56. Deliver

How we bring something into the world. Final push: painting, color-correction, review, release.

Reviewing at various resolutions.

For the first time in years, I thought about the violence of giving birth, when I had passed as if through a mirror into an inchoate animal region, a place with no words.
Rachel Cusk, “The Stuntman”

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A blur of weeks.

The show opens in four days, Saturday the 2nd.

Art-making can be meditative and beautiful. But production under the gun, for a 6 minute film containing hand-painted footage, can be a truly mind-numbing experience.

I submitted a cut to the curators, at the last possible minute, on the last possible day. It left for Culture House DC yesterday, where it’ll be mounted this week. I’ll be there with other featured artists the following weekend, Saturday the 9th, for Opening Reception (join us).

Most of us are meeting in person for the first time, but it feels more like an anticipated family reunion, than a convergence of strangers.

A proper retro, in coming issues.

The first of past two weeks,

I painted over 100 small watercolors. It required some strategy since parts of the paintings in this sequence could be looped, others couldn’t, and at times these would overlap temporally.

“Strategy”

Drawings prepped for painting. Sticky notes coming in handy:

Painting, 2:30AM 😅:

Painted sheets:

Compositing, masking, retouching:

Scanned and composited (on ones):

Cleaned-up sequence, partial (on twos):

The second of past two weeks,

I normalized color across the film.

I’ve never done color correction like this before, so it was a daunting task. But I started breaking it down into smaller ones, just chipping away at it until it was done.

Audit

The scanned watercolors were the most texturally and chromatically similar, so I refined one, and normalized all others to it, via split screen. Reference footage on the left, footage being edited, on the right:

Before (rear) and in-progress (front).

Then I just moved on down the line, to shot footage. Skin was particularly hard:

Isolating colors for targeted correction.

It took me the full week to get things to a decent place:

Before (left), Exhibit cut (right).

Finally, here’s a quick and dirty trailer (1min20s):

Members, see below a longer preview (3.5 min).

Everyone else—until next time, when I’ll be back with photos from the show.