D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
What Can Brown Do for You?
Mimbres Valley artist Kate Brown animates the Be Good Tanyas' new music video.
The image is drawn in liquid lines, a picture sprung to life. Dancing rectangles could be sheets blowing on a clothesline, or perhaps prayer flags, lively in the breeze. A solidly built woman holds one by the corners and snaps it, over and over, as if shaking the sand out of a beach blanket.
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An image Kate Brown
created for the Be Good Tanyas' music video, for the song "Human
Thing." |
In the background, a young woman's earthy, haunting voice sings, "Won't you shake it like you've never done before." The animated woman then fixes the flowing blanket around her waist and does a joyous dance, "shaking it" for all she is worth. In other frames, tree branches rise and flower, butterflies become hearts, a woman spins and twirls joyously with her naked baby on her hip. All the while, that gritty, honest voice intones a message of acceptance, of joy in being real, being human. Deliberately spacing the words for emphasis, the voice sings, "A girl... can... keep... it... together!"
This is not your usual music video. But then, local artist Kate Brown — who created art for this collaboration with a member of the Juno Award-nominated Canadian band, the Be Good Tanyas — is not your usual animator.
With 40 years as a successful potter under her belt, Brown decided in 2001 to enroll as an undergraduate at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and discovered her passion — and considerable gifts — for animation.
Her very first project out of the gate, a six-minute animated film Ursa Dream, was selected by the New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) as one of eight movies shown in a special independent film program, and was screened at the prestigious Hamptons International Film Festival in 2006.
Her second animation project — with the ample-bodied woman proudly and joyously shaking her stuff — was this collaboration with the Be Good Tanyas. A version of the video on YouTube is gathering wide acclaim.
So, what's it like working with a famous group of musicians on a major project like this one?
"Oh, exhausting!" Brown says with a laugh, then adds, "And also very exciting, and very, very rewarding!"
Amazingly, Brown's connection to the Canadian band came through a friend right here in the Mimbres Valley area where she lives. While up in Vancouver for a film festival, Brown stayed with a cousin of one of the band members. Things clicked and took off from there. Soon they were discussing deadlines and dollar signs.
"There was a lot of negotiating," Brown says. "You know, they're thinking of using me, this unknown cottage-industry animator from New Mexico, so all these 'big' people, the official people, have to approve everything."
After rounds of negotiations, Brown found herself in a creative whirlwind with tight deadlines. Once the deal was struck, she says, "I was back up in Vancouver in March, we launched into two weeks of storyboarding and bouncing around ideas, and then I was back home, hard at work for all of April. It came down to producing four minutes of animation in five weeks. That's a lot!" Brown adds with an almost exasperated laugh.
"Then I went back to Vancouver for production. We had these two intense weeks of scrambling, but we did it," she says. "We came up with a product that satisfied everybody."
Brown collaborated with Be Good Tanyas band member Frazey Ford, who also wrote the song. It was Ford's first attempt at rotoscoping — an animation technique that uses live-action photography as the basis for animated images — and Brown's first experiments in animation with glass beads.
"They wanted animated people dancing in the video, so we videotaped two real people dancing," Brown explains. "From the videotape, I can watch the images on my computer, frame by frame, and trace over them. That creates a gestural motion. It's very fluid." She gives the offbeat indy movie Waking Life as an example, saying, "That was all rotoscoping."
Brown says some of Ford's drawings were the base for her own animations. "Her quality of line was just so lovely," Brown says. "I wanted to use that."
In the video, Ford's original, simple line drawings repeat and alternate with Brown's colorful, more filled-in painted versions of the same images, a sort of dance between simple and complex, source and fruition.
Of the song, "Human Thing," Brown says, "It's got a lot to do with the challenge of intimacy, the difficulty of opening up and letting somebody actually see you as you are. The terror is so real, but the rewards are so rich. But then also, just being in your body, truly in your body, is so powerful. That song is a wonderful existential expression of my own feelings about being human."
Brown says she draws and paints using techniques developed in her work with clay, and that her work with animation also influences her pottery in turn.
"My work as a potter has become more image-oriented. I see pottery as a canvas. I like things to look very lively and animated in their own way. Each aspect of my work — pieces of pottery and animation — are expressions of an idea. The final outcome is lively movement. They become the same thing to me," she says, then adds with a laugh, "If that makes any sense!"
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Before the "Human Thing" project came along, Brown had planned to go back to work on an animated sequel to her award-winning short film Ursa Dream. She envisions that project ultimately as a trilogy.
But now part two is on hold again while Brown tackles a fresh project. Turns out, it's another Mimbres Valley connection. Beverly Seckinger, an independent Tucson.-based producer and associate director of the School of Media Arts at the University of Arizona, has been visiting Brown's friends and neighbors in the Mimbres area for years, exploring the rich counterculture lifestyles there — including Brown's. Seckinger's movie project, Hippie Family Values, will be a feature-length documentary. Brown will both animate and be profiled in the film, sharing elements of her lifestyle as an artist.
"Now that I've been hired again to do another movie, Exile (part two of the trilogy) is back on my back burner," Brown says with a laugh. "But getting hired to make things is also very nice."
— Donna Clayton Lawder
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