EDOM 11: back in the saddle
personal update • animating with tie-dye
MOOP matter
Welcome to the newest EDOM readers! Each Day, One More is a newsletter about the Walking for Vice President campaign, the '''peacewhere''' clothing line, and all things related to the Magical Office of Peace.
Councils are back in session! After an unannounced break, Councils are returning to the normal 1st and 3rd Wednesday schedule. The next Council will be Wednesday, the 19th of June at 15:00 PDT. (Councils are regular, open meetings about MOOP matters and the best place to offer your real-time input and feedback—which I greatly appreciate.)
personal update
It’s been almost three months since I wrote the last issue of EDOM. What gives? Well, I think largely the delay has been caused by some of my long-held perfectionism that hinders me from taking first steps—particularly in the realm of writing. But I was reading another newsletter—Untested by Rafal Pastuszak—and he linked to a short article suggesting to “half-ass” tasks. I took this as a sign to just write whatever I can write and have faith that it’ll be better than nothing at all. So here goes.
space suckers
Also on the personal side of things, Space Suckers from Outer Space ran for three beautiful nights at the Church of Clown! Space Suckers (as mentioned in EDOM 8), is a clown play directed by Dan Griffiths that parodies 1950’s sci-fi films. The 9-person cast (including myself) donned extremely-non-breathable, all-silver costumes to portray a training film of what not to do in space. We were blessed with a generous crowd filling the 40-person theater each night. Fortunately, video of all three nights does exist, and I will share it with your eyeballs when it is ready.
mom update
And lastly, readers of EDOM 4 might remember that my mother was stuck on the floor of her bathroom for three days after a fall nine months ago. She’s recovered quite a bit, but still reliant on a wheelchair for getting around. After visiting her last week, I can attest that while she’s often frustrated at her situation, she still has a healthy1 appetite for menthol cigarettes and caramel macchiatos.
'''peacewhere''' enters the temporal dimension
One of the reasons I love limiting tie-dye to a single dye (i.e. black), is that the final design/pattern only depends on how the item was folded (or tied) and where the dye is applied to the folded item. Even with the monochrome constraint there are still near infinite possibilities (even ignoring subtle differences in folding). In the making of over a hundred shirts / apparel for my personal collection and eventually for '''peacewhere'', I explored techniques that would yield unique and distinct designs. While this variation is delightful from an artistic sense, I wondered how precisely I could replicate a given design.
Peaces 1 through 5 of the '''pw''' line are the result of an experiment in repeatability. I made five shirts with the same tie and dye method to create a very standard single-armed spiral pattern. By making note of the orientation of the shirts before tying (i.e. twisting the shirt in a spiral), I was able to get the angle of the spiral-arm consistent across the five shirts. I was very pleased with the results:
This gave me an idea: if I could reliably control the final pattern of a shirt, I could make subtle changes to get a pattern to appear to move when looking at one shirt to the next. That is, I could make an animation where the frames were individual tie-dye t-shirts. So I tried it, and it worked.
Given that animation in traditional senses is a slow and often tedious process, I figured I would do myself a favor and keep things as simple as possible. I settled on four shirt-frames as the least amount I could get away with and still have the semblance of the illusion of movement. I also chose a bold pattern with large areas of dyed-black and undyed-white as that would be forgiving in terms of physical inaccuracy.
I went with a chevron-like pattern created by alternating bands of black and white, each 5 inches wide. From one shirt to the next, I moved the pattern up by 2.5” so that after two shirt-frames the pattern is revered (i.e. what was black is now white and vice-versa), and after two more shirt-frames the pattern would be the same as the first shirt-frame. Photographing these shirts and making it into a gif yields the final product.
So hypnotic! I love the concept as it was a lot of fun, and offers much artistic space to explore. However, it is extraordinarily time consuming at more than an hour of labor per frame; so probably won’t do another shirt-imation for a while. And for those curious, Peace 41 was sold and I kept Peace 42 for myself, but Peaces 40 and 43 are still available!
You know what I mean.