Creative

I just finished a winter assignment and thought I’d share a bit about “the making of” this new animation.

This project really started a few years ago, when I was given the FAX jr. animation stand used at the Animation Lab at Capital Children’s Museum. (I used to run the program at the museum, and the animation stand is an old friend.) I invested in a new camera and software to shoot single frame animation, and did some tests to make sure it was all working.

The stand really pulled me away from computer animation and back into physical media of drawings and objects. I decided to give myself an assignment of completing a fully drawn animated project. But what to do?

Two Alfred Hitchcock treats for you this weekend, to cover a range of creative topics such as suspense and filmmaking.

The first is an interview he did in 1972. I love listening to him talk, and he has a very dry sense of humor.

The second is an analysis of the way he blocks out a single shot in one of his films.

Brattleboro Community Television (BCTV), the community media center serving southern Windham County, will offer small group classes with hands-on experience in video production this spring.

BCTV offers individual training on an ongoing basis for Video Camera Basics, Editing with Adobe Premiere, and Studio Production. Call 257-0888 or email  to schedule a one-on-one training.

Spring 2016 Workshops:

In honor of Representative Town Meeting, this weekend we’ll take a short look at Parliamentary Procedure and Robert’s Rules of Order.

This video shows how your 4-H club or other organization can be an effective governing body by using well-recognized procedures for meetings. They cover everything from committee reports to making and amending budgets, tabling items, and delaying actions on items.

In order to be fully creative, it is sometimes good to hear unfamiliar things, or listen to people we don’t quite understand. Different points of view can lead to insights and breakthroughs, which can then have creative results.

Sun Ra is one of those people that I don’t completely understand, but I do enjoy listening to from time to time. This week we have a rare recording of him expounding on a number of issues in an Afrofuturism lecture at UC Berkeley called Afro-American Studies 198: The Black Man in the Universe/Cosmos.

Remember dipping your fingers into cool, wet paint and smearing it all across a piece of paper? Pushing it all around, getting it under your nails, and creating an abstract piece of school art? And the smell of that paint… mmm.

Here, Iris Scott uses that technique with great skill to finger paint with oils. It’s not as strange as it sounds, even though it isn’t done much. Most painters like brushes, but why not work directly, fingers to canvas?

We are very excited to announce this new adventure! Our formal name is Ewe Have Me In Stitches!
We welcome all crocheters and knitters, at any experience level! Best of all, being a member of this
chapter is free! Of course, if you would like to become a member of the CGOA, we will help you do just that!
There will be benefits to being a member of this chapter, but if you want even more benefits, join CGOA!

A few things that I am looking forward to (and if you have any ideas, please let me know)

​ – Learning experiences – I’d like to set one meeting a month to be a learning session. Learning a new

This weekend we learn how to draw some political cartoons. There’s really no right or wrong way to go, so these are just a few options and styles to get us going. The main rules are caricature and being tough on your subject.

First, a few drawing lessons. There aren’t a lot of videos about drawing the current slate of candidates, but there are some. (If you find others, add them in the comments.)

This week, let’s learn to code! Nothing difficult, of course, but it is good to know about the basic tags and how a page gets formatted.

This was something many of us learned in the early 1990’s (we used Netscape Navigator to do just what you see in this video), and is very similar to the old word processing programs of the 1980’s.

More recently, people using the internet use pre-made sites and are “protected” from needing to know any code, except for perhaps the skill of cutting and pasting links or embed codes for videos.

But that’s silly. Being able to create, name, and fill a web page with information is useful. Ever site we visit on the internet is built upon the HTML foundation. It is the language underlying the world wide web.

Pop songs of all genres have formulas for success. Most radio hits are 3 minutes, have an intro, a verse, a chorus, a verse, a breakdown, and go out with the chorus. Most keep the lyrics simple, and geared toward basic emotions, or thought one might have on a dance floor.

This extends beyond pop rock to pop soul and pop country. This week, we take a look at the creative work of Sir Mashalot, who shows us just how similar the county pop hits of today really are.

He chops and re-arranges six songs — “Sure Be Cool If You Did” by Blake Shelton, “Drunk on You” by Luke Bryan, “Chillin’ It” by Cole Swindell, “Close Your Eyes” by Parmalee, “This is How We Roll” by Florida Georgia Line, and “Ready, Set, Roll” by Chase Rice — showing just how formulaic and similar they are.

On Friday February 12, at 7:30, Write Action will be hosting a reading of poems and short prose on the topic of Mercy at the Blue Dot in the Hooker-Dunham Building in Brattleboro. In December, the non-profit organization, which supports writing and writers in the tri-state area, solicited the public for short pieces on this topic. Friday’s event will bring together some of the writers who responded to the call for written work on the theme of mercy.

This year’s invitation to write on one of the virtues is the second such writing prompt that Write Action has shepherded. Last year the organization solicited short stories of 500 words or less on the theme of hope. The group hopes to gather together a collection of writings on virtues, and to publish them in some form.

There is a tremendous amount of creativity when it comes to creating miniature worlds, and model train layouts are often some of the most amazing miniatures around. This video shows a engineer’s view of a model train set in the midwest. The video description says:

“The Hennepin Overland Railway Historical Society is located in Minneapolis, MN, and is one of the largest HO layouts in the Twin Cities, MN area. It also has the largest Helix of any model railroad in the United States that we know of. The Helix comprises 1/4 of the entire layout located in a 4,000 sq. ft. warehouse in South Minneapolis, and the entire Main Line equals 11 scale miles of track. If you are interested in visiting this railroad museum check out their web site for directions and hours of operation: http://hennepinoverland.org/ “

The River Gallery School is offering a class on book making.

Writers and others who want to learn how to create a physical book using basic book binding equipment.

This class will be made up of a series of smaller technique-specific workshops related to book arts. Along with making paste paper, marbled paper and decorative bookcloth, students will learn how to make books with exposed-bindings, soft covers and hard covers.

Students will also be encouraged to explore sculptural bindings and content driven book structures. The class starts March 25, 2016 and goes to May 20, 2016. It will meet Fridays, from 9:30 to Noon. The class coasts $280. The teacher is Briony Morrow-Cribs. Her website is www.brionymorrow-cribbs.com

This week we take a look at special effects for motion pictures, using the recent Star Wars release as our example.

One of the big lessons of media literacy is that things are not always what they appear. That is, anything can be convincingly faked, and what you think you are looking at may not exist. National Geographic famously moved pyramids to new locations to make a better cover photo, and some news outlets have erased people from images or coverage of events.

So, it is important to know that we are being fooled, and fooled often. Knowing this doesn’t take the fun away when the tricks are used to entertain, but it should help sharpen critical viewing skills.

This weekend we look at creativity with words. Have you ever thought about inventing your own language? Sometimes children do it, but what about adults?

Here’s a look at three grown-ups who have jobs constructing languages for movies, and how they approach their work. From thinking about who the characters are and where they are from, through grammatical systems and sounds, these folks help elves and Klingons communicate.

One of the ways we used to be more creative as a culture was in our ornamentation of buildings. Part of the thrill of visits to big cities is to see the highly decorated and elaborate old facades.

While cost-cutting has streamlined buildings of more recent times, the Washington Cathedral in DC is a relatively new structure that stands as an example of what is possible with carved stone ornamentation. Cats, monsters, frogs, birds, snakes, owls, mules, dragons, pigs, and people are represented as gargoyles and water spouts.

Let’s think big.

I’m stretching the concept of creativity here a bit, but I do so under the following argument: one should be aware of the tools available to be able to fully contemplate creative opportunities.

In simple, artsy terms, knowing about paper and pencils are great, but the creative options expand when one knows about crayons, paints, and markers.

Creativity comes in all flavors. This week it involves chocolate, baking, and Julia Child.

Watch this episode to see how common items such as flour, sugar, and eggs can be creatively combined to make an edible yule log.

This week we’ll study some color theory with Scott Naismith, a Scottish landscape painter, and dive into aspects of hue and saturation with him.

I’ve been doing art all my life, yet still struggle with color. I love black and white lines and using pens and pencils to shade things with hatch marks and smudges. The 256 shades of greyscale suite me well, and they could keep me busy forever.

This week we’ll take a look at a film called Der Lauf Der Dinge, or The Way Things Go. It was an art installation/project done a while ago in a warehouse, filmed in just a couple of takes, that creates a large Rube Goldberg-style contraption out of ordinary sorts of things such as tires, trash bags, ladders, and fire.

At times it goes fast and has excitement built in, while at other times the drama comes from patiently waiting for something we know is about to happen to indeed occur.