Possibly the most important
part of Adam's Graduate career was befriending and collaborating with a
young man named James Gore.
James also has his own complicated and tragic life, but
unfortunately I know little about it and it's probably better that I not
discuss it publicly. However, he was an energetic man who would hang
out at Cal Arts in the animation classes, make his own animated films,
but was never officially enrolled or accepted. Yet, James still ended
up being the most influential member of that first group of Cal Arts
experimental animators. His films dominantly demonstrate in bizarre and
hypnotic kind of morphing that on one hand appears to be child-like
scribbles and in another light reveal to be highly sophisticated and
radical stream-of-conscious animation. This morphing style was very
influential to the entire department. It could be seen in all different
films from that class. In one of his films "Une Lettre a un Ami" (aka
"The Letter"), Beckett gave James permission to use one portion of one
of his early experiments within the film.
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| Dear Janice |
While at CalArts Beckett perfected two styles that were very
distinctly his - Infinite Animation and intense use of the Optical
Printer. Infinite Animation is a process in which one creates a simple
loop or cycle and you continue adding to it over and over again. You
take, for example, 6 sheets of paper and you draw a line moving across
the page - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Then you go back to 1 and you draw a
ball bouncing. Since it still has the original line on it your page 1
becomes 7 as well. You draw the ball out through 6-12. Then start the
process over again with something else - a square. By the end you have
an animated loop that starts out with a line, then a line and a circle,
then a line circle and square, etc. This is the technique used in his
film "Dear Janice", but he used 12 sheets of paper and created some of
the most intricate animation I have ever seen (and many agree with me on
that).
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| Heavy Light |
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His optical printer process was quite different and yet similar
at the same time. An optical printer is a machine that used to be used
(and occasionally still is) to create complex FX in a movie. The basic
example was showing a building on fire. You have the fire on one strip
of film and the house on another strip and you put them together. These
FX can get significantly complex and Adam developed a technique where
he would manipulate the image creating up to 100 iterations of one image
on a single frame. Basically, he made a simple animation and gave it a strange trail effect (similar to video FX when you point a camera at the TV or projection that the camera is also feeding live video to - so it sees trails if you move the camera around).
This technique was most strongly exemplified in his film "Heavy Light", which is possibly also his most well known film. Even though he learned almost all of his skills from Pat O'Neill everyone (including Pat) consider Adam to have pioneered this technique himself. Pat has described the old Optical Printer room at CalArts as a place where Adam would spend hours, days even, and he kept it orderly. He was an unofficial gate keeper and apparently some times he would even remove a piece of important equipment just to make sure someone would have to talk to him in order to use the damn thing.
He continued to use this technique in his incomplete film "Knotte Gross". But, again, that is another story.
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