Yesterday, the practical exercises with the students went better, in a more focused way. It seems now realistic that we will get everything done by the Friday and that I will be able to edit and composite all of the segments so that we can screen this little film I was hoping for sometimes Monday or Tuesday.
The work on the relationship between animation and live action is not what I had hoped for, but they are doing their best at this point and there are some acceptable results. I will have to think over how I present this exercise so that it is better understood. The basic idea is right I think, but when I presented it, I left the possibilities a bit too wide open and I have to take into account the limits of their understanding of animation. I should also say that I should also take into account the fact that a group of students like this arrives with a preconception of what animation is (a road to phantasmagoria) that has not much to do with «the relationship between animated images and real images». This is not a common approach and it goes strongly against the common notion of animation as fantasy. So my presentation of the exercise has to be deeper and more developed in terms of the ideological background.
Here is what the exercise is about: everybody work from the same live action shot, they all have to do a little segment of animation on one section of the live action shot which relates closely to the real image, underline or interpret or develop certain aspects of it (I have a little Max patcher that allows to do that) and then all those segments are to be composed and composited together over the live action images so that all the individual segments merge into a little collective film. In this case, there was not quite enough time to succeed to do all the process. I would have to try it again in an other context.
I continue to have problems to retrieve Bob’s aiff files. It seems impossible to access his ftp server from the hotel or from the university. Problems of firewall and restriction to ftp downloads, I guess. Over that there is the problem that there is no real high speed connection in Lebanon.