第1ゴーストラジオ

More mysterious images drifitng across the air from ghost radio (part one):

Future site: www.girabbe.com

and currently on myspace: www.myspace.com/girabbe

For more animation peaks of the ghost radio (part one) project see:
http://bindlegrim.blogspot.com/search/label/girabbe

Ghost Radio - A Skeleton Mechanical

Continuing work on animated visuals for the song Ghost Radio Part 1 (for girabbe).

For the video, I believe I have finally found a stride on the creation process - and am having fun now developing some decidedly bizarre mechanical denizens for the song. (As the musical artist put it to me, roughly translated here, this part (one) of the song is about a journey into the darkest part of the forest and the sights there). And I believe this strangely creepy mechanical device might fit right in:

(Just a note on the elements - this curious device is composed of an old vintage Skeleton wind up tin toy, old stereo equipment from the 1920's, and the background is a portion of a photo that was taken of an interior from the California ghost town, Bodhi).

Odd? Well, this project is an obvious departure from the all-ages audience of the most recent book project - "The Pumpkin Dream: A Cautionary Tale" and delves back into the worlds of Dada, and the Surrealist method of autonomic creation - to surprise even myself by what appears at the end of the process. Someday I'll have to upload more of that "fine art" - part of which is viewable on the wobblebox arts website in the category of drawing, for example:

Accordionist Swallowing a Dancer with his Music (pen/pencil sketch circa 1980s)

So as for now, not even I know what strange creatures will be along the haunted travels through Ghost Radio Part One... the journey continues... and I hope you too enjoy the surprises.

Ghost Radio - The Carriage of the Rokurokubi

Still progressing on the music video animation work for the new release by girabbe, and thought it might be of interest to post this odd little snippet from that work, of a carriage-like structure that hints at a Japanese yokai called the Rokurokubi moving through a landscape of ghost-ridden cathodes...

After all summer in Japan is the time for ghost stories... because the thought is that the chill you receive from the telling will cool you off from the hot weather. (Here's a link to The Roving Ronin who tells the history of Japanese ghost stories with a selection of different tales)... the ghost story candle ceremony the Roving Ronin describes on his page can be seen in a trailer for the movie Yokai - 100 Ghost Stories.

And, my favorite Japanese movie for ghost stories, for its beautiful cinematography and music of the biwa has to be Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales):

Hauntings in the Cathode Tubes

Have started getting the new book "The Pumpkin Dream" lined up for availability in a few brick-and-mortar stores this coming fall... (I am in discussion with three stores in the Denver/Boulder area)... and while those are in process - trying to see what additional elements and sneak peeks I can add for the book via online venues. Most recently I added images from the first few pages of the book recently available on Amazon - see The Pumpkin Dream: A Cautionary Tale from the Library of Mr. Bumble Bindlegrim (image gallery) on Amazon.com.

As that progresses I'm further delving into surrealist mode for the video project of Ghost Radio part 1, and here's another sneak peek at what oddities come from the mind working in autonomic mode - these images takes advantage of some cool cathode tubes that were found once in a sadly now defunct store in Seattle called Ye Olde Technology Shoppe:

Film Reel Organism

Over the last couple of weeks I've started to work on a promised music-video project for a song by the band girabbe for their upcoming release slated for this summer. I believe there is a full video-album planned with different video artists participating on certain songs, and I'm looking forward to experiencing the full release!

Somehow, perhaps aptly, I was able to grab a really hauntingly atmospheric number titled "ghost radio (part 1)" and have been doing some test runs on style and content. (There is a very interesting story behind the song, but I will leave that tale up to girabbe).

In the meantime, here are a couple of experimental snippets from my work thus far, utilizing an old freeware software friend InkScape, to create animated bits brought into Final Cut. (Note - the sound on these tests is also random personal experiments - see Moon City Costumes).

(please place your amoebas between the speakers)



(a skeletal broadcast from the dark ride)

I've got a long way to go, but I've been enjoying this break, that has given me the opportunity to get back into my more surrealist abstract leanings.

Also, as a side note, I would like to recommend the following fun internet search for images  from the book Codex Serphinianus (a strange, wonderful book that is inspiring for its unintelligible other worldliness) -- (think Fantastic Planet in book form). Someone has also posted a youtube video of some page turning through the book:

A Brief History of the Pumpkin Dream: (Part 6) - Swing You Sinners!

Continued from:
A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream: (Part 5) - Monsters from the Id

Okay, so finally, I found my way to the end solution for illustrating this book project - Inkscape (a vector-art freeware program). Contrary to the shading and modeling of images occurring in the previous blog (with Corel Painter 11), the actual goal was to create simply-designed characters that could be easily manipulated for every eight lines of the poem, whenever a new image was needed.

Coming from years of working will Adobe Illustrator (and still a bit sad about Illustrator not being compatible on the new system) the learning curve was frustrating. I slowed down quite a bit to read the software instructions, and decided to at first just try to work with simple shapes - combining them, splitting them, playing with the line points, etc - which wasn't too far from my final goal. And here are a couple of the early character drafts with Inkscape :

Our main character here in mouse outfit.

Trick-or-Treat Witch
(Olive Green absolutely only accepts coven-approved sweets).

Duo of Trickster-Treaters

Also, at this time, I was re-ingesting lots of 1930s animation for inspiration (see end images part 4). In particular, I have always been fascinated with 1930's Fleischer Studios (Koko the Clown, Bimbo, Betty Boop). I would set the screen on freeze, and pencil sketch the images.

The next test was to see how well I could recreate characters from source sketches. I had sketched the tree below from a great little piece called "Swing you Sinners" (see YouTube video below) that involves a character who finds a soul full of trouble when he gets caught in a graveyard. The character below is one of the singing trees in the graveyard, and it turned out that InkScape was nice for pen-tracing sketched characters with the Wacom.

(Also, click here to view my old-school Halloween animation playlist)

So between the tree (with a few borrowed and scattered limbs), and maybe the walking house near the end, etc., together with tons of old school Halloween inspiration... the image below was my first of a few versions that finally culminated in the final style for the imagery:

(The North Wind (Peter Max ala Saw) was nixed here for a more Halloween-ish sky).

Whew, well this generally decided, this then started two months of intense illustrating! For every eight lines of poetry,  my goal was to create a drawing - 37 illustrations in all...., so, as far as the blog is concerned, I think from here I'll take a break on this whole "history" of the book set-up and maybe just dabble in a bit of postings about sketch to digital translations... perhaps...

A Ghost Story Animatic (2001)

A friend of mine mentioned she was going to be taking an animation class in school next quarter... which had me thinking of my ever so brief foray with a class (way back in 2001, shiver) that was called "animation pipeline"... and in some ways was less about the animation itself, but more about the process of getting an animated work completed. So, in the first quarter, our personal project, was to each come up with a story and go through the processes of creation - story pitch, storyboard, animatic, etc.

This was my story from that quarter, and the animatic I cobbled together with my grease-pencil storyboard sketches, some Poser figures, and a bit of Photoshop - Final Cut processing. It's rough, and was only supposed to be used as an animatic - which means more focus on things like timing... not so much on visual finesse.

In this short animatic, an elderly couple, (an inventor and a records clerk), seek the moonlit graves of forgotten souls. And with the aid of a strange mechanical device and a book of bedtime stories, loss and sadness are replaced with peacefulness.