Made by hand, made by mouse

I've been a little distracted this week because I've been pretty feverishly trying to finish up a short movie I started, oh, back in December. After months of work this winter — followed by months of confusion and stagnation this spring — I'm finally closing in on the end of the project.

As I look back on the whole process, what's strking to me is how it generally followed a path that described a sort of miniature industrial revolution, from the creation of a hand-wrought world through machine intervention in human-created components, to a full-out technology-driven final product.

The first months were spent away from the computer — indeed, away from any tools more sophisticated than scissors and glue stick. I built chairs from old cereal boxes and fabric scraps, reappropriated empty Dentyne packages for windows, cut newspapers into tiny scraps to create tiny versions of themselves, and glued tissue paper down in wrinkled swaths to simulate wood flooring.

In part two of the process, the computer finally got booted up, but it was only a documenter of what was happening. I moved little handmade puppets around the little handmade sets I'd made, the computer and digital camera documenting each little movement. Microphones and audio interfaces played a similar role with the sound for the film, documenting the narration and music as it was performed.

But once the component pieces were done, the process became entirely mouse-driven, as sequences of video and audio were strung together, occasionally unstrung and restrung, until things were more or less where they needed to be. I even opted for computer-generated credits after thinking I'd hand-write them because it seemed easier, and because after seven months of this, I'm kind of ready for it to be done.

I haven't found any deep philosophical meaning in this personal journey through the industrial revolution. I enjoyed both the handmade and the mouse-made aspects of it. Obstacles were no greater in any one part of the process: I had to abandon my first clay-based character because he couldn't keep his shape; the figurines I went with had a propensity for falling over during the most dramatic sequences, and the learning curve I had to overcome in learning Final Cut Express... well, that process still isn't over.

But this close to done, I can say that I'm really glad I did it. I'm thankful for friends who've been generously helping me, and thankful for the ones who've simply asked when it's going to be done so they can see it. All I can say is soon. Very soon.

Respons-o-Matic 3000

Contrary to the Army's old recruiting pitch, I'd venture that parenting is, for most of us, 'the toughest job you'll ever love.'

I made this as a gift for a friend of mine who has two prepubescent children — and a birthday today.

Testing Patience

Late spring and summer in Minnesota have stuttered with the occasional release of results from the battery of tests the schools, by state law, must put our eight- to eighteen-year-olds through. We've reached a testravaganza here, where kids are tested nearly every year, usually on several subjects and often using more than one testing system.

The oddest manifestation of our love affair with testing came just before school ended, when it was decided that next year's 12th graders would be spared having to pass a high-stakes math test taken back in early spring in order to graduate. The catch: those that didn't pass will have to take the test up to three more times next year. But if they still don't pass, it won't be considered make or break for graduation. It'll just take up time that the students and teachers could have spent on other important preparations for heading out into the next phase of their lives.

All of this played in a interesting light for me back in June, when I went to a joint reunion of five graduating classes from my high school, 1980-1984. We were a generation whose grade school and middle school years were colored by that fact that our young teachers had come of age during the 1960's. Open schools, open classrooms, and alternative teaching methods had become the rage. There were standards and some testing, of course, but things were pretty loose and tended to emphasize exploration and individuality.

And the result? Sitting at the reunion, chatting with folks I hadn't seen since graduation, I was struck by how content folks seemed. Professions ran a stable and fairly predictable gamut, from teaching to health care to business, technology and advertising. Wine-making, comedy, and picture-framing were also represented. In a word, we'd spread ourselves naturally into industries and activities that help the economy and the culture keep chugging along, all without the benefit of over-testing.

There had been the sense throughout our education that yes, there were things we needed to learn, but that we could be trusted to have a natural curiosity, a natural interest in forging lives that were meaningful to us, and that those natural tendencies would eventually benefit everyone. Would that a bit more of that trust would find its way once again into the hearts and minds of the folks who forge Minnesota's education policies.

Of Cherries and Okra

A bit of food irony noted this week: while a friend in Birmingham, AL says that his okra and eggplant crops are being pilfered by hungry folks in search of free food, another friend here in Minneapolis can't give her cherry tree's outpouring away.

Well, she's had one taker — me. I've been over twice in the past week, and although I'm not sure just how much a bushel is, I'll go out on a limb and say I'm close to having taken away that many cherries at this point.

And I probably wouldn't have bothered with them myself if I weren't inspired by my own little cherry tree. Back in April it budded out just before a hard freeze, so I assumed we wouldn't get any cherries from it this year, but we did. Twenty-five of them. So my friend's tree has more than supplemented our meager crop and provided us with a very respectable sour cherry pie season.

But what to make of the fact that the MN cherries will for the most part go to the birds and the squirrels, while the AL okra is so prized it's being stolen?

I have noticed a slow evolution in thinking this year about food sources in general in Minneapolis. Folks are slowly putting in more vegetable gardens, buying more from farmer's markets. But the transition is far from complete. A tree showering cherries is still, I think, more likely to be thought of as a messy nuisance than a food source. And while I won't assert that folks in Birmingham are somehow inherently more likely to recognize food as it grows up from the ground or falls from the trees, it could well be that a very hungry belly breeds a new kind of sight, one that more easily sees the value in the edible stuff growing in right in front of us.

Whales and Humans

This week a friend passed along an article from the New York Times (check the reference below to read it yourself) about state of the relationship between whales and humans.

Central to the piece are the interactions that have been taking place in Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California Sur, Mexico between gray whales and the humans who venture out into the laguna. Mothers with their calves in tow have been visiting boats, swimming up alongside and rearing up to look at, and be touched by, the humans. What makes this behavior all the more remarkable is that it comes on the heels of a history of whale hunting in the area and looming evidence that use of sonar by the military is causing a condition similar to the bends in whales that may be the cause of beachings in the Baja and other areas around the world.

The article follows several paths in its investigation of the evolution of our relationship with — and abuse of — the largest of the mammals, but the most interesting and heartening part for me was a comment made toward the end, that science itself is finally freeing scientists to become better 'storytellers'. After centuries of having the scientific method so often bully us out of our natural instincts and observations and lead us down circuitous paths of understanding, I'm hopeful we're beginning to reach a point where these critical tools for knowing the world and our place in it are no longer relegated to the sidelines.