It is ironic that we began making movies after Curtis gave up his dream to make movies. It was a practical decision for him. After all, he had to pick a career and go for it. Dreaming about making movies was a distraction for Curtis. He has since discovered that he is a producer, and in this capacity, he can eventually revive his dream.

As for the children and me, I think I stumbled upon an academic goal sheet again. It had something on there about helping Yanni to make ‘The Apple.’ Curtis had started this process, having Yanni make a flip book of the story, and then scanning the pictures into the computer to animate them. I think his vision required several animations of flip books before the final product could be reached.

I thought that this approach was taking too long, and in fact, the project had stalled after we had scanned in that first flip book. I took matters into my own hands and asked Yanni if she had learned enough in her claymation class to make her own claymation film. She assured me that she had, and we went from there.

Let me back up a little. In the winter of ’01, I think, Yanni was in a claymation class at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA). Curtis had heard of the classes there, and we rushed to sign Yanni up, even though it conflicted with Ujima, the African dance and culture group the children participated in at the time. For 11 weeks, Yanni went through the entire production cycle of making a claymation movie. Hers was called The Lost Pig, and at the end of the class, everyone received a videotape with all the movies on it. I had created the music for Yanni’s product; a three tune combination that fit with the movie’s theme.

Yanni had put such expression in her tiny pig’s face; her set was beautiful–it was time to make another film!

At Curtis’ insistence, I had Yanni write a storyboard first. The first movie we made was a completion of a joint project Yanni had started with Curtis. The story was one they had fleshed out in the car one day. It had dark humor, and a generally tragic tone. Yanni didn’t really believe in the story, but she dutifully produced it. She was 11 at the time.
Next, she made the set. She had learned at KIA that you can make a set out of a piece of cardboard. You paint all your backgrounds on that. The set she’d made for The Lost Pig was large. It had three different locations painted upon it, and it was folded in panels.
Yanni only needed one scene for this movie. She accomplished this on a much smaller scale. She envisioned a playground scene with the action happening in the foreground. These were the days when finishing a project just wasn’t one of Yanni’s priorities. It took her a long time to finish the one-panel set. I rushed her. If you look carefully at the two apple movies, you’ll notice that there are some un-painted sections of the set. It doesn’t detract from the movie, but I think it pains Yanni a bit.

Next, she made the characters. She made two little girls of different complexions, and I did animation tests on them to see which looked better on film. The lighter girl had on a purple dress, and the darker girl had on a red dress. The darker girl looked much better on film, so we went with her. These characters were a fraction of the size of her ‘Lost Pig’ characters, and I was concerned about this, but Yanni knew what she was doing.

Everything was in its proper scale. How did she do that?

Yanni had a hard time making the tree. The clay she had didn’t have enough brown to make a whole tree. She ended up taking the huge block of orange and standing it up and sticking a green ball on top of that. She made the apple and carefully stuck it on the tree.
By this point, I had been doing several animation tests on toys. Every day Curtis came home from work, I’d be in the hall taping, and then subjecting him to look at every little advance in animation. He told me that I’d have to stop making tests and start making movies pretty soon.

I was scared, but we took the plunge.

The first shot was a pan of the set. Then Yanni inched her little girl figure step by step to the tree. It is easy to lose track of time shooting a stop action animation. You think it will be too long to watch, each shot you take, but when you run the tape, it really didn’t take long at all.

The tree kept moving. It fell over. The little girl fell out of the chair when she was trying to reach the apple from the chair. I was laughing hysterically by the time we were done shooting. Yanni was mad as a bear.

I left this film alone for a while.

Then, Xay and I made The Crash. This followed the same lines as the animation tests we’d run with the toys. We had to figure out how to show the accident in live action without showing our hands. So we had the camera locked in on the toys, with our hands out of the shot. I taped it while Yanni and Xay rammed the cars together.

Right away I could see a need for two cameras. We had one Mike thrown to the back of the room, while the other Mike was in the foreground. I didn’t know how to follow them both without breaking continuity, so I just zoomed in on the back Mike briefly, before focusing on the near Mike. I had Xay move everybody a little for every frame. It takes so much longer to make a stop action film than to watch one, and I usually forget this, and try to cut down on the action for the sake of time.

We used the white board and a toy bin to hold the titles in this film. the title is written by Xay in stop action, and when the x teem (Xay’s spelling) show up, I have the x teem sign Xay had created on the computer leaning against the toy bin beside them.

We had Yanni operating the little plaid bunny on a string in live action. I thought that would be funny. I think this movie works well because of the humor.

I did the music during the editing process. I used the drum machine for the rhythm, and the Roland 2080 for the music. I watched the film while creating the music in order to sync them. So much for SMPTE! (Ed. note: I learned a little about SMPTE in grad school. It is the recording industry standard for syncing musical tracks. I believe it is also used for syncing video and music, but they may use a different standard.)

After I completed editing The Crash, I was confident to do another film with Yanni. She’d had enough space from her unpleasant experience with the first Apple film, and came up with a happier story to shoot the second time. We’d learned how hard it was to have the little girl walk back and forth, so we used fade outs rather than have her walk back out to get the pogo stick. This movie filmed much easier than the first one.

I had a hard time thinking up music for this film. With Xay’s first movie, I used a little short-hand. I had some existing drum machine tracks that I worked with, and the music flowed easily. I had a general idea what kind of sound I wanted with that project. This one I thought needed a smaller scale of music. I thought I’d use some of the discarded stuff from some old piano music I’d written, but that wasn’t just right.

I was going through my composition notebook. It has several unfinished pieces in it, as well as finished work. The first piece in the notebook is my piano concerto. I’ve finished the piano part, but not the orchestral part. I went to the most complicated part of the piano concerto, and thought that would be good music for this film. I had to practice it a lot, as I intended to play it in one take for the recording. I think it took at least three times to get it the way I wanted it. It’s not a perfect performance, but the music works for the film.

Xay and I worked on the Rescue next. He had a taste of frustration working with that Power Ranger doll. He kept falling over. We ended up having to lean him against the wall to keep him on his feet. Every time we tried to move him, he’d fall several times. Xay was really sweating getting him up the string to the window, too. There is a scene where we close in on him in the window, and he fell out.

Another challenge was keeping Yanni out of the scene as she worked the bunny again.
This movie needed much more editing than the Crash, and Curtis suggested we use Adobe Premiere instead of Windows Movie Maker. I found that the movie was very choppy without all the bunny scenes that had Yanni’s hand, so I had to leave some of them in. Curtis helped edit this one, too.

When I was done cutting scenes out in Adobe, I transferred it back to Movie Maker to add opening and closing credits and the music.
I did more improvisation on the same drumbeat to make the music for this film. I thought it was fun and easy.

Now it was time for me to make a movie. Xay’s birthday was coming up, and I spent a lot of time in my studio preparing for it. Curtis was going to finish a video game he’d started years before to give to Xay for a present, and he needed music. I knew that Curtis liked grand scale huge music for his projects, so I put Yanila, my second symphonic work, into the sequencer. It took a long time to get it right, but it was great when I finished. I played it for Curtis and he liked it, but said it wasn’t right for this project. He ended up not finishing the video game, either.

I wanted to make Xay a video birthday card, so I took Yanni outside to work on it in secret. She wrote the opening credits on the garage floor in chalk. We set up the whole x teem along with several dolls in Yanni’s room, partially painted to look like an aquarium. We had them dancing, but again, I got nervous about how long the segment would be, and I stopped it prematurely. I had Mani and Joy in there amongst the toys, and then I had everyone that lives here do a dancing segment (except Xay).

When I edited this one, I had a hard time discarding any footage, so I just strung it all together with credits. For the music, I edited a song I’d already done, called Team Gray! I am chanting about Yanni, Xay, and Mani on the original, but for the birthday video, I edited out Yanni and Mani, and just kept the Xay part. The segments where we’re dancing are pretty embarrassing to Yani and me, but it was well received.

Now we wanted to do something with all those toys who’d participated in the birthday card. We tried to conceptualize the x teem and the Y team. To keep it simple, we had the Y team be dolls and the x teem be stuffed animals. We tried it with a large cast of characters in the house. We had Xay’s toy cars fall down the stairs for the accident, and then this huge assortment of dolls and stuffed animals come to the rescue. It was visually difficult to follow, and execute. It was really made harder by Mani and Joy crying in the background. We scrapped this idea.

Without a storyboard, we decided to make this into our biggest production yet, and go on location. We moved the whole thing outside. Curtis had told us that real movies are made in more than one shoot, so we set up with the idea of taking longer than the one day to make the movie. We had a couple Brandy dolls, and one of them had both of her legs off. We put her and a couple of baby dolls in the big truck Xay had gotten for his second birthday. We rolled them down the driveway to see if we could make them have an accident with Brandy falling out with her legs off.

The first few times it didn’t work. We tried hitting them with a ball, but that didn’t work well. Then we tried hitting it with two balls, and that did the trick. Problem: Xay and I couldn’t roll the truck down the driveway and hit the truck and film the whole thing at the same time. Sisters to the rescue! We got Mani to roll the truck down, and Yanni to tape. It took a few tries for Xay and me to hit the truck, but we did it with a football and a big red ball. Yanni then zoomed in on the wreck. Then it was time to ‘strike the set’ and make dinner or something.

We marked where everything was on the driveway with chalk.
It rained before we returned to production, so we put the toys where we thought they were, and went on. The idea was to show the x teem and the Y team, and they would be arguing about who was going to save Brandy. Then, Brandy would cry out and say she needed help, and they would stop fighting, and work together to save the doll. The last scene would have a whole Brandy smiling.

It was hard to find dolls that didn’t fall over all the time. We ended up using Dora, Mani’s doll with nice flat feet be the spokesperson for the Y team. The other dolls were sitting dolls. The x teem pared down to four more or less upright toys so they would be well balanced.

Dora was a dancing doll, so during the argument with the Wishbone from the x teem, we just had her do her dance. The funny thing is that she fell down during the dance. We kept that in. It’s good to have humor in these films, remember.

I again panicked about how long it was taking to have everyone move, and cut the action down to fixing Brandy. Yanni was very upset about me just taking the truck and the other injured dolls out of the scene abruptly. I don’t think the film suffered terribly from it, but Curtis did say that the movie didn’t make any sense.

I took the movie to my studio to edit, and ran into a huge problem. My sequencer, emagic? died. It just stopped working. I had a great theme for the Y team worked out in my head, and I couldn’t use it, because I just couldn’t record anything else on that sequencer. I set the film aside.

Several weeks or was it months(?) later, I revisited the film. I decided to use music I’d already finished. I used a section of yanila. It had the right amount of drama, and it got light just at the right part of the film, too.

I found some great effects in MovieMaker, too. I was able to use slow motion at the beginning. The problem with MovieMaker is that you can’t cut out clips like you can in Premiere. The film has a shot of when we tried to make the truck crash, but failed, followed by the good take. I decided to put the credits over the bad take, and when the good take plays, it looks like an instant replay with more details. That slow motion thing is really cool on the accident.

I don’t remember whether I edited x teem y team or Tragic Tale first. I ended up using existing music for Tragic Tale, though. That was the opening music to A Woman’s Trip, a play I’d done music for back in ’94. I had recorded it for a present for Daddy, a CD of music I’d done that would interest him. I call it daddy jazz. Again, I was surprised at what a good fit the pre-recorded music was for the film.

Next we did a documentary. This was in 2003, in the Spring. I wanted to record a week’s worth of activities to show my Curtis and my mother, primarily what it is we do all day. It was during baseball season, so Xay is practicing for games, etc. When we ran out of tape, the film was done. I edited it with lots of cute transitions, and it was an hour in length. I had a really hard time getting it into a format where it would play on TV, but I finally did. When we played it for Curtis, he fell asleep. I don’t think he has seen the whole thing to this day. Mommy was surprised at how little we sat at desks and ‘did school.’ She was impressed with what we did do, though. I was horrified at how much I fussed at Mani, how much she cried, and how bad everyone’s hair always looked. Like we didn’t know we were going to be on TV!

We stopped making movies for a while. I wanted to branch off into television. We did one episode of a show called yanilala. I had had this idea for many years, since at least ’93. I had wanted to do a show with a story acted out by the children, narrated by me, a few field trip segments, a cooking show, etc.

We actually made a half-hour show. It got bogged down with editing and syncing issues, but I think it’s ok. Not great. Curtis could do better. I think I will try to get him to help us with this when he has time. We recorded segments for a second episode, and the tape seemed to have gotten ruined. I think it was a dirty camera issue. I’ll hunt those tapes down and try again. Yanni and Xay made their first films in over a year this last fall and summer. So, I don’t think Carver Lab films is out of commission just yet.

We’re preparing an episode of yanilala with Esteban as the wide mouthed frog. . .