover:" an expression of "scientific animism," a dance of the fractal levels of life from first cause to molecules to cells to organisms to Gaia. Another idea is a kind of experimental investigation of camouflage, animal behavior, perception, illusion, and the nature of abstraction by using simple shapes interacting ambiguously in terms of scale, timing, foreground/background, whole/part, continually re-configuring to produce surprising shifts of context. It would hopefully function both artistically and educationally.  [To read about the work Arthur developed and produced in the years since this interview, click here.]

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