Chez Ani And Beyond
By Andrew Jaremko
The Ottawa International Animation Festival is a big event. Quickdraw had a lot going on there, and I had promised a fancy setup for the Chez Ani after-hours party. My dream was to have people animating on more than one computer and to be projecting their animations while they were working. And all to music, so I could show off some of the things I had programmed into StopMotion Station. (I definitely had an agenda going to the Festival – in addition to helping Quickdraw keep promises.)
I took four computers (well, five including my notebook) and the setup worked. We set up three stations with cameras for shooting. All the frames people shot were stored on the fourth computer, which could play them back – completely independently of the people shooting their animations. I had a few pencils and pens there, as well as some paper. I expected a lot of creativity, and I wasn’t disappointed. We still have all of the animations people did, and I plan to put some samples on the Web. (Just haven’t done it yet)
I didn’t spend a lot of time talking to people at Chez Ani, so I’m not really sure how it all went over. I’m told that it attracted a good deal of attention. I had also been shooting sequences of photos on my digital still camera, and played them back as animations as well. I think the sequences from the picnic went over very well.
Since Chez Ani ran at nights I didn’t get to see a lot of the Festival. I missed the performance of Richard Reeves’ Signal film, which was disappointing; I wanted to see how my segments looked in the final film. I spent most of the days sleeping, and then had to set up the computers and take them down each night. Just like rock and roll.
The first night was relatively slow since there was another “official” party going on. There were enough people for a fairly intimate feeling, and it pointed the way for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Those nights Chez Ani was packed – and on Friday we were there until 5 am, if memory serves. I wondered just how much the partygoers in the back could see, since we only had a small screen to project on.
Frederic Lebrasseur of Shan Ku Kai Studio shot a sequence of super close-up images. Later in the evening (I think it was Friday) we played the movie while he performed a soundtrack live on the microphone. I just let the movie run rather than jump around in it, but it was very exciting. It reinforced the importance of sound to the performance. Our next step is to jam the movie with musicians and sound performers. (We’ll have to get JF on the mike.)
I did discover that there’s a thriving appreciation of “performed” cinema –for want of a better way of saying it. I spoke with one artist who works with banks of 20, 40 60 Chez Ani and Beyond Continued projectors, all running loops. He was very interested in the way StopMotion Station can jump around among movies and within movies. So my feeling about the importance of being able to control a movie while it’s playing was right. I got further confirmation the week after Ottawa, when Johanna Dery and Devon Damonte came to Quickdraw to talk about their work on Wednesday the 9th. They ran a 24 hour marathon of drawing, scratching, painting, and manipulating 16mm film at the Festival. I did see the result at the Festival and they showed it, along with a lot of other things, at Quickdraw. As the evening progressed we got a little looser. Ed Ackerman was assisting with the projection and we started showing some Quickdraw works (with soundtracks) along with some of our visitors’ film loops. Devon was starting, stopping and reversing his projector.
I had brought my electronic projector along. Not to be left out, I fired it up and projected the Ottawa material along with the two 16mm projectors, “performing” the movies along with the music. It was a lot of fun, and Ed said it was he best “dueling projectors” he had seen. I intend to do a lot more of it with our planned animation Chataquas and in as many other places as I can.
