Month / December 2016

by Robert Gerst

Writing Is Kinetic Sculpture: Crafting the Essay in Liberal Arts

 

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Writes Professor Carol Dine:

Studio work and expository writing in Liberal Arts classes potentiate each another. The Thinking, Making, Writing, research essay  that  Chongsheng (Howard) Zhao wrote to describe  “Labrador Dragon,” his kinetic sculpture, demonstrates the synergy.

For a metals class, Howard selected and sketched three animal figures in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. As a sculptor, he planned to devise an imaginary animal, incorporating parts of the creatures he observed at the museum. As an essayist, he planned to describe his imaginary animal in sentences recounting how he created it. In brass, he struggled while he abutted  edges; in words, he puzzled as he connected ideas. His sculpture evolved through trial and error,  as his essay did.

Through library research, a requirement for his Thinking, Making, Writing essay, Howard learned that Eastern metal artists traditionally represent animals as static. In the end, though, he riveted together the parts of his dragon, imbuing the sculpture with a capacity to move.

“Though this process was tiring,” he concluded his essay, I still enjoyed it,” Howard Zhao reports. Read his statement here .

by Robert Gerst

Film History: The Flashbulb Frenzy World of Martin Scorsese

Above: Raging Bull (1980), top left; The Aviator (2004), bottom right; The King of Comedy (1982), top right; Casino (1995), bottom left

“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” – Martin Scorsese

In essays treating films of the twentieth century, students in Film History often focus on elements that distill a director’s vision. Elyssa Iacobello cites flashing flashbulbs as a critical component of Martin Scorsese’s vision. She observes:

“Flashbulbs [in a scene hint] that Martin Scorsese had a hand in the film. Using them in different settings, he captures different emotions that come with flashbulbs. In Raging Bull, you feel the suffocating pressure emanating from the aggressive reporters. In The Aviator, you experience the strange disorienting effect of the flashing lights. Using flashbulbs in multiples and at the correct time, Scorsese heightens the feeling he wants you to feel. In the suffocation, you feel trapped. In the strangeness, you feel the illusion. Scorsese uses flash bulbs for editing effects, too. In The Aviator, he uses flashes to disguise difficult cuts. In that film, flashbulbs and strobes disorient both characters and viewer. Scorsese is very fond of dreamlike states in movies. His flashes allow you to feel like you have stepped into another world.”

by Robert Gerst

“Dear Quiet One…”

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When she first enrolled, Shelby Doolity noted what she hoped to achieve in summative elective, Friday Night Lights.: “I want to think more critically about what I’m watching instead of allowing the mind-numbness of entertainment for entertainment’s sake take hold.”  Launching her final project, she explained how she would achieve that ambition to feel more deeply and think more critically:

envelope“I want to write ‘letters’ to about ten of the characters I found most impactful within the show. I plan to pick a word/phrase for each in order to title the letter. As opposed to saying ‘Dear Matt,’ I’ll address him with something like  ‘Dear Quiet One.’ I am inspired by Mary Louise Parker’s book, Dear Mr. You, and I practiced a lot of this sort of writing in my Creative Nonfiction class.”

Read Shelby Doolity’s  letters-to-Friday Night-Lights-characters.

by Robert Gerst

“Feet Are The Most Honest Part Of Our Bodies”

“How To Control Walter,” Robert Marcantonio, CG Animation

“Viewing Friday Night Lights (FNL),” Robert Marcantonio writes, “has helped me grow as an animator because the show has taught me the importance of body language when animating a character.”

Robert Marcantonio participated in the Spring 2016 Friday Night Lights summative elective seminar. Meet “Walter,” his FNL-inspired character above. Read excerpts  of his essay below.

Marcantonio explains:

Imagine you want to animate a character that is sad.  What comes to mind?  Slouched shoulders, droopy eyes, and an over all hunched stance? Say you want this character to simply walk across the screen. Perhaps he lost his job.  Maybe his girlfriend dumped him.  To effectively convey his state of mind, you need to put him in motion. As he walks across the screen with his body taking on an over all hunched look, you could make him take very slow, short steps.  Perhaps his feet drag across the ground.  His arms could drop to his sides and barely move.  His head and shoulders could slump towards the ground.

I start with the feet when I animate characters because feet are the most honest part of our bodies.  They advertise how we feel, even without us being aware of it.  “If you want to decode the world around you and interpret behavior accurately, watch the feet and the legs; they are truly remarkable and honest in the information they convey,” writes former FBI agent Joe Navarro in What Every Body is Saying. Friday Night Lights richly illustrates Navarro’s point…. In FNL, everyone jumps up and down when the Panthers win state in season one. They almost seem to defy gravity, which suggests their boundless joy and happiness.

I move on to the torso.  This part of the body can have a wealth of nonverbal tells, because there are many parts to observe: the hips, abdomen, chest and shoulders (Navarro, 85).  In FNL, Tim Riggins uses his torso very subtly, yet it gives the viewer an idea of what his personality is.  He hunches constantly, not in a defensive way, but in a care free, cool, “anything goes” kind of posture. He tends to drink a lot of beer, not worry about the future, hook up with girls, and occasionally get into fights.  Tim’s best friend, Jason Street, is quite the opposite (specifically before he ends up in a wheelchair).  Street stands tall.  His shoulders are always straight.  When he walks, he looks like he knows where he is going.  He was a guy who knew his future and was confident in achieving his dreams.

The reason why Tim Riggins is so interesting to an animator is because he has very little dialogue and relies on non-verbal tells.  In one important scene in Season One Episode Seventeen, Riggins walks into a bar to engage in a fight with an older man.  Prior to the fight, Tim is intoxicated and feels the need to perhaps prove that he is a man, even though he is just a kid.  When he walks into the bar to find his opponent, he leans to one side.  His torso communicates his motive and causes his whole body to just slump in a relaxed pose.  Once he signals to his opponent to walk outside and fight, the man walks out excited, but Riggins shifts gears. He stands robotic as wind up toy, goose-stepping to his destination.

Face matters, too.  A study of the face by Albert Mehrabian in Communications Study found that roughly 45% of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in words that are spoken and the way they are said.  A whopping 55% of a message relating to feelings and emotions is in facial expression (Mehrabian).  Facial gestures can emit a vast range of emotions.  As Navarro explains, “When it comes to emotions, our faces are the mind’s canvas” (Navarro, 165).

As a character animator, I like to use CG “rigs” that give me the ability to create complex emotions and movements.  I animated “Walter” above.  A vendor sells “Walter” to animators: endowing  him with motion, I gave him life. I see him as an outdoors-inspired old man.  I gave my Walter four basic emotions: contentment and happiness, astonishment, “pent-up-rage”, and a stern look.  Each gesture involves a lot of jaw, eye, eyebrow, mouth, shoulder, chest, and cheek movements.   The more subtle movements are achieved by moving the ears, areas of the mouth, and areas of eyes (the pupils, for example).  I also over-emphasized his facial gestures by adding squashes and stretches of the entire face.  Even the hat is animating, thus furthering the exaggeration effect I’m going for.

My Walter emerged from seven hours of enjoyable work. He illustrates  what goes on in my head—a plethora of Looney Toons episodes that continually loops indefinitely.   I view him as a work-in-progress. I make him gesticulate here. He illustrates what I learned viewing Friday Night Lights.

by Robert Gerst

Bad Cop…Good Cop…Great Coach—Summative Elective

Claire Owens, 14″ x 20″ watercolor on Arches paper•Robert Gerst, Digital Editing

In a summative elective, Professor Robert Gerst notes, students treat culturally rich topics from the perspectives of two or more Liberal Arts disciplines.

In the summative elective Friday Night Lights, students apply what they learned and how they learned to think in previous Liberal Arts courses to a television series that, even as it focuses on high school football in Texas, examines contemporary American society.

In her final Friday Night Lights essay, student Claire Owens writes that, as he coaches, Coach Taylor expresses two profoundly different educational philosophies. In the watercolor above, she expresses her assessment of Coach Taylor as an image.

coach-taylor-dualIn the cloud-filled sky above the home field of the Dillon Panthers, Claire Owens represents Coach Taylor’s two approaches. On the left she depicts his tough, stormy coaching. On the right she depicts his sunny, fatherly coaching. Taylor’s balance, she maintains, is what makes the Dillon Panthers the strong team that they are.

Every team needs a hard and stern coach as well as a soft, genuine one, Owens asserts. The middle ground where the two styles combine is the most vital aspect of any sports team, Owens says. For the Dillon Panthers, the blue skies in the distance signify hope for the future and winning the Texas state championship. Ultimately, in this show as in life, the players shine through the stormy clouds, learning and growing from when the coach was hard on them and strengthening their bonds with each other and with the coach when he welcomed them as a father would.

Taylor, Claire Owens judges, exemplifies how an effective coach bonds a team using both stern and gentle coaching methods. She say all that in the hues of her watercolor clouds.

by Robert Gerst

“Something Rich And Strange…”

Storm Scene in The Tempest, Raphaella Yang, Digital Drawing• Robert Gerst, Digital Editing•”Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies,” Vocal by Alfred Deller

Professor Albert Lafarge passes along this note from Literary Traditions student Raphaella Yang:

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Icon of St. George, Musuem of the Icons, Venice, Italy

“After I read what happened to the ship at sea in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” Raphaella Yang writes, “I  began imagining…how the storm, the thunder, the lightning, the fire, the waves and human cries would shake dramatically. The scene reminded me of the sinking ship in Titanic and the shipwreck in Life of Pi. But in The Tempest, resentful Prospero compels the storm and Ariel raises it. All that happens seems due to the force of nature, but Prospero has plotted all and left no clue save the freshness of mariners’ garments.

 

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Handwritten Gospel Manuscript, St. John Theological Monastery, Patmos, Greece

I remembered ‘the hand’ of divine  instruction so common in art I saw in my Early Christianity and Byzantine art course. In my digital drawing, Prospero’s  hand secretly conducts from the top right corner.”

The hand she incorporates into her drawing? She discovered it in a 1829 painting by John White Abbot.

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“Prospero Commanding Ariel,” oil on panel, John White Abbot, 1829

by Robert Gerst

“Since You Cannot Be My Bride, You Must Be My Tree!”—Literary Traditions

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Sevanna Kilman, Apollo Beside The Laurel Tree, Digital Drawing (1902 x 1080 pixels)

Professor Albert Lafarge reports that this digital sketch that Literary Traditions student Sevanna Kilman created depicts how Kilman interprets a moment  in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“Apollo still lusts after Daphne even after she has turned into a tree, “Sevanna Kilman writes. “He says to the tree he will never forget about her or his love for the woman the tree once was…Beside the laurel tree, he looks outward towards the sunrise as lovers do while the sun rises from the hilltop.”

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Daphne and Apollo, Antonio del Pollaiolo, 1470-1480

But Apollo’s emotion isn’t mutual love, Kilman judges. For that reason, the semi-human Daphne so customarily central to representations of this moment has, in Kilman’s digital sketch, already transformed into a tree. It happened as quickly as a sketch, Kilman adds.

by Robert Gerst

Jump-Cut In Film History

Excerpt: Jean Luc Godard, Breathless (1960)

“In History of Film,” Professor Robert Gerst writes, “students can learn by doing. They can undertake film making exercises I provide on the website accompanying my film history book, Make Film History. In the exercises, students re-experience moments when choices made by film making giants of the past created the cinema of today.

About Jean Luc Godard’s visual style, Elizabeth Pattyn writes:

One of the most defining films of the French New Wave, Godard’s Breathless changed the rules for what is acceptable in filmmaking. The film is most commonly known for showcasing Godard’s unique style of editing, which made the jump cut popular and acceptable. Although films at this time were expected to follow a smooth digression of editing, with every cut following a very logical pattern, Godard completely did away with this generic formula for storytelling, and instead relied on unexpected, quick jumps in editing.

Only minutes into the film do we see the first jump cuts. In the first scene, we witness Michel steal a car from the streets of Paris, and conspicuously rush through the narrow country road at top speed. Godard makes use of the jump cut as Michel passes numerous cars on the road. We’re given a POV shot from Michel’s view on the street, quickly passing car after car. Here Godard is showing the same action over and over again, without fluidity or polish. The mastery of Godard’s precise cutting is not only thrilling to the audience, but it also clarifies the character of Michel. He isn’t the mastermind he thinks he is. He isn’t smooth or cautious. He’s reckless and will undoubtedly be arrested before he can reach the heights of crime.

Working thru a Make Film History jump-cut exercise, Elizabeth Pattyn recreates Godard’s Breathless jump-cuts above in her 2016 version below.”

by Robert Gerst

“The story…represented for thousands of years…in my own personal way”

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“Students in my Literary Traditions sections,” Professor Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta writes, “may create an original work of art that interprets a text we read.” Like Penelope weaving a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Caroline Fortin depicted Homer’s Hades in the singular needlepoint above.

Caroline Fortin explains:

Homer’s depiction of the underworld in The Odyssey is . . . fascinating and descriptive, culturally accepted as the archetypal vision of the ancient afterlife. In my own interpretation, I have chosen to represent the underworld through the traditional craft of needlepoint.

At first look, there is a disparity between this soft, traditionally feminine medium and the idea of what is essentially hell. With my project and medium I wanted. . . viewers to reconsider what they might, at first, see as a deep dark realm, something to be feared.

In today’s culture, we tend to view the afterlife as an unknown, or something to be apprehended. In ancient Greek culture, however, the afterlife was seen as a familiar place; it was, essentially, just a step into the next life. For this reason, many heroes in mythology are challenged to contact the dead, or even to venture into the underworld itself. It is for this reason as well that Odysseus was able to make his brave journey into the realm of the dead, for though some aspects came as a shock, he could somewhat expect what was to come.

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Penelope Unraveling Her Work At Night (1886), Silk embroidered with silk thread, Dora Wheeler

I wanted to portray that cultural familiarity through my work of needlepoint. Though the images depicted may be frightening or off-putting at first glance, the scene of the afterlife is something that need not necessarily be feared. Through the use of a traditional, somewhat “comforting” medium, I wanted to challenge the viewer to see this scene as something that can be considering normal, and even comforting.

Most conceptions of embroidery are of a grandmother writing down an age-old quote, or depicting a scene that would be meaningful to the family. I do both here in a slightly untraditional way;  I used embroidery to portray a scene meaningful to a culture and a people, and I physically depicted a story for anyone who walks by to see.

One of my biggest takeaways from this project is the appreciation for The Odyssey that I gained. I will admit that I hated The Odyssey— reading it in high school and again in college was, at first, a massive chore. But spending so much quality time with the text and picking and choosing what elements would be important to represent really made me appreciate and recognize the beautiful and complex world building within the story.

I also gained an appreciation for storytelling in that era; the names and characters to be memorized even within just Book XI (“The Kingdom of the Dead”) are numerous and complicated, and I became downright impressed with the skills of bards and poets of the day.

Through the hours I spent listening to music and meditating on this scene while working, I thought about song and story as entertainment both then and now, and how the nature of humanity has not changed much. Both in our curiosity about the world and the way we choose to interpret, share, and bask in it, people have always had a unique way of envisioning the world around us, and the wonderment and community of humanity seems timeless.

I found comfort in the fact that I was representing the very same story that people have represented for thousands of years, but in my own personal way.

How The Bards Once Sang in Homer’s Greece