Waiting for the Robots

Moving Pictures

Amelia — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:31:07 +0000

Pat and I have been continuing to play with stop motion, and we’ve made these two short movies.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They are works in progress: I’m starting to learn some digital animation, in order to be able to overlay the actual photographs with my drawings and computer manipulations, and we’re still figuring out what music and sounds we want to go along with it. We hope to be able to finish them soon, but it’s been a lot of fun experimenting!

Sneak Peak!

Amelia — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:41:23 +0000

One of the projects I have in the works currently is “The Book of Beasts” – an alphabet accordion book. Here’s the background drawing for the letter B. I’ve been choosing a variety of animals and mythological creatures, usually picking creatures that I think are the most exciting. The images will be constructed using colors and textures from photographs, using the outlines of the base drawings, with a bit of an illuminated manuscript style.

What movies look like pt. 2

Amelia — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:43:24 +0000

drawing made while listening to a summary of the movie "Them"

drawing made while listening to a summary of the movie "The Screaming Skull"

The Garden of Roots and Webs – Tunnel Form

Amelia — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:38:44 +0000

The Garden of Roots and Webs is an image I created when I was first learning to use Photoshop and experimenting with my drawing/photo/collage process. I’ve been back to this image many times, exploring the characters in an accordion book, as well as making an attempt to recreate it using screen printing. After learning about tunnel books, I jumped at the chance to make this image more dynamic.

I made the accordions out of a continuous grassy background, on double sided paper to continue the image as much as possible.

The butterfly and dragonfly characters are double sided, and suspended from fishing line from the inner frame. That way, as the tunnel extends, the flying characters are free to move in the air.

Playing with stop motion

Amelia — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:29:31 +0000

The Girl Who Feared the Future

Amelia — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:16:59 +0000

For this piece I picked out 6 science fiction novels ( based on their covers), read them, glued the pages together, and wrote my own summaries of the stories. After all of that, I created an image to put over the books, which expresses, more or less, my fear that the future could be a pretty terrifying place.

Some of my favorite parts of some of the stories:

The House The Stood Still: The house had bricks that kept people young. It was built by an alien robot that crash-landed in America in the Aztec time.The immortals want to abandon Earth, taking the bricks from the House with them, to keep them young. The beautiful immortal woman wants to defend Earth, and attack Mars first. The lawyer has several nice nights with the beautiful lady after rescuing her, but is abandoned by her in her spaceship apartment when he refuses to bomb the Mars factories.

The Secret of the Sunless World: When a man gets the first alien disease ever, in exchange for treatment by a giant spider shaped doctor, he must try to recover an alien female archeologist and some precious relics from the space pirates. Against his will, he receives a super cure to the disease that gives him enhanced night vision and the ability to see radiation. He uses that to find a mountain that has a hidden cache of ancient alien relics, including a space ship of incredible lost technology. This spaceship whisks him, some primitive peaceful native aliens, a space pirate, and the female archeologist away just as the planet is being invaded by ruthless barbarian aliens.

The Doomsday Planet is a world on the edge of extinction. A spaceship full of vacationers is pulled towards it by an irresistible, throbbing, heartbeat. The heartbeat drives some people mad, makes people love each other, and other people sick. Most of the worlds occupants are sleeping in vaults underneath the ground, lulled into unconsciousness by the throbbing heartbeat. The beautiful queen tells him not to worry that the planet is about to collide with another planet, that things will be OK. The throbbing noise is meant to keep people calm, so that the transition to the new order will go more smoothly. She teaches him telepathy and he trusts her. The worlds collide; everyone falls asleep and wakes up to a new world. He finds his wife, the sad scientist falls for the beautiful queen, and everyone gets married. He decides to stay on the world and perfect his newfound telepathy skills.

Enslaved Brains is the story of a man who was lost in the jungle for 40 years, and returns to find a changed world. It is clean, efficient, and controlled- which provokes the savage in him. His cousin’s beautiful daughter is voluntarily put into a coma, to avoid a forced marriage to the evil scientist. He discovers that his sister’s brain resides in eternal torment, after her death, running a food-processing machine. He is driven to become an intense revolutionary, joins the secret society, and uses jungle acid to release the brains, killing, but freeing them. They overthrow the government and rescue, at the final moment, the girl from the clutches of the evil scientist.

Where do thoughts come from?

Amelia — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:40:53 +0000

What movies look like

Amelia — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:56:24 +0000

12 Monkeys

Awhile ago, Pat and I started a project where he tells me about movies that I haven’t seen and I draw pictures of what I think they are about.

House of the Devil

Since I can’t handle anything too scary, but I’m strangely interested in the creepy story lines of horror movies, I think this is probably the best way for me to experience those sort of movies. I’m pretty excited to do more of these drawings and turn the drawings into something crazy.

Do you think this is really all there is?

Amelia — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:35:25 +0000

I’ve always been a bit terrified about non-existence, and the idea of infinity – its just so hard to wrap my brain around it. And then I start thinking about the movie Dark City, and how strange it would be, if, instead of an empty void outside of the city, there were giant rabbits and fields full of flowers?

The House with 57 Doors

Amelia — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:13:03 +0000

I’ve finally finished the house-maze-storybook that’s been bouncing around my head for forever! I love the idea of unfolding pages as you explore from room to room. Over the years, I’ve toyed with several versions, when finally, I learned this 1 sheet book folding technique (Thanks Heather Bella!) that seemed to be perfect. Because of the way it folds, the orientation of the rooms flip upside down and right side up as you unfold the book, adding to the maze-like confusion.