[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): I only found an unfinished draft of this old post, although I am fairly certain it was originally completed and posted to my MySpace blog in 2008, shortly after my post about Istvan and JoAnn Nadas. Yet extensive searching of my personal backups of online content have not uncovered a complete version, so I finally had to resort to finishing it as best I could, although I am certain the original effort yielded better results. The draft broke off in the middle of the third sentence about JoAnn Glenisky, so everything after that is newly written from degraded memories and with a diminished spirit.]
Half-Remembered: Bob Gardiner
As with my previous "Half-Remembered" post, the title refers exclusively to the failings of my memory in general, and should not be taken as a slight on the memorable nature of the subject. By all accounts, Bob Gardiner was one of the most memorable people ever.
I met Mr. Gardiner briefly, somewhere around 1978, spending a couple of days in his studio in Portland, OR, where he was living and working at the time. He is best known for the Oscar-Winning animated short feature "Closed Mondays", which he co-produced with Will Vinton. They split shortly after making that ground-breaking film, and Vinton's name has somewhat unfairly become exclusively synonymous with the field of "Claymation".
It was only today that I learned of his death in 2005. Broader, but generally breif, biographical information is readily available on the web; just Google his name if you are interested. This post is only going to be about my personal encounter with the man and his work, and the ways in which it instructed and inspired me.
An essential starting point is the short feature itself, which can also be easily found online by searching for "Closed Mondays" on YouTube. Go do that now, actually, and then come back and finish this, if you like.
"Closed Mondays" was the one work for which he is most noted and remembered, and was in fact the only work by which I knew of him prior to visiting his studio. I sensed that he felt a little opressed under the shadow of that early acheivement. Having an artistic temperment naturally gave him mixed feelings about the whole idea of the Oscar, so for him it may have been as much a curse as anything else.
My first visit was a small field trip for our small roster of TAG (Talented And Gifted) students (more about that later). My second visit was on my own.
He was in the middle of shooting a commercial for Kodak, which was to be a morphing sequence through all of their popular models of snapsot cameras, but admitted that it had been slow going, and as far as I know, it was never actually finished. He probably missed the deadline and defaulted on the contract. He had so many different projects in various stages of incompletion, and not just clay animation.
He worked in virtually any form of creative media you can imagine, and some that I had not even imagined. He had sculptures, clay "paintings", holograms ( more about those below), and played and sang original songs for us on an electric piano and on guitar. I felt a little bad about putting him on the spot, especially in the middle of the usualy isolate safety of his creative space. He wasn't a teacher and wasn't really sure what to do with kids around, especially since much of his work and much of his natural style was more adult in nature.
Most fascinating to me were the collection of cylindrical multiplex holograms he had created, as I had already experimented with holography, with little success, and this was a kind of hologram and production process that I had never seen or heard of before. He apparently had a hand in the development of the process, but I believe there were others involved as well. The finished product is a transparent cylinder about the size of large lampshade. When a point source of light (white light is fine, no need for lasers for viewing) is placed in the center of the cylinder, the effect is the closest thing to Hollywood depictions of "holograms" (eg. the Princess Leia hologram shown to Luke by R2D2 in Star Wars) that is ever likely to be physically possible to create. Suspended in the center of the cylinder is a 3 dimensional image which can be viewed from any angle. Additionally, the image can change or move with with the rotation of the cylinder, or by the observer moving around it. His subjects included live humans as well as clay sculptures, and many of them were designed to smoothly loop an animation sequence. I have always been surprised that this never caught on in any larger way as an art form, nor as a method for creating advertising displays. The starting point for creating these holograms is to film the subject with a motion picture camera as it makes a single full rotation on a turntable platform. The filming could be at a constant frame-rate, or it could be shot frame-by-frame, to facilitate stop-motion animation. Thus there was virtually no limit to the size or nature of the subject, so long as it could be viewed from all horizontal angles and an appropriate apparatus could be assembled to rotate it (or alternatively, the camera could be trucked in a precise circle around something very large, but as far as I know, this had not been attempted). I will refrain from going into the details of the remainder of the process here. Such details could probably be found online, or I could share as much as I know with any interested person who inquires.
The only downside of this form of holography relative to other methods is that, while it uses similar materials (ultra-high-resolution film) and equipment (lasers) for creating and embodying the image, it also has much in common with stereo photography and lenticular "3D", in that only horizontal parallax is recorded. In other words, while a traditional hologram is like a little window through which you view a fully three-dimensional image, a Cylindrical Multiplex Hologram only presents the two eyes with differing 2-dimensional perspectives on the subject, offset on the horizontal plane, although it does so by, in a sense, creating a multitude of narrow slit "windows" through which a single projected 2-dimensional motion picture frame could be viewed in full.
Also much like my previous post, this is as much about an exceptional teacher and person who did much to make my mind and my world something that greatly transcended my rural surroundings. JoAnn Glenisky was employed as an English teacher at my school, and when the federal government created the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. The local superindendent had no clue what to do with it, so he put it in her hands, much to my benefit. She taught me how to fill out requisition forms and the process for getting them approved and turned me loose. It is hard to believe that the kid I remember convincing the district superintendant to approve and sign these forms was me. Such courage and audacity have long since been somehow deleted from my psyche, although these attributes stayed with me through some of the most challenging times of my young adulthood.
It was through these TAG funds, in part, that I was able to experiment with stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography. There were two incomplete attempts at animated short features, one of which was subsequently destroyed by a kitten, and time-lapse experiments which included a 3-minute drive across the continental United States. Eventually, some of these films were projected on stage during some shows of the 2000 tour of the band Man or Astro-man.
Mrs. Glenisky also greatly enabled my gradiose delusions of being a writer. Before I learned to type for myself, she would use her personal time to manually transcribe my barely legible handwritten drafts of truly awful short science fiction stories. While these were routinely rejected by magazine editors, one of them earned me an opportunity to join a writer's workshop with the author Ursula K. LeGuin, which was offered as a college credit summer course by Portland State University. Being a college course, this also required the payment of tuition, which Mrs. Glenisky also paid from her own personal funds. The workshop, part of a program called Haystack, was held in Cannon Beach Oregon, which also meant an exciting opportunity for 16-year-old me to be away from home and in the supportive company of adults who treated me as an equal, for an entire week.
I attended Haystack again two years later, again with Ursula K. LeGuin, with whom I had also maintained a correspondence, as well as other workshops, but by that time I was already creatively crippled by the general and social anxiety which keep me largely paralyzed to this day, even with treatment.
Both JoAnn Glenisky and Ursula LeGuin invested so much in me as a writer, my greatest regret in life is how, after a promising start, it all came to nothing, and how much I squandered such spectacularly unusual opportunities. But this isn't intended to be about me and my perpetual pity party. This is about how much I appreciate my fortunate encounters with truly amazing people.
There was another writer from the first workshop, Micaela Massimino, with whom I maintained a friendship and correspondence for a few years and even visited in Boston MA, at the end of the same cross-country drive during which I filmed my epic and chaotic time-lapse travel film. That trip, and it's cast of characters, are a whole story in themselves.
Bob Gardiner, as previously mentioned, passed away in 2005, Ursula K. LeGuinn still lives and writes in Portland OR [Update: Ursula just passed away on January 22, 2018], and my recent attempts to determine the status of JoAnn Glenisky or Micaela Massimino have been unsuccessful. I am grateful to all of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment