The Birth of the Animation Station

 It was nearly ten years ago that the Animation Station made its debut at the Lowry Avenue Open Streets/Harvestfest even on September 29, 2012.

Margo Ashmore, a friend of mine, told me that the folks organizing the neighborhood Harvestfest part of the event were looking for artists to do different kinds of art on the street. I had been playing with a new stop motion application on my laptop, and thought that maybe I could do stop motion animation with people, pixilation, like Norman McLaren had done in "Neighbors" way back in the 1950's. 

It all came together pretty quickly. I could bring my laptop computer with the stop motion software and I could mount a webcam on a tripod. I bought a video projector, so I could project the laptop screen on one of the portable movie screens I had. I was going to get power from the hardware store on the corner of Lowry and Penn, and they were also going have a table and a chair that I could use. The chair ended up being used as an animation prop as much as anything else. I didn't spend too much time sitting down.

I loaded up all equipment on my bicycle trailer and went up there. On the way to the spot where I would set up the animation station, I did some filming and shot some interviews. I would also edit together a video of the event, which is above.

The animation was just about anything that could happen. I didn't really have a spot on the street, it was really on the sidewalk because I didn't have an extension cord long enough to get any farther than that. I had some chalk, and there was drawing on the sidewalk, and lots of improv pixilation with mostly kids. I didn't exactly know how or when, but I knew I wanted to do something like this again.

Behind the Scenes - 20 Years of Art-A-Whirl

 In May of 2015, I set up the Animation Station in the Northrup King Building for the 20th Anniversary of Art-A-Whirl in Northeast Minneapolis. Building Manager Debra Woodward let me use a partially finished space on the second floor of the building for the three days of the art crawl. I used tape to attach a webcam to the ceiling and then ran a USB cable from there to my laptop on a table below. I taped out an area on the floor. The webcam was aimed straight down so that area on the floor was the table top for a gigantic animation stand.

The space had served as a gallery in the past so it already had some bright lights on the ceiling, which I took advantage of to light the floor. At the top of a ladder I attached my Go Pro Camera to record a time lapse of the whole process, which you can see at the end of the full video here:

Before the big day setting up, I made a list of twenty one word themes and put a theme on each of the 20 years. I divided up the hours of the three days to focus on roughly one year each hour.

On Friday afternoon I set everything up and started animating on my own. Soon people were passing by, and some of them stopped and spent some time. I would try to get a group to stay for each hour theme. They would spend part of the the hour making things. I had a table set up with lots of bright colored paper, tape, scissors and pens that people could use to make things. I told them to make things that were big. I had already made some things, some of the Northeast Minneapolis buildings that Art-A-Whirl revolved around, some giant drops for the occasional storms that would go by during Art-A-Whirl weekend in May, and some lightning bolts. The storms were also a great way to clear the frame to get to a new topic.

There was a lot of leaning down and getting up, moving things a little and then pressing the button on the Dragonframe keypad to take a frame. Several times people stayed on the floor so they could be part of the animation. I had some people who stuck around for a while and even took over some of my work in having to explain what was going on to every group that came by.

Sunday was pretty quiet at first. That gave me time to use some masking tape to spell out the word creativity for day 17. Other times there were lots of people. At the end of Friday and Saturdays session I showed some of the videos I filmed the first few years of Art-A-Whirl.

One wall was the projection wall. The screen of my laptop was projected onto that wall and I tried as often as possible to run what existed of the project so far up on the wall so people could see how the thing was working and growing.

A lot of very cool people stopped by and helped me make the movie over those three years. I used my camcorder to try to record a little from each person who participated. I asked them to either share a memory or thought about Art-A-Whirl, to create a sound effect for their section, or at least give me their first name, so I could put them in the end credits. Using the camcorder to record the audio helped me to visually match the person with the section that they contributed to.

Editing the video part was easy - it was just putting down the animation that had been done over the three days without making any corrections to it. The audio mixing took quite a bit more time!

Here's a little Behind the Scenes video, with camera by Beth Peloff.