How We Remember

I've tried to explain to a few friends what Vine is and they all have the same reaction, "Six seconds? That's it? What can you do with that?". Good question. I think six seconds is freeing because it breaks the expectation we normally have for watching a "short" video. It also occurred to me that our memories, well at least my memories, seem to happen in short chunks; chunks that might just be about six seconds long. When I call up a memory, often times it is a flash of an ordinary moment; walking down the street, waiting in line, a turn of the head and a smile. If I try to remember a long event, it still comes to me in little packets of memory. Vine videos replicate that.

Last weekend, my wife and I were hanging out on the patio listening to the new Steve Earle album and I happen to look straight up and saw some beautiful clouds floating overhead.

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Saturday evening chillin' w @SteveEarle (CD) on the patio. https://t.co/qAiwuDJHc7
— Hal Weaver (@Weaverwerx) June 16, 2013

"The Struggle" - A Vine Stop Motion bit

"The Struggle", a short stop-motion animation starring "Frank" from "Sin City". :)

"The Struggle" a #vine animation. Never give up! Weaverwerx.blogspot.com vine.co/v/bLiaHpvPHQ5
— Hal Weaver (@Weaverwerx) June 7, 2013

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Six Seconds on The Vine

This morning, a friend of mine posted this link;

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/animator-ian-padgham-flourishes-within-vines-6-second-limitation/

on a well-used social media web site. I instantly fell in love with these imaginative and lyrical very short, just six-second animations created through a new (to me) app called Vine. I was intrigued enough with the concept of what could be done with six seconds, that I downloaded the app and installed it on my iPod. Here's first attempt;

My #firstpost on Vine. TS Andrea on the way. vine.co/v/bLWulDBxYVn
— Hal Weaver (@Weaverwerx) June 6, 2013

Believe me, I realize it is a very humble start, but what I liked about it was the immediacy of capturing a moment. The six second time limit and lack of customization options strips away the clutter and forces the creator to make something. Even if that "something" is bad or boring, it's over so quick, no harm done. The six second limit also makes the videos more honest in a way. I see that people are willing to share very mundane moments, which for me is where life happens. Most of our lives are made up by those "mundane moments", so what a fine gift to glimpse other folks slices of life and save some of my own.

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Covering the Beer Revolution

Sometimes work finds you. Usually when you already have more then enough to do. I was in just that state of heightened activity when my old friend, Jeff Maisey, owner/publisher of VEER Magazine approached me to create an illustration of George Washington raising a pint for the May issue. "When do you need it?" I asked him. "I don't need it until May second. That gives you plenty of time". "I'm leaving for Scotland on April twenty-fifth, so I'll have to have it to you by the twenty-fourth". And so it began.

Jeff's idea to have Washington raising a pint came from another venture of his, a new web site promoting Virginia Craft Beer, and with Virginia being strong in the "Founding Father's" department and George being such a recognizable figure, it was a natural. I decided to take a pop art approach to the piece, with bold colors, heavy lines and starburst background. Jeff approved my concept and I was off and drawing. I only had to reach into my pocket and pull out a dollar bill to use as reference for my portrait. I also served as my own hand model and used the camera built-in to my laptop to shoot a few images of my hand holding a pint glass.

I decided the final work would be done as a vector image in Adobe Illustrator, so that I would have maximum flexibility with color and scalability. I scanned in my drawings, George and the hand holding the pint were separate pieces and placed them in my Illustrator document. I tried the auto-trace feature on my scans, but my first drawings of George were too rough and I couldn't get the look I had in mind, so I created a larger, cleaner drawing of George (shown above) by doing a quick tracing over a blown-up image from the dollar bill and finishing details by hand. This image yielded better results with the auto-trace. I cleaned-up any unwanted artifacts and modeled the mouth into a smirk. All the coloring was done on separate layers above and below the outlines using the paintbrush tool controlled via mouse (next time I'll have a Wacom tablet). I finished the illo with the starburst background and sign plate with the tagline, "a revolution is brewing" and delivered my files via dropbox. In the final printed version, they added the Virginia Craft Beer title. The printed issue is available in the Tidewater region of coastal Virginia through the month of May.

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