Brad Rushing on artistic motivation

Brad Rushing is a cinematographer who was recently interviewed on the youtube channel Film Courage. It was so insipring to me, I thought I'd post a few outakes of his interview. For more details, see the full interview.

Q: How do you keep faith in yourself and in your craft during turbulent times?

A: ... there was a time early in my career (early on in the 90’s) where I was so frustrated and so down and didn’t believe in myself and I just had this revelation You know what, I’ve set a goal. I don’t have to believe in myself. I just have to do the steps that I committed to doing to get me through the valley of the shadow of death, and that worked for me. It was a device that worked for me and I feel like occasionally I still have it. ... I just find that my brain is a little more complex in terms of the things it does to me. I don’t know that I am always in the driver’s seat and, quite honestly, I deal with self-esteem issues. I really do. I think a lot of people do in this business. Your identity is tied up in your work, even if you don’t want it to be because you put so much of yourself into it ... I do try and keep faith in myself and you know honestly when I do have crisis with the system or success is a nebulous thing I really get basic and I go back and remind myself: Brad you're an artist. That was the contract you made. You never said you wanted to be rich. I don’t care about being rich. I would like to be self-sufficient. I’d like to be secure. If I was rich it would be okay but I’d be donating, helping, and so on. I mean, I just don’t need a super yacht and an island. But I remind myself of the contract that I made was that I wanted to be an artist, simple as that.

For more questions and his wise advise, see the interview on Film Courage.

Photography design principles according to Johannes Itten (part 1/2)

Johannes Itten (1888 – 1967) was a Swiss painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus before starting his own school in Berlin. He won the Sikkens Prize in 1965.

One of Itten's paintings from 1916, Der BachSanger (Helge Lindberg):

Except for this painting of Itten, all images below are mine. Feel free to use them as you like (even for commercial purposes), but please credit them to me: for example add "(c) David Joyner used by permission." The basic references used here are

1. M. Freeman, The Photographer’s Eye, Focal Press, 2007. (Note: The latest 2019 edition has no mention of Itten in the index, but the original 2007 version does.)
2. J. Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltungs und Formelehre, Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg (1963). Translated as Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, Thames and Hudson, London (1964).

Design principle: Two important ingredients of photographic composition are contrast and balance.

Balance is the relationship between contrasting elements.

Laws of form, discussed in detail below, describe these relationships.

Contrasts come in a variety of manners. This post illustrates some of the basic contrasts according to Itten.

We will see how Itten introduces other design elements via his "laws of form". For example, two other design elements entering into photography are:

Direction: Using implied movement (via motion blur, for example) to create the illusion of displacement.

Rhythm: A repetition of one or more elements, creating harmony.

Laws of Form and Shape

In design theory, "form" is any visual element in an image, as opposed to we commonly call "negative space" (an area of the image with little or no contrast value). Sometimes a form is also called a "positive value" in the image, while a "negative value" is really negative space in the image.

1. Proximity - Nearby visual elements are grouped together in the mind
   
   In this example, the cars/gondolas of the ferris wheel and the birds lined up on the railing get grouped into shapes.
2. Similarity - Similar visual elements in a photograph are grouped together in the mind
   
   In this example the vertical stripes of apartments with the same colors are grouped together.
3. Closure - Visual elements which are grouped together form an outline shape
   
   In this example the triangles of books at the Peabody Library get grouped together.
4. Simplicity - The mind tends to prefer simpler compositions (symmetry, balance, simple shapes)
   
   In this example there are only two colors (blue and tan) and two objects (one bird and one building). The building is made of simple rectangle.
5. Continuation - The mind tends to continue shapes and lines beyond where they end.
   
   In the above example, the rows of cemetery tombstones seem to go on forever.
6. Continuation, 2 - Grouped elements with an implied motion are assumed to move together.
   
   In the above example, the runner and 1st baseman move in sync with the out-of-shot baseball.
7. Continuation, 3 - The mind tends to continue shapes and lines beyond where they end.
   
   In the above example, the skater is mostly seen in shadow, but we know he’s there.
8. Separation - To be perceived, the object must stand out from its background.
   
   Of course this collage-type shot (it's from a single shot of a lamp) is artificially separated, but at least it makes Itten's idea clearer.

Notes on Randy Baker's Playwriting II class

Randy Baker taught a playwriting class recently at the Writer's Center in Bethesda MD. He's a great teacher, the class was excellent, and here are some very rough notes (along with my own embellishments and possible mistakes) that I took during the class.

A playwright is a craftsman or builder of plays. The learning is in the doing. Many well-known playwrights actually dropped out of school. Playwrights learn by the doing.

We will structure the class by approaching it from the direction of Aristotle. He wrote in 300 BC the Poetics, and he discussed tragedies and what makes the story great.

What do we, our animal self, want from a story? We want it to move us emotionally.

Aristotle split what makes the play work into six categories:

1. plot or mythos (not quite the same as narrative plot),
   
2. character or ethos (not quite the same as a dramatic character),
   
3. thought or theme or dianoia (not quite the same as narrative theme),
   
4. music or melos,
   
5. diction or lexis (see also dialogue),
   
6. spectacle or opsis,
   

in order of importance.

In modern playwriting we often swap 1) and 2) in importance.

What does drama do? Drama is not an imitation of a thing but rather of an action.

For Aristotle, plot means something different than what we think of it. For him, plot means mythos. Mythos - myth or believe, or world-view perspective. For him, character means something else as well. For him, character was ethos, their a morality, their ethics, and how that affects their world view.

In modern playwriting, music could be referred to as tonality or poetry of the play.

Diction - the words we use, the type of dialogue.

Spectacle - the visuals, the set design, the location, the physical space used to convey the story. Where are the characters? What are they wearing?

Theater is defined by its limitations. It is analogous to the older history of poetry - when it was limited to meter. Aristotle's three unities:

• time - used to be required for the play to take place in 24 hours,
  
• place - used to required it to take place in one location,
  
• action - used to require it to have only one plot line (no B-story or C story).
  

For a recent example of this, consider the film Locke, written and directed by Steven Knight, starring Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke who, years earlier, had an affair with a co-worker Bethan. Quoting from the plot section of the wikipedia page for Locke:

Over the course of the two-hour drive from Birmingham to London, Locke holds a total of 36 phone calls with his boss and a colleague, Donal, to ensure the pour is successful, with his wife Katrina to confess his infidelity, his son, and with Bethan to reassure her during her labour. During these calls, he is fired from his job, kicked out of his house by his wife, and asked by his older son to return home. He coaches his assistant Donal through preparing the pour despite several major setbacks, and has imaginary conversations with his father, whom he envisions as a passenger in the back seat of his car. When he is close to the hospital, Locke learns of the successful birth of his new baby.

We see then that Aristotle's time, place and action requirements are satisfied with Locke.

Rafael Alvarez on Chaim Potok

In his keynote address to the 2014 Maryland Writers Association Conference, Rafael Alvarez spoke about the "Wisdom of Chaim Potok." Mr Alvarez (and the MWA) kindly allowed his talk to be videoed:


Some brief notes (what I note below is as much the wisdom of Rafael Alvarez and Chaim Potok):
Potok taught writing at JHU in 1996 and allowed Rafael Alvarez, a Baltimore Sun reporter who had not yet published his first book, to sit in. Knowing Potok commuted in my train from Philadelphia, Rafael volunteered to pick him up at the station and drive him to JHU. In this way, he collected the wisdom of Chaim Potok on writing, with the intention of writing an essay on Potok for the Sun. While the essay was never written, this talk is the essay he would have written.

Potok wrote The Chosen, which is a work of literary fiction that sold 3.5 million copies. It was also made into a movie starring Rod Steiger. He wrote about a dozen other books, both fiction and non-fiction, and is highly regarded as a writer of Jewish culture, history and philosophy.

As a teacher at JHU, Potok looks for a students "voice". He also stressed the carpentry, the hard work and the the craft, of writing. Writing is not "won" by the smartest, the most talented, the swiftest. It requires courage and hard work and diligence. Voice can be learned. Keep having new experiences. Don't repeat yourself. Always strive to improve and do better. For a short story, say 10 pages, Potok would write at least a dozen drafts of the overall content and 20 drafts of individual portions. For Potok, the writer is not that different from the sculptor. Both create their works from their imagination - the writer is using the English language and the sculptor a block of marble. However, the writer, Potok says, must first create his marble before he or she can start on crafting the story. It is through the heart and human imagination that we document our stories. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

For more details of this great lecture, see the video above.

Review of "Mathematics, Art, Technology and Cinema"

"Mathematics, Art, Technology and Cinema" (ed. by Michele Emmer, Mirella Manaresi) Springer, 2003. 242 pages.
ISBN-10: 354000601X
ISBN-13: 978-3540006015

This book is out-of-print but the prices at various used-book sites are rather high (I've seen used copies range in price from $ 85 to $ 600). Hopefully, this brief review will help a buyer decide if the book is what they want.

This is a collection of popular articles on topics in the intersection of mathematics, art, technology and cinema. It can be broken down into three parts.

(Mathematics and Art)
The 1st and third articles "God is Everywhere" (by the late American sculptor Charles O. Perry) and "John Robinson's Universe Series of Symbolic Sculptures" are both on mathematical sculptures. The only pieces covered are a selection of those of Perry and those of the late British sculptor John Robinson. Artists such as Helaman Ferguson or George W. Hart are not discussed at all. The second and fourth articles, "The Geometric World of Lucio Saffaro" and "Mathematics meets Art: Escher, Reutersvard and Saffaro at Bologna 2000", are on artists whose paintings have a mathematical theme. These too are focused on the mathematically-themed work of specific artists. This part comprises about 40 pages.


(Mathematics and Technology)
The next six articles are "Making the Optiverse: A Mathematician's Guide to AVN, a Real-Time Interactive Computer Animator", "The Geometry of Sight: From Euclid's Optics to the Renaissance Perspective", "From Descriptive Geometry to CAD", "The Muses of Mathematics", "Cryptography and Digital Signature", and "The Images of Art and the Art of Images." The articles on AVN and CAD discuss technologies which are now mostly out-of-date. The optics article is timeless and nicely written but discusses topics available in many other places. The articles on cryptography and "the muses" seem tangential for the subject matter of the book. Perhaps the article "The Images of Art and the Art of Images" is the most relavant today to the book's title. It discusses, among other things, (mathematically-based) technology used in research on ancient art and architecture. This entire part comprises about 60 pages.

(Mathematics and Cinema)
Almost all of the articles in the remaining 140 pages are on a specific movie with a mathematical theme, or an interview with a writer or director connected with such a movie. Films dicussed include "Good Will Hunting" (G. Van Sant), "Moebius" (G. Mosquera), "A Beautiful Mind" (Ron Howard), "Enigma" (Michael Apted), "The Bank" (Robert Connolly), "Cube" (V. Natali), "$\pi$" (D. Aronofsky), "Stand and Deliver" (R. Menendez), and others. However, there is one mathematical article, namely the short piece by David Pravica and Heather Ries, " 'Cube': The Math Paper." This is one of the most interesting articles, however a version of it is available on the website of one of the authors (http://personal.ecu.edu/pravicad/). If you like mathematics and films, you will like this part a lot.

On "The Origin of Stories"

Here is my mini-review of The Origin of Stories, by Brian Boyd (Harvard Univ. Press, 2009).

This book changed my way of thinking about stories. It addresses the following natural questions.

• 
  How do we represent meaning in our experiences?
  
• 
  How does our understanding of stories contibute?
  
• 
  How did stories, or more generally art, or more generally play, evolve (in the sense of evolutionary adaptation) as an aspect of human mind and/or behavior?
  
• 
  How is one to understand the creative work of the author/artist (or reader/audience) from this perspective?
  

Here are a few quotes which might serve to approximate Boyd's explanation:

From page 14:

We have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves senses and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information
through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively peursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crutial domain, social information.

From pages 80-81:

An evolutionary adaptation is a feature of body, mind, or behavior that exists throughout a species and shows evidence of good design for a specific function or functions that will ultimately make a difference to the species' survival and reproductive success.

From page 92-94:

The more often and the more exuberantly animals play, the more they hone skills, widen repertoires, and sharpen sensitivities. Play therefore has evolved to be highly self-rewarding. As for play, so for the cognitive play of art we can specify the
design conditions in advance. If there are cognitive capacities in which flexible fine-tuning and widening the range of options deployed at short and context-sensitive notice can make decisive differences - and out aural, visual, vocal, manual, and social skills all qualify - then individuals with stronger motivations to practice
such behavior in situations of low danger and adequate resources will fare better.

From page 156:

We think, remember, and imagine by mentally stimulating or reactivating elements of what we have previously perceived, understood, enacted, and experienced. Simulations appear central to the representation of meaning.

From pages 381-383:

Art is a human adaptation, its chief functions being

1. 
   to refine and retune our minds in modes central to human cognition - sight, sound, and sociality - which it can do piecemeal through its capacity to motivate us to participate again and again in these high-intensity workouts;
   
2. 
   to raise the status of gifted artists;
   
3. 
   to improve the coordination and cooperation of communities, in our very social species; and
   
4. 
   to foster creativity on an individual and social level.
   

The problem-solution model allows us to analyze closely the choices we infer behind a work of art. Storytellers' first problem is to capture attention. Each attempted solution to the problem of holding audience interest will involve different costs and benefits for both storytellers and their audiences. Storytellers will attempt to reduce the costs and raise the benefits of their own compositional efforts and their audiences' responses.

page 322:

The evolutionary approach follows three main lines:

1. 
   a problem-solution model that links the long term of evolution to the short term of n author making choices about this detail or that detail;
   
2. 
   earning attention as prior to generating meaning in the problems an author faces; and
   
3. 
   a multileveled system of explanation.
   

There are four interconnected levels of explanation appropriate to any work of literature: a universal level, which considers aspects of human nature in general; a local level, which focuses on particular cultural, historical, social, economic, technological, intellectual, or artistic contexts; an individual level, which assesses the dispositions and experiences of an author (or, alternatively, of a reader or critic); and a particular level, which examines the specific problem situation of the author composing this story, or of a reader readng it in a certain situation (for the first time or the n-th time) or for a given purpose.

Highly recommended.