Listen to MP3 Commentary by
Pete Moraites and Eric Scott
(Salvador Dalek)

Learning Curve
(3:10 / QuickTime / 2003)
Director : Pete Moraites
Music : Learning Curve (Visitor Mix)
Salvador Dalek (Eric Scott /
Pete Moraites)

Take a journey with suspended expectations and definitions.

Vistas, both new and familiar, take on magical properties. Cosmic forces play their game of balance on a black and white game grid. A magician's music reveals older worlds within the walls of the labyrinth. Giant roadside faith magnet shatters, releasing dynamic expressions of energetic creation.

This is how we see the world in a new light.

Learning Curve

This piece was originally called visitor and I’m not even sure why I retitled it to Learning Curve, but now I think its appropriate because this piece was a big acceleration in my learning curve as an animator, and now that it has been sampled into “Adventure” and I’ve recently added the cartoon heads to the chess-players, it continues to be a project on which I’m learning. Or mabe I was high when I retitled it.

Anyway, I decided to make a whole piece with just my digital still camera (I have gotten a lot of mileage outta that thing!). I flew back to NYC to visit and shot chipfull after chipfull, loading them into the laptop as I went. The craft of sequencing photos has gotten easier in the past few years with features in the software. I think its become one of the easiest things in the world to set up now, and so I have more and more fun in the details of each frame.

The music is, I think, the first official track by Salvador Dalek, the combo moniker for colaborative works by Eric Scott and myself.

...In '91, i think, i took a few classes at School of Visual Arts in NYC. One of the classes i loved the most was called "drawing on location" with an awesome teacher / artist named john ruggieri. john was a wizard with line; he'd put the pencil or pen on the page and you could see the total connection from his eye to his hand as he'd trace a scene with his eyes steadily smoothly tracking the contours of buildings and people while at his fingertips a bold and elegant line would describe the same path. Amazing and inspiring to watch. The class was fun and the single "lesson" i am learning from it still is to develop the pathways connecting your eyes and your hands because it produces great drawings, its fun, and it brings the universe to a rest...

timeless

The same lesson each time I drew with john warwicker at the tomato workshops. Their drawings could look more different; John R's lines are bold and dark and infused with an immediacy of energy, his technique is fast and focused...American Zen. John W draws with super hard pencils and an ultralight touch... his movements are slow, deliberate, keenly focused on the tiniest details of the movement of leaves in a tree, or reflections on the surface of water... barely visible even up close, contour maps of motion, tracings of quantum level fluctuations... his is a more eastern looking zen.

When i participated in john R's classes when i was 21, i thought that my practice at drawing the "way" in which he drew would be a process of emulating a style which seemed very commercially applicable... I could make money!

By the time I got to tokyo in 2000, i knew that the processes of observing and listening to what they focus on mentally as they draw, and emulating their postures to achieve similar "results" was really about achieving similar "states". Though the skills i long refused to recognise were widening in scope and deepening in adeptness and adaptability, these had no connection to my ability to create an abundance of money. You can draw in beautifully expressive dynamic ranges of styles as soon as you already know you can, and the same applies to creating anything else, including material abundance or, even better, experiential abundance. In my current perceptions of my past, i formerly believed that i needed "commercially applicable drawing skills" in order to be able to "live as an artist". such a focus took my attention away from the joy i've been experiencing creating since my earliest memories, and the more i've released such focus and reconnected with the myriad joys of creation (the whole spectrum of drawing zens, the mellow joys and wild thrills of shaping sound and music, the presence, the fluidity, the ecstacy of dance, the surprises and laughter and total connection of collaboration), the easier it is for any and all of us to learn fun new ways of playing. forget about the product for a while and enjoy the process.

which brings me back to: the process of making "learning curve".

My whole point in making it was to make something. thats it. i wanted to make something with no budget whatsoever, because i knew that i could and because i wanted to enjoy the fun of being resourceful and making it up as I went along. and because i had created myself as having no budget whatsoever.

So, anyways, back in '91, one of our "drawing on..." locations was washington square park in manhattan and i loved to go there and draw the crowds gathered around the chess tables watching and playing games of speed chess for money, to practice, to strut their stuff, or just for the fun of it.
As with any scene full of humans, when you focus and watch and listen , they all become very fascinating and colorful. I thought for years about doing a documentary or i guess that today it'd be a reality show. and wont that be fun, when television is so omnipresent that we can finally stop acting in case we're on camera or if anyones watching because we're all on camera and the only thing we're paying attention to anymore is how we interact with each other, how we interact with ourselves, listening and reading to find out what everyone else is thinking... we've learned how to motivate and relax ourselves and others and now we're remembering to celebrate.
In 2002, I split the cost of a digital camera with Hans at Pub District in exchange for going to nightclubs to photograph beautiful women (clearly I've gotten much smarter than I was back in college, afraid to ask all the beautiful wonderful sexy women I knew to pose for my camera or my pens because I didn't want them to think I was using my art to sleep with them... when that is, in fact, alot of the reason I've kept my focus on creating so much throughout the years.) anyway, I'm being very freely associative with this writing about this work, but thats ok because thats alot of how I made this piece.

in september of that year I flew back to NJ to visit family and friends. I decided before I took the trip that I would use the time to create something with the resources i had, which was the digital camera and a computer with which I could line up the photos in sequence and create stop-motion animation. I've always loved the look of stop-motion, since my dad showed me the old Harryhausen stuff like sinbad and, of course, a staple for my generation, clash of the Titans. When I was in 6th grade, Paul Sabo showed me one of his first films, a stop-motion piece with some action figures. That was my first real realization that anyone could make movies, make animation. Someone my age. a kid. huh. wild. I wanted to make a stop-motion animation piece for twenty years before i finally decided just to do it and love doing it.

i dont even remember if i had any idea what i was going to do other than, i think, i had planned from the start to shoot at the chess boards. the beautiful thing about the digital camera is that as soon as i got it, i started shooting with it all the time. besides shooting the club patrons i would mess around with the settings and see how i was affecting the image, shooting closeups, details of patterns on walls, of lights and shadows, whatever... i just filled chip after chip after chip. i took thousands and thousands of photos. so when i was on the plane to nyc, i shot tons of pics of the sky and the clouds, the terrain, the canyons, the crop circles...

once in nyc i shot the chess-boards as planned, spending the lot of my "budget" on coffees for some of the other players and sixty dollars to Harry, who accepted my offer of pay and continued to escalate his fees every few games. I brought a laptop with me so i could periodically upload the pictures and clear the chip. i shot until the batteries ran out on the computer and the camera.

i walked around the city shooting "flythrough" footage shooting, walking a few steps, shooting again. I went to the observation deck of the empire state building and shot another couple of chipfulls of panoramic aerials and zoom ins from high above the city down towards the streets. the idea to blend the cloud footage into the aerials from the ESB, which i saw as a kind of POV Rodan / Mothra descending on tokyo shot, may have occurred to me while shooting or maybe later as i was stitching sequences together and looking for a visual flow.