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Week 1

A Cup of Tea: (zen koan)
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university
professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's
cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no
longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!" Like this cup,"
Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show
you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
To be true to one self and original one must forget some of the rules that have
been acquired over time.
“.. consider the imagination a major power of human nature.” Gaston Bachlard


Lecture

Soundtrack pro
demonstration

Process(discussion)

Storyboarding

most flexibility: use index cards

from "Making Comics" you need to address:

flash intro:

Visual Music


Reading * Viewing

Assignment

  1. Form teams. select production manager, and send email to HGoldman@umassd.edu
  2. Analyze music in sound track pro, develop story line, create Xsheet (dopeSheet) in excel.
  3. In 3-5 sentences(using text edit): describe protagonists problem, 2 attempts at solutions, final resolution.
  4. Using drawing media and 5 by 8 index cards, create sketches to visualize and develop finished storyboard. When developing the storyboard try to use camera cuts to define new scenes. Remember the "film language" discussions from dm2. You do not have a lot of time, so keep things simple. When changing the angle of the character in the movie you should use camera cuts. Scan the storyboard into photoshop and save at 72 dpi. Deposit storyboard into warp and woof.
  5. Sketch simple protagonist, antagonist, set and props. Front and side views as well as 3/4 shots. Try to design the character such that you can easily draw views from different angles. keep the character simple. look at storyboard and develop sketches based on the boards
  6. remember Disney's 12th principal of animation: Appeal
  7. create blank flash file with 720 by 540 dimensions per the tutorial"interface intro.

Due next class

what should be turned into warp and woof next week:
(remember work must be turned in prior to 10:00 pm)
(your grade will be based on these items)

  1. 3-5 sentence description of protagonists problem, failed attempts at solutions, and final resolution (use text edit program) No indesign or work documents are accepted.
  2. 4 sentence summery of Freff article(see below)
  3. scanned storyboard (scanned or converted to 72 dpi)
    (scan frames at 72 dpi so they show clearly when projected and are easy to read within a 720 pixel wide and 480 pixel tall format.
  4. music analysis in relation to storyboard (excel XSheet))
  5. 72 dpi scanned in rough pencil sketches of character props and environment(72 dpi) must fit in 720 by 480 size.

    • we will project storyboards and drawings in class next week. double check visibility of text and image.
    • These should also be stored on the your personal backup folder. The personal backup server will not be looked at by anyone but you and CITs staff. Only files on warp and woof will be evaluated. Homework files will eventually be thrown out of the warp and woof server. Warp and Woof is for weekly grading. It is not safe for storage.
    • Keep only legal school related files on your personal sever space

Storyboards will be referred to all semester long.

If you make significant changes please deposit updates in the wk 1 homework folder

Reminder:
warp and woof is: 134.88.74.60
user name:
your entire last name, directly followed by the first initial of your first name.

For example, Joy Miller would type in her user name as: millerj

password:
first four letters of your last name directly followed by the first four digits of your student ID number.

For example, user millerj has a student ID of 008956778 so for her password she types in mill0089
User name: millerj
Password: mill0089
Click CONNECT

(remember work must be turned in prior to 10:00 pm)
(what you grade will be based on)
this project is not an exact replica of earlier dm assignments.

Turn in 4 sentence synopsis of the following reading next week:
"lookin for snappy first sentence"
By Freff, keyboard magazine

Call me ishmael. (that was a good one.)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do.
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to re-member that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Lately I have come to feel that the pigeons are spying on me.
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
In the beginning. Something happened. To someone. Or because of someone. Or some-thing. Somewhere. Somehow. And then the book/song/symphony/one-act/story/movie/ play/campaign/show rolled, its audience either rolling along or not, depending on the skill of the creator, the strength of the creation, and the power of that opening hook.
Just above I quoted a few favorite literary volleys from Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, lewis Carroll, Garrison Keillor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Russell H. Greenan, Thomas Pynchon, and Genesis. All of them different, to be sure, but all of them proven hooks. (Irreverent thought: Given the oft-credited authorship, Genesis could be read as a lengthy employment resume.) Were you here with me and my CD player, I could just as easily have made the point by using musical examples: the bird-riot swell and swing of Yes’s Close to the Edge, Beethoven’s hammer-blow Fifth and self-deconstructing Ninth, the teenage mutant organ warble of Prince’s “I Go Crazy” . . . or any first phrase by J.S. Bach, Johann’s body of composed work being the musical equivalent of the King James Bible. All different and yet there is a common ground among them, a set of shared characteristics that can help us understand and create our own beginnings that work. Four of these shared elements strike me as particularly critical in the artist’s quest to avoid false starts, misfires, DOA’s, nonambulatory preambles, and beginnings that flop and quiver like rancid cafeteria Jell-O cubes.
In ascending order of importance and subjectivity, these elements are:
#1 Clarity.
I have a friend with a peculiar speech impediment. He stutters. Not words, sentences. With him, the normally internal process of deciding how to express a thought is made public. He begins to speak, stops in mid-sentence, starts again, stops again, starts. . . until finally, after several such apparently random sentence fragments, the listener perceives the single point that all the fragments aim at. Before that revelation the effect is maddening. And misleading. My friend is one sharp cookie, but a lot of people will never stick around to learn it. The same goes for unfocused work in the arts, where no unpaid, unprepared, unprovoked audience willingly endures a muddle. Clarity requires that all beginnings be made of simple parts. Break that rule and you leave the audience nothing to grasp, which means that you leave them behind.
This does not, by the way, rule out complex beginnings. But you must build complexity out of clean pieces instead of pitching concept casserole at the first five rows. There are musicologists who have spent their entire lives dissecting the first movement of the Ninth, but at bottom its complexity reduces to one short phrase.
#2 Certainty.
If clarity in a beginning is saying things plainly, then Certainty is the confidence of having plain things to say. It is a bridge to your audience’s trust. There they are, sitting in the concert hall or puttering about their living rooms or crammed into standing room only, offering you their ears-’’Take ‘em and shake ‘em:’ they are saying-and all you really have to do is not blow it. A beginning is no time to be a wimp.
Science fiction writers refer to this audience phenomenon as “willing suspension of disbelief.” In effect, it is license to take the time required to make your point, with only one caveat - the audience has got to believe that a point is actually being made. Support their belief and they will grant you the benefit of their doubt. Lose their belief by projecting an uncertain purpose and they will trash you. “Call me ,Ishmael,” says Melville at the start of Moby Dick, not “You can call me Ishmael” or “My friends on this boat I was on called me Ishmael” or “This is a whale of a story, hey?”
#3 Implied Complexity.
On its own, a bowl of steamed rice is pretty boring. Ditto for solid blue canvases and johnny one-note drones; good props for meditating on the path to enlightenment, maybe, but not role models for a work I of art. (The audience can’t applaud the play if i the first act puts them to sleep.) For all its clarity and certainty, then, a good beginning must also
have spice, contrast, even contradiction. It must, have tension and no release. More than merely’ establishing a threshold, it must convince the, audience that a larger, wilder, more interesting world exists on that threshold’s other side. In short, good beginnings hint broadly. Re-read those opening sentences quoted above to I see this for yourself. The most laid-back of the lot, the one used week after week by Garrison! Keillor in his radio monologs-”It has been a !
quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town” -is nothing but a hint, being spoken in an America where Keillor’s rural-to-the-point-of-mythic midwestern life is as alien as anything Isaac Asimov ever wrote.
#4 Clank Factor.
At least, that’s what I like to call it. More academic (but less visceral) terms for the same effect might be “Carefully incomplete Completeness” or “Applied Curiosity Enhancement.” It’s teasing, is what it is: holding out on the really good stuff.
In one way; Clank Factor is a measurement of artistic boldness. The test for it is to get through the beginning of something and then make an abrupt stop. Pack up your instrument. Punch: the tape deck’s pause button. Put the book down. Turn off the VCR. A proper beginning will have raised questions, excited your interest. If the beginning in question has a high Clank Factor, stopping now will be torture; leaving those questions unanswered and that interest unfulfilled will feel like throwing a rod five seconds into the first lap of the Indianapolis 500. CLANK. Rattle. Crash. Conversely, dropping a piece of work that has little or no Clank is as easy as not dating your sister. Unfortunately for creators, Clank Factor is incredibly subjective. “fascinatin’ Rhythm” just won’t gain the same response in a Tuscaloosa bar as in a Boston cabaret. But you can improve your chances by casting as broad a net as the focus of your beginning will allow. Back to old principles - for teasing to work you’ve got to promise more than you are delivering (yet). Contrasts can help, as Stravinsky showed in combining a high clear woodwind and low moody strings at the beginning of Le Sacre du Printemps. Establishing the endpoints of a big story is also effective, as is bluntly contradicting accepted belief. Garcia Gabriel Marquez does both of those beautifully in his quoted sentence, linking idyllic childhood with imminent death by firing squad, and turning refrigerator ice into something rare and mysterious. There is far more to be said about beginnings than could ever be covered in this space. That they are radically different things for artist and audience, for example. That searching for them starts like prospecting and ends up like Olympic wrestling.
That you can always start with no beginning in mind, then come back to that challenge later. That each medium (and even each subject) liberates and imprisons beginnings in a different way. That they often take more time than the rest of the work. That beginnings establish context instead of benefitting from it. And that they are generally pure murder to conceive, so when they come easy watch out, because it means that what’s ahead will come hard. . . .
But what I most want to leave you with is this: As important as beginnings are, they are not as important as endings.