The Joys of Miniatures

It's been months since I transitioned into color and as I expected the work has become more complex but so much more fun! I don't regret it, so thanks to all you B&W naysayers.

Recently I've had to step up the work on the miniatures in order to finish and shoot the rooms of the house. So far only Lars' room is done. The others are in varying degrees of completion.

In attending to the fine details I've had to replicate to scale a few objects that appeared in the action shots. Lars' Encyclopedia Britannica for instance, which plays a huge role in the way he recreates civilization in his mind.

Here it is in an early scene:

I reduced and printed the covers:

And made the tiny replica's:

And here they are inside their tiny shelves:

A similar process was applied to other books and while at it, I threw in some food packaging needed for the kitchen:

I was lucky to come by Jason Liebig, an avid collector of vintage pop culture, who was a great sport and gave me carte blanche to use any of his hi res images for the project. This actor/writer has a soft spot for comics it appears, as he has worked for Marvel as story and Art editor for the X-MEN line. You can see his dazzling collection here.

On board with me for the tedious job of assembling these items was my friend Mindy Florestan.

Here she is during one of our many sessions assembling a Coca-Cola crate.

Another convoluted process was making the miniature photographs that Lars' had shot and particularly his experiments with photograms. I shot some pertinent items from the production (Such as Lil's stylish sunglasses and medicine bottles) over a light box to achieve the high contrast. Then reduced and printed the shots on shiny paper. The final step was to age the paper with a solution of turmeric in water:

(The books on Lars' tables are Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, 1957  and a car electricity manual by Delmar Publications).

Here's Nanna's sewing box. Found it online, painted it and filled it with tiny stuff. Fun!

The chandelier was a tough one. After a year on e-bay and other sites, I gave up on finding a miniature period chandelier and ended up having to make my own out of beads and metal. 

Below is a quick evolution of Lars' room up until the first tests combining the action and miniatures. Looks like it's going to work out fine. Huge sigh of relief.

For the aerial views of the entire island I intented to rely on stock photography, but again, believe it or not, after a year of searching could not find a decent sequence of photos of an aerial approach to an island. I even considered buying a video and extracting a series of stills, but the resolution was too low and the islands always the wrong kind of island.

So below is the "quickie" mini diorama I made in a few short days:

The big diorama is all finished and done and I shoot it almost every week for one scene or another. All this photography gets done at night to avoid mixing with real day light.
It's a task out of my field of expertise, but then again, so is this whole project!

Opening the Door to Color

Natashia gives Petro a back scratch in return for a swig of beer.

...And the people said "let there be color" and there was color...

...So my ascetic vow to B&W is now gone out the window, as you can see.

A whole giant slew of complications lays ahead because of this, but the color fiend in me has been awakened and there is no going back!

The "green-spill" (green reflections) from our makeshift green screens is no longer a harmless gray. It's like a green slime that infests every single images and requires sisyphean nitpicky work to get rid of.

Certain garments and objects which were selected for production for their lovely texture in B&W are actually of hideous irrelevant hues. take for instance Nanna's dress...

The peachy orange was a perfect mid-tone gray, setting off Nanna's white skin perfectly. In color it's almost the same color as her skin!

In the image below you can see an attempt at the left side of the dress, right under her hair, to change the dress color to a yellowish green.

So often obstacles become opportunities for invention, and in this case, the idea to allow Nanna's dress to change colors with her moods was born. I can't wait to see her in black, burgundy and turquoise!

Nanna during dinner preparations. (I stalked these particular metal, pink kitchen pieces on e-bay for 6 months until they dropped to a price I could afford. I love love love them.)



Below are a few tests of the outdoors areas:

Finally, The Trailer Online!

...and an item on First Comics News!

And So it Was...

Alexandra Ceribelli (Isness' prop-master) and myself showing off the trailer. Notice the sample miniature at bottom left. Brought it in as an attraction. Only problem was the demographic it attracted: females 8 and younger!

So glad I made the push to finish the trailer for MoCCA!

There's nothing like that river of comics lovers drifting by your work and commenting freely to give you a reality check!

Although a good deal of trailer copies were sold, ISNESS remains rather elusive to the average viewer.

Most comics connoisseurs regard photo-comics as a lesser form because the handcrafted process is bypassed with a click the camera. The signature style, so coveted in this art form seems to be absent.

They say:

"Why not draw"?

From the other art millieu this work flirts with, filmmakers, I often hear:

"So why not just make a movie, then"?

It will certainly be a challenge to get this work to speak it's own singular language clearly enough as to cast these questions moot.

Another point that came through loud and clear was people's desire for color. So consisted was this comment that I am now reconsidering my earlier commitment to absolute B&W...

The added technical complication this will introduce is daunting... yet the pleasure of departing from an austere palate and dabbling once again in color is, I must confess, tempting...

I was lucky to sit two tables away from Seth Kushner, the multi-talented photographer and comics artist who's currently producing "Culture Pop" a photographed documentary comic series about some of New York's most fascinating characters. He offered some insights and we exchanged work (Work exchanges between artists is one of MoCCA's sweet little side benefits. I also exchanged with Nick Moore for two super-cool T-shirts with an image so wonderfully morbid, the recipients, my kids, refused to wear them, alas...)

I'll be posting the full trailer here soon and your comments will be most welcome. Until I figure out how to do that, here's one of my favorite frames from it:

Although the kitchen maquette was hardly finished when I shot it, this composite demonstrates well how the miniature and life size will co-exist.

It's MoCCA Time of the Year Again!

...And the 16 page trailer is done! ...And not a moment too soon.

I'm posting the lavish cover image and extending a warm invitation to you all to come visit me, and the many other amazing artists at MoCCA.

And yes! It's this weekend!

Saturday, April 9

and

Sunday, April 10

11am-6pm

at the 69th Regiment Armory

68 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY.

http://www.moccany.org/content/mocca-festival

Size-Matters

There was a short-lived fantasy that I would be ready with the first volume of ISNESS fot the MoCCA festival (April 9)...

NO CAN DO. Drove myself nuts (and those around me) for about a month until I faced reality.

Maybe June. But ISNESS will be all the better for it.

Meanwhile, to keep you all in the loop, I'll be posting images from the process and preparing some teasers to give out at the festival.

In the studio, miniature building is the new big game and it has taken over every nook and cranny I have real-estate rights for.

Miniature set building, as I soon found out, is no walk-in-the-park. There is a mind boggling number of scales to choose from and they all don't talk to each other...

The house rooms are being built in 1/12" scale a very common doll house scale (Every inch in doll house world equals a foot in real life).

The other scale I finally settled on for the beach-side diorama is called "HO" and is a classic model-train building scale (Evey 0.14" represents a foot)

...If you choose HO, you'll find plenty of trains stuff and diorama stuff but very little furniture or anything of modern design.

...The military scales such as 1:35 have very little beyond WWI and WWII. (Vietnam era is oddly absent) and no living quarters or furniture...

...The very common 1:12" doll house scale is designed mostly in Victorian style and has no military stuff...

...Most of the vintage doll-house furniture designed in the 50's and 60's in the style of the era, are of odd scales and hard to find.

It's truly the wild west out there when it comes to scales. The scale schism, I call it. Obviously, nobody out there has planned for ISNESS and it's mix of Vietnam era military equipment and mid century furniture.

So after months of savvy e-bay hunting It looks like I will be building, at least the kitchen from scrap. Crazy detail work. But If I followed the rules of sanity, this project would have never lifted off, anyway...

The beach diorama is coming along slowly. Here is a snippet of the further-inland area, the forest where Hunter roams. Lots of painted plaster of Paris, trees and turf from trainz.com.

Lars' room is a lot of fun to work on. He's a child who's raising himself as a thinker, in a very unsophisticated home and his choices of objects is most fascinating to me. Can't wait t fill his shelves.

The decaying concrete walls for Natashia's room. Most will be covered with wallpaper but I got carried away with the organic, messy process. Foam-core covered in paint, plaster of Paris then splashed with inky water.

When it dried I cracked and repainted it to accentuate the cracks.

Bought 30 brand new doll house windows (price undisclosed...) only to deface and mutilate them later.

They don't make post-apocalyptic windows in 1/12" scale.

A wonderful miniature garment designer, Thelma Lewis DeMet jumped on board and contributed some of her wonderful hand made pieces to the shoot.

Most of them will end up in the master bedroom which does not appear untill volume 3 of ISNESS.

Check out her work at http://thelmalewisdemet.homestead.com/

Photoshop can do ANYTHING I want. Here's a test combining Lil' and her imaginary live-dolls interacting. Threw in a lens flare and some blur and converted to B&W and voila! (I don't mean to say that it's fast! Just keying out the bodies can take up to an hour for each image. At least 1,000 images will go into each volume. Sanity? Say what?)

So many options for the cover. And the fonts! So many cool fonts to choose from! I'm so glad there will be 4 volumes! This means I can design 4 covers!

A typical state of my pages: Partially edited, partially keyed out, partially desaturated...

I WILL be at MoCCA Festival with promotional material, teasers, posters and samples from the 1st volume, so DO stop by and give me a word of encouragement!

Long Time No Blog...

It's been almost 4 months since I wrapped up the Kickstarter campaign.

So many people came out of the woodworks to lend a hand (a buck, I mean). It was humbling and stimulating and scary...

The 2 months of heavy promotion took their toll, however, and the journey back from the extroverted, manic PR mode to a more introverted creative mode, proved longer than I expected.

Lil' scratching in B&W

I have long been toying with the idea of creating the novel in B&W. In fact it was the original plan but during the shooting phase I kept getting seduced by the tantalizing color images that were pouring onto my screen.

I have recently remarried the B&W option. Sure, it may cut down on the delicious visceral impact of each image but in the long run it will afford me greater latitude in the story telling as a whole.

There is something about the way we absorb B&W imagery which leaves our many psychological responses to color untouched and offers it's content up for a more literary engagement.

It is more like reading, less like passive absorbtion.

It's not that I have anything against color. (Anyone who's seen the way I dress knows that that is hardly the case!) This story just does not want messy splotches of vibrating somatic-state inducers interfering with it's line of inquiry.

This line of inquiry being the complimentary interaction between the cinematic moving image, indicated by the photographs, and story telling in sequential stills as executed in the comics form.

The B&W choice is also in keeping with the spirit of my homage to the original fotonovelas (also called cine'-roman and roman-photo) of the 50's 60's and 70's..

An exhilarating, celebratory look at the power of the cine'-romans of the era is Fredrico Fellini's The White Sheik (1952)

Alberto Sordi as the White Sheik with an extra. (I have no recollection of this particular scene from the film... Can anyone enlighten me?)

A fascinating experiment in still/motion subject is the short film La Jetee (1962) by Chris Marker. It's a film offered up in sequential stills. So deep is our drive to complete the actions, that shortly after watching it, I forgot that it was in stills!

A poster for La Jetee

CRAFTY TUESDAYS!

Catriona Rubenis-Stevens as the craft-wizard from ISNESS, Lil', as she threads her needle in preparation for some not-so-sterile surgery...

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF AN EXCLUSIVE FORUM FOR ISNESS BACKERS!

It is called "CRAFTY TUESDAYS" and is a late night brain child of mine contrived to pamper my existing backers and attract some new one's!

The studio, now turned craft workshop for the miniature work, is a very welcoming environment for crafty gatherings. We have space, tools, materials, craft books, cookies, tea and great music!

WE'LL BE MEETING EVERY TUESDAY OF 2010 AT 6pm FOR 3 HOURS OF FREE-FLOWING CREATIVITY & RADICAL CRAFTING:

Sewing, weaving, knitting, spinning, beading, any hybrids of the above and much more!

Bring your own project or conjure one up on the spot!

To join, click the widget bellow and make a pledge (at any level!) to "ISNESS".

Be sure to mention CRAFTY TUESDAYS in your comment to me or e-mail me directly at sallweis@gmail.com to get on the Craft Tuesday Mail List!

See you Tuesday!

Interview with Williamsburg Greenpoint News+Arts

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Launched!!!

Click the widget to view the Kickstarter video, Filmed and edited by Lee Peterkin.

You can become a backer for as little as $5!

Every new backer adds to the "popularity" of the project on Kickstarter, which in turn generates more support! Go for it. Take part in the insanity of ISNESS!

Thank You Circle Arts!

I cant tell you how many times this organization, and in particular Amy Shapiro, their president, came through for me during the long months of hunting down props and materials for the production.

Thanks Circle Arts!

It's A Wrap!

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

From left to right:

Back row: Lee Sebastiany, Michael Calloway, Tom Regan, Jen Storch, Amanda Ryan, Mia Bauman.

Middle row: Amy Bittner, James Allerdyce, Isabelle Thiele, Anna Kohler, Arielle Toelke, Alexandra Ceribelli.

Kneeling row: Aiden peleg, Stephanie DeLatour, Toby Levin, Catriona Rubenis-Stevens, Stavit Allweis, Nachshon Peleg, Zoola.

Front row: Emma Peleg, Kimberly Boldrini, Lelo Lourenzo.

Last Shoot. Wow! Already?

This was one strange shoot.

Knowing it was our last, I expected some sort of party atmosphere...

No such thing. It was quiet, sluggish, might I say sad?...

Toby had to jump from scene to scene catching up on missing material. Pretty demanding, considering that his scene partners were not present.

Later we popped a bottle of champagne (O.k... fizzy wine) and sat around taking turns fantasizing out loud about where we might be two years from now.

(I want to extend special thanks to my first photographer Kimberly Boldrini, who besides excellent photography, always brought her unique perspective on life to the set and offered up moments of reflection such as this one.)

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Image: Kimberly Boldrini

Lil' & The General, A morbid Duet

The last shoot with Catriona and James and a culmination of their deep interpretation of the bizarre affair between a deluded child and a dying man.

It was also a SFX orgy as we had not 1, or 2, but 4 (!!!) wonderful artists headed by Arielle Toelke having their way with the pliable, patient James.

Shooting the duet was a messy, awkward affair but heart wrenching all the same. I can't wait to record the song to go with this one...

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Image: Kimberly Boldrini

Arielle Toelke, Mia Bauman, Amanda Ryan & Michael Duggan were responsible for this man's sorry state.

On Location at Sandy Hook N.J.

Getting ready for our first and only location shoot was like packing for a very strange camping trip. Boxes were marked "Doll-Skin" "Poop" "Hunter's Gear" and such. Not your regular beach fare...

The logistics nearly blew a fuse in my brain. I know how to get 2 kids safely to the beach and back, but 8 very unique individuals was a little out of my league.

Having said this, getting away from the green screen for awhile was exhilarating.

All put up graciously with the diminished physical conditions, with the carrying of heavy gear over half a mile of muscle-wrecking sand and eating sandy food for two days.

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Catriona didn't hold back and delivered a wildly idiosyncratic "Beach Lil'".

Image: Kimberly Boldrini

Cat and James take a break from the physically demanding work, to pose for a double portrait.

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Alex and I rush to wrap the freezing actors after their dip in the sub zero water.

Image: Kimberly Boldrini

Lee looking awful handsome and natural in his "wilderness" setting.

You'd never guess that he was rather uncomfortable walking barefoot on ant's nests and crawling, thorny vines.

Stacking the crew to create a no-budget, on the fly crane

Last few stitches sealing James in the "doll-skin"...

James, completely stitched in.

James and Mia slipping a quick rest in before James' glamour shot

Our box-O-turds, hand made, from simple kitchen ingredients.

(Yes, they are edible and organic!)

Seeing It All From Lil's P.O.V

An intimate shoot with the oddest couple in "ISNESS".

It had been 2 months since the last shoot with Catriona and James so it felt a little like a reunion. A rather hallucinatory bizarre reunion... It was wonderful to see James, yet again, commit so fully to the character of Emily, Lil's imaginary friend. Very, very charming.

Lelo and Kim slapped the good ol' Vaseline on their lenses for that true vintage, dreamy effect.

Later Catriona re-staged Lil' coughing up the hairball at dinner, it was gross and titillating. We finally got the close ups we missed in March.

Image: Kimberly Boldrini

Enviable love.

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

The angelic James Allerdyce.

The Flashback Shoot

Flashbacks are tricky business.

In tracking back to the origins of the larger than life love affair between my leading Matriarch and Patriarch, I had to ask the actors for quite a bit. Tom was a great sport and got a hair cut just in time. Also, rambunctious sex poses were required such as would challenge any 20 year old yogi hipster (Sorry, no images of those. You'll have to buy the book!)

Image: Lelo Lourenzo

Breastfeeding and smoking. Yup. That's the 70's for ya.

Hunter Goes Glam-Rock

Lee took the challenge, left his comfort zone and committed fully to the Glam Rock archetype mixing in vanity, femininity and brazen, sexy physicality.

We all enjoyed this shoot so much.

Loud music, singing, shouting... what's not to like?

Image: Christopher Perino (Guest Photographer)

Image: Lelo Lourenzo