I finished this animation in January of 2007 and have had it sitting on the hard drive for a while now.  It’s all done in stop-motion with a camera on a sixty-second timer and me drawing spurts on and off for about a nine month period.  You can see the weather changing as it goes from summer t-shirt to winter hat and sweaters.  The whole thing was done in the old BF Goodrich factory in Akron, Ohio.  They’ve converted the spaces into light industrial and although they’ve since kicked most of the artists out, there are still a few in there.  The factory scene in the middle of the animation is the view that I saw out the windows.  

Like I was saying earlier, the whole animation is done on a timer, so that once I get started drawing I don’t have to worry about advancing the frame, and I can just draw and not worry about it.  After about an hour exhaustion starts to set in and the drawing gets a little more real and most of the time I don’t even know where it’s going.  

Gary Millus and Josh Elrod did all the music for it.  I went through about ten of Gary’s tracks trying to find something, and when I heard this I knew immediately that I wanted to use it.  I could see a subway scene and a foot splashing in a puddle.  Those came up later when I was drawing.  It was odd those drawings came because I was like, “…oh yeah, i remember thinking about this when i first listened…”  

The sound byte is Willem de Kooning and honestly, when the project first started I didn’t know all that much about him, but I went to the library and took out every book available in the Cleveland Public Library system and started reading and spread out the colorful pictures all over the floor and started smoking cigarettes by Phillip Morris.  It ended up that he was the perfect artist to study while doing this animation for a buch of reasons.  He ended up being in the Abstract Expressionist school, so he was concerned with the brush stroke and the emotion of the event more than getting each stroke in it’s exact position.  He also mentions the “Glimpse” and that’s what a lot of this is.  I would spread out the water on the slate and then look to see if there was anything in it that resembled anything else, and I would follow that until the end, or more likely until i got tired or until something else distracted me.  

I pulled out each of the slates when I got them to a certain point and put up a new one and started working off of that.  I know where most of them, but a few are getting scattered about.  I hung them in a gallery, but a few didn’t sell.  I heard someone say if art isn’t hanging on the wall, it isn’t art, it’s a storage problem.  100 pound slates quickly become storage problems.  So if you want one, let me know.  I’ll see what I can find.