First of all: Tonight! PechaKucha at Krannert! 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. 8:20pm outside, unless it’s raining and then it’s inside. Andy Warfel is emceeing. I’m going to talk about ELEPHANT. Jen and Chris Peck and I are going to sing a tiny bit. And I’ll pretend I’m an 82 year old lady named Anastasia from Elkton South Dakota. What could be dreamier? And this – all of our posters are being taken. This is good. Anna Peters is putting up a new ELEPHANT poster every week. When she goes back to put more up… the old ones are gone. I think this is good. If you want a poster, download one from the ELEPHANT project page here on this site. I’ll update the download each week with the poster that we’re slapping around town. I like them. I think they’re worth stealing.

O.k. Here’s a wee picture from the meeting of the Stop-Motion Minds that we had last Monday. Emily Denis, Anna Peters, Nicki Werner, Julia Pollack, Chris Hampson, Sean Brice, Andrea Jennings, Bill Fulara and Hanako O’Leary … I hope I didn’t forget anybody … all got together to make some test-models. They did some super-simple pipe-cleaner-ish ones and some full-on clay models. Below is a picture Nicki sent me of the elephant she made.

The whole stop-motion section for ELEPHANT is going to be about 7 minutes long. Chris Peck recorded Gary Ambler doing the voice-over yesterday. So we’ll take the storyboard drawings that Bill and Andrea have made, scan them in, lay down Gary’s VO, and edit in the storyboard scans along with the VO – and then shoot the thing with the models that everybody is making. I’m nervous about being able to shoot 7 minutes of good stop-motion. I know we don’t have Fantastic Mr. Fox time to make this – at the Motion Museum or TV Museum or whatever it’s called in Queens the Gumby and Pokey exhibit says that they make 5 seconds of animation a day. In the Fantastic Mr. Fox clip about making the movie they said they did 30 seconds of animation a day… but they also had at least 4 separate shoots happening simultaneously. But the thing is this: enthusiasm! The mighty-model-builders seem to want to go for the more time-consuming, more detailed approach and not the faster pipe-cleaner approach. We decided to do a hybrid of clay and fabric/wire. There was a big craft-party the other night. Crafters rule! All hail the mighty crafters! I hope we’re not biting off more than can be chewed.

The story that we’re telling with the models is really quite sad. The models are all around 4 or 5 inches tall… some are more. So, it feels like we’re going against the grain in a couple of ways – sadness and size. The tiny models will be projected on screens that are 20 feet high and 90 feet long (sitting and watching Inception the other day… why do people like this movie so much? It’s like the lamest parts of four James Bond movies all slapped into one movie that’s REALLY IMPORTANT because of it’s incessant use of THE FRENCH HORN… and realizing that the screen I was looking at was “only” about 35 feet long… what am I doing?) and claymation is usually sort of goofy and funny. I’ll have to remind myself of hiding under the couch because I was terrified of the Abominable Snowman in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Oh. And then there’s this: the mighty Ryan Thompson is doing some work on the website and the list-serv. Dark, sunless, code work that is immensely helpful and deeply appreciated. Thanks Ryan!

And this! Chris Peck and Jen Allen have made some ELEPHANT RINGTONES! OH, THE HUMANITY! Coming soon!