windowboxes

OK, it’s not really spooky.  At least I hope not.  But here is the kitchen set for the film…  with all freshly installed lights.  (N.B. the set isn’t properly lit yet; I’m just using the practical lights within the set, and in most of these images, the main light overhead lights of the studio.  In the images where the lights are off, the effect is similar to that of a face being lit from beneath with a flashlight, Blair Witch style.  Or maybe it just feels that way because it’s almost Hallowe’en.  Anyhoo…)

Happy All Hallows’ Eve!

Filed by stephanie dudley at 2:00 am under Set Design
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I love stop motion.  It’s the only thing I can think of that brings together all the things I’m passionate about, all in one place.  Design, writing, carpentry, puppet-making, animation, poetry, photography, music, and… painting.  However, I now have a love/hate relationship with painting.  Way back in the 90s I studied figurative painting for 4 years before finding motion design by accident, or more specifically, being called into broadcast design in my last year of college and saying yes.  So there’s always been a mild remorse at the thought of a lost career as an artist.  But these are just thoughts, and they don’t mean much…

Anyway, let’s just say I began this painting having mixed feelings.  Opening up that old paintbox (above) is scary for me.  But I really wanted to feature a painting of a Galician landscape in this part of the set.  The landscape goes into a 3-panel frame, which makes a room divider screen that separates the dining room from the kitchen.  I have a particular painting style that I like,  (I like GRIDS, and TRANSLUCENCY!) so I had no choice but to paint it myself.  Here are the progress shots:

My reference pic, found on the web and printed out.  I was specifically looking for some farmland.  A cabbage patch in the Galician countryside, perhaps?

My technique for these types of paintings involves gridding out a source photo, and first roughing the image in on a similar grid on rice paper (coated with acrylic gloss medium).

Once the image is roughed in, leaving some areas translucent, I go square by square and paint one square at a time, as if each little square were an abstract painting.  I am selective about the squares I want to focus on:  in this case I just do the town in the BG of the scene.

Here’s the final screen, lit from front and back.  I had gessoed the middle area where the cityscape is, to make this part opaque, while the field and sky are both translucent.  It’ll be interesting to see this lit properly on the set.

Here’s what the screen looks like from the back.  It’s kinda interesting to me to paint this way, because it’s a 3-dimensional object rather than flat.  You can do the underpainting after you do the main painting.  So here I added the grid to the back, as well as some turquoise and teal underpainting highlights, and backed it with the gesso, in selective spots.

Here’s a kinda rough shot of what it’ll look like in the set.  The colour palette works with the dining room, and overall I’m really happy with it!  Though again, it should be lit so that the sky is more glowy.  But that’ll come.

If you’re interested, here’s a blast from the past — old paintings and artwork from college days…  I think you can see the similarity.  I have made many more grid paintings since, but these are some of my favourites.

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The set I’m building has three main designs.  It’s a theatre, containing 3 miniature sets on its stage:  one where it’s more or less empty, one where there’s the 1970s kitchen, and one with a dining room.  Here’s the dining room, in progress, but almost finished.

Again, I’m using a minimal palette for this room.  The colours are pale yellow, pale green, a warm brown, a deep brown, and a deep teal.  Earth and Water colours.  The palette is also partly inspired by memories of my grandparents’ living room, accentuated with fragments of Galician and Ukrainian cultures.

First I made a wall out of 3/8″ plywood, and covered it with some textured fabric, acrylic paint, and a strip of miniature molding.  The fabric started out as a pale teal blue, which I dyed with acrylic paints to get it to this colour.  The fabric (and colour) is reminiscent of the couch cover my grandparents had.  The couch is where we used to sit on our visits when I was a kid, so I had a lot of time to examine that fabric, and elements of the room, when I was bored.

They also had a lot of dark wood, and a plate rail in the dining room.  I devised a similar plate rail here, but rather than making mail-order Norman Rockwell plates like they had, I painted the plates with patterns inspired by the Sargadelos ceramics from Galicia.  I had to give up the trademark colours of the Galician ceramics, though — the beautiful blues and whites — to fit in with my colour palette.  There is no white in the set really, and the royal blue wouldn’t work, so I improvised.  I also didn’t want the images to be too high-contrast, as they would stand out too much against the pale wall.  I really just wanted some subtle detail there.  There is not a lot going on in this dining room, so I didn’t want the subtleties of the drawings to overwhelm this part of the set.  (The plates are made from buttons taken from my other grandmother’s old button collection…  I never met her, but she used to sew a lot, so these buttons are pretty special.  She saved them in an old Black Magic chocolates box.  Note the old girl guide button above — be prepared!)

I had just seen Ishu Patel giving a talk and presentation of his work last weekend at the NFB, in which he spoke about his Paul Klee influences, and showed some Paul Klee slides… I think those images sank in as I was reminded how great he was.  I’ve always liked Paul Klee’s drawings.  So you can see that influence here as well.

Erín sent me this awesome pamphlet straight from Sargadelos, which outlines the meanings behind their mysterious amulets…  some of which are quite bizarre and fascinating…  (Plus some info about horns and witches!)

The chairs were inspired by my favourite architect and furniture designer, Roy McMakin.  They were built by Miriam, who has proven herself to be the chair-making queen.

More quick notes:  the tabletop is made from a small bamboo cutting board; the plates on the table are also buttons; the bowls are those rubber things you put on the bottom of metal chair legs to protect your floors; the clear “glass” cups are rubber thimbles; the copper pot and platter (which will soon hold an empanada!) are made from copper pipes and pipe fittings; the lid of the copper pot is a metal button shank coated with copper foil; the candles are fimo but are wired to tiny bulbs which will be on dimmers to create a flickery candlight; and there will eventually be a landscape painting in that folding room divider / screen-thingy.   I plucked a few interesting-looking grasses from the garden to make the dried flower arrangement… and the little bundle of grasses on the floor is a nod to Ukrainian traditions, a tiny didukh.

Filed by stephanie dudley at 11:37 am under Set Design
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I had dinner at my friend Susie’s last week.  What is the significance of this, you ask?  Well, I’ll tell you.

Sometimes I feel like I was meant to make this film.  There have been many, many magical moments when things fly out of the universe towards me in a way that make me stand back in awe.  An example of this would be my friend Susie’s latest revelation.

The film, as you may know, is based on a Galician poem.  So I’ve been trying to incorporate Galician elements, here and there.   Until reading the poems from the book Little Theatres I had never even heard of Galicia before.  So I don’t know much about the culture, other than the brief glimpses given in Little Theatres.  Susie heard about this important aspect of the film — its language — and suddenly came out with the fact that she herself is Galician, even though all along she has been saying that she’s Spanish.  As far as I had always known, she spoke Spanish, and grew up there… but all this time she had sneakily been born in Galicia and not told me.  Or “Galithia,” as she pronounces it.

So, we were both thrilled at this discovery — she at the fact that I’m making a film in her parents’ native tongue, and I at the fact that she still visits there, and brings back beautiful Galician ceramic artwork and craftspieces.  Last week she offered to cook me a (semi-)traditional meal, introduce me to her kids (whom I’d never met before) and show me her lovely ceramics.

The relevance of this dinner, and the ceramic pottery, to the film will become apparent soon.  I will (later this week) show pictures of my dining room set, which is looking smashing, if I do say so myself.  More pictures from Dinner at Susie’s behind the cut…

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Filed by stephanie dudley at 2:00 am under Inspiration,Little Theatres,References,Set Design
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I’m guessing most of you have seen this, but I’m embarrassed to say I finally saw it just this past weekend for the first time, after hearing so much about it.  So maybe some of you haven’t seen it either.  Worth seeing again, anyhow.  I can’t stop thinking about it — it is incredible.  Not stop motion — but just beautiful animation.

(NFB / YouTube Link Here)

Filed by stephanie dudley at 8:21 pm under Inspiration
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My friend Loretta came by last week to cut and style all the puppets’ hair.  There are no hairdon’ts here.  Nosir.  I think they’re looking great.

First of all, this character absolutely slays me.  Is she not insanely cute?  She’s not the main character though — she’s her sister, Abigail:

Here’s the Dad, Xosé Luís.  We’re not 100% sure yet about his long 70s shag haircut; this might be cut shorter and more traditional once he’s wearing his costume…

Loretta gave the Mom, Liberdade, just the right type of look, I think.  Not 100% sure about the wire at the back; I might paint this to knock it back a bit.  Have to wait and see, again, once she’s in costume:

Finally, there’s Sabela, with her new ‘do.  Similar to the old one… it’s meant to look like she did it herself.  It’s a little-kid-ponytail.

And here’s Loretta’s fancy toolkit, and Loretta at work.  She’s brushing boiling water on the puppet to try and hold the nylon hair in place.  We later fixed the hair with some glue called “scenic cement” that’s intended for model railroad foliage.  So the up-dos are not coming down — they’re rock solid.

Thanks Loretta — you are a genius!

Filed by stephanie dudley at 2:00 am under Puppets
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Instal?  Hair?  Well, I don’t know how else to describe this process.  I did this with both practicality and aesthetics in mind, as usual.  So it’s about 1/10 rooted strands of hair, and 9/10 glued on.  Rooted where you could see the roots, and glued everywhere else.

1. I used these nylon hair extensions made by Easihair.  Nylon works well because it’s heat-resistant, which means you can iron it and style it with boiling water.  (Ouch, poor puppet!)  Real human hair extensions would also work, but of course they’re much more expensive, and somewhat gross, in my opinion.  So to work with these extensions, I had to take out the elastic that the hair is stitched to, splice the lengths of hair apart (they came sewed into 2 layers of hair, one shorter than the other), and iron each length of hair (on the lowest heat setting!) so that it’s straight and easier to work with.
2. Next I painted a “cap” on the puppet’s head where the hair would go, to fill in the scalp with the colour of the hair.  I mixed about 2/3 acrylic paint with 1/3 liquid latex so that it’ll be stretchy, and won’t peel away from the scalp.
3. Here’s what the length of hair looks like once it’s peeled away from the elastic and its other half…
4. I hold the length of hair up to the base of the scalp, and mark the length I’ll need for the base of the scalp.  I stick the trimmed piece on with liquid latex, and work my way up the scalp, one layer at a time… letting the latex cure in between.



5. Here’s the first layer of hair, stuck in at the base of the scalp.
6. Then I add layers about 1 cm apart, wrapping in a horizontal semicircle around the head, to fill in the painted area.  There are about 3-4 semicircular layers on this puppet.
7. Once I get to the top, above where the part would go, I divide the head into 2 halves, adding smaller strips of hair on either side of the part.  I.e. now the strips aren’t semicircles around the head, but rather 2 lines parallel to the part.  I build these layer by layer until the 2 strips are about 5 mm apart, surrounding where I want the part to go.  So for Liberdade, the part is on one side, so there’s one side that has more strips of hair glued in.



8. Now comes the rooting part.  First I made a hair rooting tool out of a medium sized needle.  Using a Dremel tool, I file off the tip of the needle’s eye, making it open at one end, so that it forms a Y shape.
9. I carefully cut apart the strips of hair into strands using an Exacto knife.  Thankfully the way these hair extensions are made, the hair is already in perfectly sized strands, looped at the sewn end.  I carefully insert the loop of hair onto the Y needle tool.
10. Then I jab the hair into the head, strand by strand.  This is pretty hard to do… both because it’s kind of gruesome repeatedly jabbing hair into a human-like head…  but it’s also a delicate task.  I carefully hold the needle in place, with the eye side pointing towards the head, holding the strand of hair, and use pliers to force it into the scalp.  It takes quite a bit of force, which is why I learned to use plumber’s epoxy to reinforce the puppets’ head armatures.  Otherwise the head will lose its shape here.
11. The rooted hair will stick straight up.  As mentioned above, the best way to make nylon hair take on a specific shape is to use heat — in this case, I just pour boiling water over the head (!) and smooth it down into place.  At the end, I do some paint touch-ups, making sure any latex-glue areas are painted over with the hair colour, to mask any strange gobs.

Here she is, with newly rooted and glued hair.  Later she gets a haircut and a special stylin’ ‘do!

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Here she is — the Mom… not QUITE finished — still have to paint her hands and finish off some of the sewing…

Other than some minor tweaks, all 4 puppets are now complete!  Woohoo!

Filed by stephanie dudley at 12:23 pm under Puppets
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Mike Brent wrote a post a couple days ago about how difficult it is to tune out human voices, and the effects this has within the context of a film.   I’d never thought of this before, thinking of film as a medium that fills in the visuals for you where other mediums don’t.  But film dialogue and — especially — voiceovers can sometimes give too much away, filling in the silences that draw the viewer in, allowing them to be co-creators of the film.

This got me thinking about my own film.  Translating between different languages of voiceover, text, and image is central to what I’m attempting to work with.  I wrote before about how the poem on which the film is based is written in Galician, and how the poem’s author uses language as different dimensions of mind…  each language concerting its own thought patterns, and each non-English language providing escape to the drone of the Big Voices (commercial media, political speeches).

What happens when the voice in a film is speaking another language?  If there is silence, or another language, or if the voice is too quiet, then the viewer’s mind tends to either ignore it completely, or it becomes occupied in trying to understand.  The mysterious sound of a foreign tongue becomes a puzzle for the mind to focus on, trying to interpret or make sense of what it hears, like trying to find an image inside an ink blot.  We can’t just let things be.

I used to practice something which may seem kind of odd…  I don’t have the advantage anymore of being able to enter the dimensions of other languages (I used to speak fluent French, but have almost completely lost it.)  So my breathing space away from the Big Voices of English involved pretending I was a fish.  (!).  Walking down a city street, which is flush with signs and posters, sandwich boards and stickers, I would pretend that I was a fish, crawling along the bottom of the ocean.  All living beings were other fish and fauna, swimming along; all sandwich boards, signs, and posters were simply flora and rocks of the ocean.  They became shapes and colours, with no meaning beyond these visual properties.  Suddenly text becomes unreadable; text is no longer text.  It’s just a bunch of colourful symbols, no different from any other image on a flat plane.

This way of seeing takes practice.  But I found it incredibly soothing.  I stopped trying to understand or problem-solve the images of my own language.  There is a difference in my mood when I’m walking along a busy downtown street, bombarded by visual imagery and text all vying for my attention, vs. walking along a busy downtown street and not absorbing any information.  Of course, I am aware of my surroundings, and not about to walk into traffic or anything… but it takes a different kind of awareness to disorganize visual language and see it from the perspective of an illiterate being — illiterate in the sense of not being able to read text OR flat visual imagery.

Often on public transit I hear people speaking languages I don’t understand.  Lots of them.  In this case, I enjoy listening but trying not to create stories in my head of their dialogue.  I allow myself to be content not understanding, but just enjoying the sounds of language, of people’s voices.

This breathing space becomes essential to me.  Even when it seems impossible to do suddenly unlearn a language, like when walking down a busy(ish) street such as this:

I’d like to turn down the loudness and simply walk down the street, a quiet and neutral observer.

I did an oil painting a while ago that was partially about this practice of non-understanding, or seeing only solid values of shades and tones, concrete things, without joining them with meaning; or wanting silence.  I went to a subway station in the city that was under construction, and took some pictures of the open ceiling.  (A subway cop actually approached & casually questioned me while doing this… I think it was 2002 or so, so too close to 9/11.)

I then flipped the scene and disguised the text into something unreadable…

Make what you will of a figure fallen on an unreadable sign, with the world upsidedown…  Not my happiest image…

But back to the film.  There will be moments in there where I’ve planned to let the v/o run on its own, without the crutch of the written text to translate, for a brief period.  Just to have that space (for non-Galician-speakers) where the mind tries to understand, but isn’t able to.  And perhaps the viewer gives up, just seeing the image and the sounds of a voice, but not taking in meaning, for a moment.  Or rather, perhaps, she provides her own meaning to the voice, for that moment.

Filed by stephanie dudley at 2:00 am under Film Thoughts,Little Theatres
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Finally!  I’d like to introduce Sabela’s Dad, Xosé Luís.

OK, I’m still getting the hang of this sculpting with nylon stockings.  It’s not as easy as it looks!

I’m just thankful that the little dude will be wearing very heavy clothes to cover up the seams and oddities.  I’m honestly not too sure why I seamed his legs up the front, when he’ll be sitting in a chair…?

I’m very pleased with how his face turned out though; note that he will look a lot less like Geddy Lee once his hair gets cut to a short new ‘do.

And… I’m still sewing her, but here is the Mom, Liberdade, in progress.

I sure hope I haven’t broken any rules of puppetmaking by taking photos of her BEFORE she has eyes!  I realized after that I might be going against the flow here.  But I just couldn’t wait.

Filed by stephanie dudley at 11:49 am under Puppets
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