MY FAVORITE FILM BOOK

This is the best film book I know of: "Grammar of the Film Language" by D. Arijon. Too many film books waste the readers time with personal anecdotes and academic jargon. A lot of this book is made up of diagrams and captions and usually you can tell what's going on without reading the captions.

The book starts with simple set-ups like the one above. I love back shots where the actor walks away from camera into the set and seems to take you with him. We cut to a side shot to pick up the actor entering sc on a close shot. It's a challenging cut but one which is never jarring or confusing.

Arijon likes to cut to actors who are in the same quadrant of the screen that they were in on the previous shot. Is this standard practice or just a preference of the author?

Here's a nifty way to walk a man down a corridor. I like the the way the third shot, where he presumably stops, deliberately violates the screen direction of the previous two shots.

A lot of the set-ups in the book are more complicated than the ones I've shown here, but most of them are understandable without recourse to the text. Skillfully done drawings will often explain things faster and better than text. It's amazing that more books aren't presented this way.

A word about Arijon: he was a filmmaker and teacher in Uruguay when he published this book in the mid-70s. Can you imagine that!? It took someone from Uruguay to show us how to write a textbook the right way!

MY HAIR DYE STORY

You may have noticed that my hair is turning grey and that I haven't dyed it. I wouldn't be surprised if some generous soul admired me for being so close to nature as to allow my hair to take its true color. Actually I'm not close to nature at all and I'd dye my hair every day if I thought I could get away with it. I'm just not very good at hair color. One incident in particular turned me against it.

One day a couple of years ago my son told me that his girlfriend's parents were going to drop by for the first time. He naturally wanted me to clean the place to make a good impression. I thought fine, I'll do that, but first I'll dye my hair so they'll marvel at what a handsome, young-looking dad my kid has. I assembled all the paraphernalia in the bathroom and proceeded to apply the dye.

I was vigorously massaging the dye into my hair like the box said to do when I noticed that little dots of brown dye were falling into the sink and probably staining it. I didn't know what to do then it occurred to me to move over to the toilet and let the drops fall into that. Surely water and porscelin (spelled right?) would resist staining. I moved over and continued to rub the dye in, really energetically.

A while later I emerged from the bathroom all dressed, with my eyes closed and drying my hair with a towel. Just then the doorbell rang and I invited the visiting parents in. The two families assembled in the living room and a fun time was had by all.

After a while my son's prospective mother-in-law asked to use the bathroom and I pointed out where she could find it. She disappeared down the hall and everyone else continued to socialize. After a couple of minutes she appeared back in the living room only something was wrong. She looked sick as a dog. She was positively green and could hardly stand. Her husband didn't seem to notice and asked if he too could use the bathroom. He disappeared for a minute then came out a minute later even greener and more sickly than his wife. The two of them were in extremely bad shape! I couldn't figure out what was wrong. The couple made an excuse and practically ran out of the house into their car.

After they left my still and speechless family cast looks of disbelief at each other. I timidly looked into the bathroom expecting to find some dye implement that I might have forgotten to clean up. No, the room looked OK, or at least it did untill I focused on the toilet. There on the wall just behind the facility were dark streaks of brown emanating in an explosive fan pattern from the open toilet. It looked like...like... I can't bring myself to write it. I found myself turning green. Then I remembered that I was standing over the poscelin when I rubbed the dye into my hair. That was brown hair dye on the wall!

The couple never again visited us and my son and his girlfriend eventually broke up. Since then I've allowed my hair to take it's natural color. I'm frequently praised by ex-hippies for being so close to nature and so regally oblivious to what other people think. Actually I'm scared to death about what other people think. I just haven't the energy to retell the story again and again.

BTW, the girls in the picture are people I never met.

ME BABBLING ABOUT ROMANCE AGAIN

Half the artists who frequent this site are probably in San Diego for the comic convention. Good! I'm in the mood to write something really, really off-topic...something that absolutely no artist will want to read! Here goes....

TWO OBSERVATIONS ABOUT ROMANCE

First off, the picture above relates to my second point and has no relation to the kind of romance I'm writing about in this paragraph. Here I'm writing about the Romantic Era which may have started with Rousseau but reached its height in the 19th century. Now the odd thing is that the Romantic movement quickly split in two. It meant something totally different in England than it did on the continent. In England it was primarily a literary movement. It influenced poetry and stories and gave us novels like "Frankenstein." On the continent it was mainly a philosophical movement and it produced anti-Enlightenment philosophers like Nietzche and Mussolini.

English Romanticism favored people like Byron and Colleridge. Continental Romanticism favored Napoleon. Even the people who fought Napoleon openly admired him. He was informed by reason but he was said to have transcended it through his will. Continental literature of the period was full of references to will and the philosophers codified it. I love what the English did with Romanticism; I can't even begin to understand the continental variety.

Here's the second observation about romance. This time I'm talking about romance in the sense of a man and a woman falling in love. My guess is that romance is one of the factors responsible for the concept of human rights and liberty. Lots of institutions give lip service to supporting love and families but I get the feeling that every institution actually feels threatend by them. People who are passionately in love have their own agenda and they're willing to die for it. It's amazing that the medieval troubadors would have sided with this anti-social behavior. Eventually they persuaded society to support lovers at the expense of the weakening of the state. Interesting, huh?

Thanks to Steve Worth for the French postcard. Also, I hope Blogger will publish the paragraphs in type that's all the same size, as it is in the window I'm writing it in.

SOME LESSER-KNOWN EGON SCHIELE PICTURES

Here's (above) a red woman. She's not exactly a woman painted red but red that takes the form of a woman. We are fields of color that have minds.
Here's a woman (above) reduced to just the interesting parts. She's packaged in a rich brown and presented to us. The picture is sexy but you rebel against it because there's something disturbing about the missing limbs.

Here's legs with transparent, silky stockings stretched between them. It's odd to think that a naked figure is even more naked when wearing something. Transparent color like the green shown here is riveting because our minds can't figure out whether to regard it as pure color floating in the air or as a tint of the flesh color. A vagina thrown into the composition combines the mystery of sex with the mystery of color and texture.


The white woman with the colorful crotch is pure Kandinsky but it's easier to see what Kandinsky was getting at here than in his own paintings. Color here is portrayed as a weird, otherworldly attribute that is tamed and enslaved to allow us to perceive reality, but which has a mind of its own which can assert itself and threaten to show us the chaos that underlies things.Here's an elegant line drawing that suddenly erupts in extreme volume. When you see drawings like this you wonder if volume is the fundamental atom of vision, the thing that art is all about.

J.T. QUINN FIGURED IT OUT!

For a long time I've admired Will Elder's watercolor technique in "Little Annie Fannie" but I could never figure out how he did it. Now, thanks to an animation artist named J. T. Quinn I think I understand it.
A couple of months ago I stumbled on Quinn's blog called "JT QUINN SKETCHBOOK" and there it was, Elder's Annie Fannie technique adapted to Quinn's own sketch ideas! I recognized the look instantly!
Reading on I discovered that Quinn had taken a class with Harvey Kurtzman at SVA in New York city. Kurtzman taught the class Elder's way of painting watercolors. You build the color slowly with layers of transparent washes. Eventually you get a rich, brilliant glaze then you finish by spotting the most important color areas with a little gouache. It sounds simple but I had to read about it in Quinn's blog before I could figure it out.

Quinn's a pretty good sketchbook artist. If you visit his blog you'll find the Elder section archived under August 21, 2005.

TWO KILLER JOHN CARICATURES

Here are a couple more caricatures that John did of me. When I think about the John drawings of me that I've posted up till now I'm amazed at how many ways there are to draw just one face. There's the optimistic me, the seedy me, the retarded me, the rat me, the eager me... it goes on. A number of the ways of thinking about me required John to try a different kind of line or a different design concept.

I don't post these drawings out of ego, because I'm the model. I do it so this aspect of what John does will get into the historical record and so that these techniques won't be lost. And since history is watching I'll cop to accidentally cutting off the final "D" in "dreaded."



Here's me in pantaloons and cod piece. I'm stupid-looking here so the "V" of the head in the disdain drawing is inverted so the wide part is on the bottom, as if my head is too stupid to resist gravity. I like the tiny soda under the soft, rubbery upper-lip flap. The five o'clock shadow looks like it's made of toothbrush bristles. Tiny granny glasses cover the seedy eyes and the long, thin spectacle arm extends all the way back to the hay-filled ear. Warts, of course.

I like the restraint involved in making the wart on the end of the nose tiny and understated. If it had been bigger it would have taken our attention away from the elegant, sloping line formed by the nose and forehead. This long, continuous line is the true focus of the picture.

STEVE'S MIRACULOUS CARICATURE MACHINE

I have no idea what the final layout of this post will look like. I used Blogger settings that I was
warned away from by friends but which I had to try because my curiosity about them was eating me alive. If it all looks chaotic when it's published then I offer my apologies in advance.

Anyway here's some samples from Steve Worth's amazing caricature machine, which is actually a Mac laptop with a camera built in and with Mac Photobooth software installed. This is a $1500 package but that's probably peanuts to the filthy rich artists who frequent this blog. Just get your butler to pick one up next time he goes for a caviar run.

This program is amazing. It contains dozens of virtual lenses all of which distort the face in a different way. You just move your face around infront of the camera till you find a distortion you like then you click to save it.

I learned a lot about drawing by spending less than an hour with this machine. Look at the hand pictures...I never thought of drawing hands that way till I saw these snapshots! This is a great machine but it's going to put a lot of marker and pastel caricaturists out of business. If you do caricatures for a living then consider yourself warned!

My uncertainty about the final layout makes it impossible for me to assign names to the photos. The friends skewered here are: Steve Worth, Jon Trapnel, Marlo Meekins and myself. One more thing...um...I'm not as fat as I look standing behind Jon. That's a camera distortion. Just thought I'd mention that.

Thanks a million to Steve Worth for letting me use these pictures!