A kid who brings miniature worlds to life

NATICK — Sometimes, the world can seem overwhelming. Overbearing. If only you were tiny enough to build a house out of cards and climb inside, or escape to a miniature treehouse suspended between stalks of broccoli.

Or better yet, just fly away. Fold a giant paper airplane, then grasp its thin fuselage for dear life and sail across a field into summertime.

Such is Zev Hoover’s fanciful photographic take on reality. His arresting images evoke a wonderland of imaginary environments, built from f-stops and pixels, and hinting at characters with secret stories to tell.

Hoover’s work, which he posts on the photo sharing site Flickr using the handle “Fiddle Oak” (a play on “Little Folk”), has caught fire across the Internet. He has been profiled in the media and on design and photography blogs. On Monday, he will fly to New York to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America Live” webcast.

One post touting his “surreal photo manipulations” has received 108,000 Facebook likes.

“Maybe a million people saw it,” said the slightly stunned Hoover, who is only 14.

COLM O’MOLLOY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

“He’s enjoying this little ride,” said his father, Jeff. “But he’s familiar with Andy Warhol’s idea of 15 minutes of fame and realizes this may be transitory.”

The skinny teen deadpanned, “If I was older, it wouldn’t make as good of a story.”

But it’s Hoover’s talent that has captured imaginations. A film production company contacted him about designing a movie poster. He has been approached by a publisher for a potential narrative photo textbook project. Nikon World magazine asked him to contribute a photo. A lens manufacturer sent him a free lens, saying only: “Take some pictures with it.”

No doubt he will. Plenty of his peers would be happy playing soccer or video games, but not Hoover. He needs to be creating. “I get anxious if I’m not doing something,” he said, sitting outside his family’s Natick home this week. “What’s next?”

His series of “Little Folk/Fiddle Oak” images began during a walk in the woods with sister, Aliza. He remembers thinking, “Oh, wouldn’t little people be cool?” Crouching near the ground, he imagined seeing the world from their perspective. He felt the miniature genre had never been done in photography — “at least not very well.”

“There’s a fine line to walk between having it be too abstract and having it be too cheesy-obvious,” he said.

He performs his sleight of hand in Photoshop, which he taught himself via Internet tutorials.

Read the rest of the front page Boston Globe story. For a photo gallery of Zev's work, look here.

Why Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion effects were more real than CGI

The death of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen raises questions about the future of special effects, writes Ethan Gilsdorf. In the good old days, it did not take so much to trick the eye.

"There comes a point where people will reject digital effects and want movies where we actually did something in real space, and real time.” 

That's a quote from a film director perhaps the least likely to decry computer-generated special effects: Peter Jackson. Interviewed for the 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, Jackson said, essentially, that as digital special effects in movies become increasingly advanced, we'll crave the real even more. Real, as in "real" fake -- physical puppets of gorillas and T-Rexes, Medusas and animated statues, not ones made from pixels. Real, as in physical models manipulated by hand and filmed one frame at a time, not rendered in some fancy computer program.

But Jackson's comment about a movie being something that happens "in real space, and real time" feels surprising, if not ironic. The director most known for creating miniature models and sets (and so-called giant miniatures, or "bigatures") for The Lord of the Rings, and seamlessly mixing them with digital trolls and elves, later turned away from the "real" miniatures he used in that trilogy. In his last film,The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jackson finally and fully embraced digital effects. It's a film in which nary a miniature or puppet exists.

Now, the death on May 7 of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen poignantly brings these issues of real and fake, analog and digital, info focus. Harryhausen's passing represents the end of an era. It closes a crucial chapter in special effects history. It's also a kind of turning point in film technology. From here on out, it's too late to return to the analog.

If you don't know who Harryhausen was, you've probably seen his work. The master animator is best known for breathing life into giant, writhing serpents, sword-wielding skeletons, and marauding dinosaurs in such fantasy adventure and monster movies as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad(1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). Harryhausen was an innovator, and in many ways the father of the modern special effects craft and industry.

Harryhausen's trademark action sequences featuring animated model figurines -- always pictured interacting with, or more often, fighting with human foes, or crushing them, or biting them in half or flying away with them -- might seem clunky and old-fashioned when measured by today's standards. But in their day, the effects Harryhausen pioneered were cutting-edge. He painstakingly filmed his "creatures" frame by frame. The process was exhausting: The 4 minute, 37-second skeleton and human fight sequence from Jason and the Argonauts reportedly took four and a half months to photograph and Harryhausen had to readjust and film around 184,800 movements of the puppets.

Then, using his patented "Dynamation" technique, those skeletons and serpents could interact on screen with actors in a remarkable realistic way. The Dynamation process combined foreground and background footage by photographing miniatures in front of a rear-projection screen. Sometimes, he shot sequences through a partially-masked glass pane. Live footage would later be superimposed on the masked portion of the frame, and voila, the creature or creatures seemed to exist in the midst of "real" human-scaled action, or even appear to move in front of and behind "live" elements. Harryausen also carefully controlled lighting and color balance to make sure the image quality of his animated sequences matched the quality of the live action. His effects were more convincing than the standard use of optical printing and mattes. This was before green screen, folks.

Read the rest of my essay for BoingBoing

Mitt Romney as a D&D Character?

Now that Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is wailing on his opponents Newt, Rick, and Paul, perhaps it's time for his deeds to be enshrined as a D&D character.

Artist Casey Jex Smith has been working on a series of works that depict people as D&D characters. Here, Mitt Romney, although unnamed, is shown as Lord Spelldyal, a 21st level warlord with 152 hit points, Boots of Speed and a Helmet of Authority.

The drawing was one of the works in the Dungeons and Dragons On & Ever Onward art show at the Soho Gallery of Digital Art in New York City. The show, which closed Jan 11, 2012, was curated by Timothy Hutchings, and featured works by Casey Jex Smith, Ryan Browning, Sean McCarthy, Rebecca Schiffman, Josh Jordan, Jeffrey Brown, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, Chris Bors, Owen Rundquist, Andrew Guenther Jason Phillips, Ketta Ioannidou, Fiona MacNeill, Kitty Clark, Erol Otus, Steve Zeiser, Matt Brinkman, Chris Coy, and others.

And it featured historical selections from the Play-Generated Maps and Documents Archive.

More from Casey Jex Smith's D&D characters series here.

Image courtesy Allegra LaViola Gallery

[a version of this post originally appeared on wired.com's GeekDad]

Let's Put on a Show!

Henry hams it up.I was hanging out with my nephews over the weekend.

Jack and Henry are aged 8 and 4 respectively. A couple years back, Jack took tap dancing lessons.

When he outgrew his shoes, and became a wee bit self-conscious about being only boy in the dance class, he hung up his vaudeville dreams. But now the shoes fit Henry. And before I knew it, while we were all eating dinner, the tap shoes had been produced and Jack was giving Henry a crash course in everything tap.

“You go like this,” Jack instructed, kicking his lower leg back and forth while the rest of us tried to finish our pizza. “Click and click and click.”

Meal over, the boys disappeared. To treat Uncle Ethan, they had secretly decided to put on a show.

This was DIY at its best. They went over their routine somewhere upstairs. Total rehearsal time: about 15 minutes. They selected their costumes: a dress shirt, their Dad’s tie and silly hat and sunglasses for Henry; and just a shirt for Jack. Total time allotted for costume change: probably 5 minutes.

Then Jack returned to announce that the show would commence in the living room.

“Would you please, you know, shut off your phones and other noisy things,” Jack announced to his audience of three. The kid is 8, going on stage manager.

As for the spectacle itself, there was dancing, and hamming it up, and Jack whispering instructions to Henry as he clicked and clacked his way to tap dancing glory. “Now Henry will do something he’s been working on himself,” Jack announced as third act began: Henry pretended to pour tea, then blew out a candelabra of three lit candles.

Fred Astaire and Gregory Hines they were not, but the show was unbelievable in its own way.

The Uncle shouted “Encore!”

The parents shouted, “Bedtime!”

 The impromptu performance reminded me of my summer days as a kid. I was always putting on a play, or a puppet show, or making a Super 8 claymation movie, or writing a new Dungeons & Dragons adventure, or painting a mural, or building a tree fort — or planning a D&D adventure/performance/movie in a tree fort. I would make grand pronouncements about some new creative direction I had decided to devoted my life to. Summer vacation was always a time for projects, a chance to try out new material. Even if my audience was three: my sister, brother and mother.

My nephew’s nutty, goofy, fearless example recalled those days, but also imparted a key lesson. Namely: be brave. Risk embarrassment. Put yourself out there. Try out that new material. Test it in front of real people (not just the real people in your mind.) Gussy up the barn, sew a curtain from that old bolt of gingham, reunite the jug band and put on a show!

Some writers crave limelight but sit back and wait for the light to find them. “I’ll just wait till someone calls me” is a common myth about building your literary career. It doesn’t work that way. You have to make your own calls.

Putting on your own event is also a good antidote to that grumpy feeling creative people can get. You know the one I’m talking about: that everyone else seems to be getting recognition except you. Miffed that you’re not being invited to read your poems for that new hot reading series? Bummed that the such-and-such bookstore or library or nightclub won’t host you? Find a non-conventional venue like a bar or church basement or backyard, write up a press release, make a Facebook event and invite your friends. (My pal Jane Roper hosted a great book launch for her novel about summer camp, Eden Lake. The event took place at a VFW hall and featured a sing-a-long and Sterno cookers for DIY s’mores.)

Put on your own show. It’s a great way to get experience performing your work, and to test out new material. One piece of advice: I do recommend writing and rehearsing for a bit longer than my nephews did.

[If you'd like to see my efforts in this gingham-and-jug-band arena, four performing pals and I are putting on a performance of writing, comedy and music called "Funny As a Crutch" on Monday June 13 in Cambridge, Mass. The show includes dirty limericks, educational raps, recipes for cooking raccoon, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired poetry, children's stories that shouldn't be read to children, and fiction about the miracle of motherhood as seen from the bottom of a martini. More information here. Hope to see you there.]

How do you have a day without creativity, imagination, and thought?

Taking the time to stop WHO

Drake Patten

WHAT

Drake Patten knows what looms if arts and culture disappear. A lifelong arts advocate and former director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Patten is now the executive director of The Steel Yard, a Providence-based center that uses the industrial arts to foster community revitalization and workforce development. She recently co-founded Culture Stops!, a volunteer-run nationwide day of action (or rather, inaction) on Thursday, March 10, to draw attention to the impact of proposed federal budget cuts on the creative sector. Q. Your website www.culturestops.org asks people “to witness a world devoid of creativity, imagination and thought: America after culture stops.’’ How do you have a day without creativity, imagination, and thought? A. This is a day about absence. This Culture Stops! movement is about what is there when it’s not there. We want people to stop and mark the day. Q. How would it work? A. People who are performing, for example music, could stop their performance and try to educate the audience, or leave the stage and join the audience and look at the blank stage. We have talked to people who have said they would cover their works of art with a black cloth. Or simply put up the Culture Stops! logo on their website or Facebook page. Q. So you don’t necessarily want to shut down culture for the day. A. In the Culture Stops! call to action, we say “stop work for eight minutes to a full eight hours.’’ You choose. Keep your store open that sells local art but put something in the bag that says, “You just bought something on Culture Stops! day.’’ To say you should just stop working that day and alienate your clients, that’s not realistic. But the education of clients is necessary. Q. How widespread is participation so far? A. We just launched [last week]. We are hearing from every state but I think five. What is great is that people are saying that they are prepared to take on what is immediately local. Q. How did this idea originate? A. Culture Stops! began around a kitchen table in Cranston, R.I., with five people, one dog, and $87. I was speaking to my colleagues about our fears. It’s the fear about not being able to do our work, and living in a nation where arts and culture is not valued. In a human way this translates to darkness. It’s like a black stage. Q. How do you answer those who claim that, in a down economy, arts and culture are luxuries, that we all have to tighten our belts? A. When you set a budget, you are setting the program. You are saying publicly that arts and culture have value or they don’t. We have increasingly seen over the years the cultural budget line being embattled. While we’re very clear this budget will demand sacrifice across the board, we feel this is disproportionate. Q. It seems that what you call “the creative sector’’ could do a better job explaining itself. A. The cultural sector is a critical part of the national economy with big impact nationwide. The non-profit arts sector represents the equivalent of 5.7 million full-time jobs, including many in a range of related industries traditionally not thought of as part of the arts world. That’s $166.2 billion annually in economic activity and more than $12.5 billion in federal income taxes. This isn’t a niche market developed around earmarks. These are mainstream American jobs. It’s not that it’s just artists. It’s the skills that go into every sector. IBM recently put out a report that asked what does the business world really value in leadership? Creativity, innovation, imagination. Q. Let’s say you’ve paid $20 to go to a concert or play on March 10. Are you worried some people might get upset if that experience is interrupted? A. I’m sure it could make some people angry. But I do think it’s very important to be exposed to the idea that art goes away. We in this culture, we have a lot. But we don’t have the experience of taking away. If people are upset about it, that might be the best thing. I was inspired by what came out of Egypt. America knew at one point how to take to the streets. Perhaps we are at that point again. Interview was condensed and edited. Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.