cliff-hanging illusions as used in early films

Above Advertisement for a Hal Roach 1923 film comedy starring Harold Lloyd, called Safety Last. It shows him hanging precariously from a high-rise window ledge, with a distant busy street below. But in fact that’s not the case. As shown in the diagram below (from E.G. Lutz, The Motion Picture Cameraman), it is all an ingenious camera trick, albeit one that looks utterly real. 

Lloyd posed for various scenes like this, such a below, in which he seems to be suspended from the clockface on a building. When movement is added, both that of the actor and those on the street, it is even more convincing.

Comparable tricks were later used by American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert (Del) Ames II in developing the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, which we have discussed at length in a triad of online videos, titled The Man Who Made Distorted Rooms.

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: Video Version

Recently completed: Our most popular video talk, titled Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version (40 mins). It traces the emergence of Gestalt psychology (c1910), as well as its connections to holism, Taoism, yin and yang, displacements of attention, contrast illusions, color, camouflage, graphic design, and architecture. Ideal for classroom screenings, and library discussion events. Non-monetized, free full online access for anyone at YouTube.

Acclaimed film of Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird

Cover of The Painted Bird (1976)

In 1976, I was asked by Polish-American writer Jerzy Kosinski to illustrate the dust jacket for the special tenth-year edition of his celebrated novel The Painted Bird. We have only recently learned that a much-acclaimed film version of his book has been completed, and is now on tour for screening. Produced and directed by Václav Marhoul, it will be released in the near future. more>>>

Einstein and Wertheimer | Street Peek-A-Boo

D. Brett King and Michael Wertheimer, Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005, p. 122—

He [Albert Einstein] seemed also to relish his intellectual and social exchanges with [his friend, Gestalt psychologist Max] Wertheimer. Wertheimer was once amused when he and Einstein consecutively covered their right and left eyes with their hands to test the effects of retinal disparity (the slightly different images of the same object on the two retinas because of the spatial separation of the eyes) as they stared at a church steeple.  Watching these figures on the street corner, a crowd soon gathered and the two were surprised to see that the onlookers were also engaging in this curious behavior, shifting their hands back and forth over their eyes. more>>>

Talk by Red Bull Filmmaker Nick Schrunk

Buffalo Bill in Cedar Falls IA | 1917 Double Bill

William F. Cody shaking hands

Above Looped film footage of William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill, possibly filmed by the Edison Company, which recorded a series of brief films pertaining to Cody's Wild West performances. We have no explanation for the vigor of his handshake.

•••

My father was born in northeastern Iowa in 1901. Buffalo Bill was still touring the country in those years, appearing with his traveling show. He performed in Cresco and Decorah, one time each, which may account for my father's memory of having actually attended a Wild West performance. Cody died in January 1917, two months before the following news article appeared in an Iowa newspaper—

Anon, BILL CODY'S DOUBLE: Col. Curt L. Alexander, of Nebraska, Startles Cedar Falls Lads in the Marshalltown Times-Republican (Marshalltown IA), March 6, 1917—

"Gee! Buffalo Bill ain't dead! Look, fellers!"

That's the way a small boy directed a bunch of his fellows to Col. Curt L. Alexander, of Hastings, Neb., walking the streets of Cedar Falls (IA) today. And a small army of boys greeted him every time he appeared.

Colonel Alexander is an exact "double" of the late Col. W.F. Cody, from his flowing hair, moustache, goatee and big sombrero to the tips of his cowboy boots. He is here visiting his nephew, Lloyd Alexander,  a prominent clothing merchant, while en route home from Chicago.

Besides looking enough like the famous "Buffalo Bill" to have been his twin brother, Colonel Alexander is an old plainsman and scout and as much like Colonel Cody in his habits. In fact, he was a lifelong intimate friend of "Buffalo Bill," working with him as a freighter across the plains when the west was young and in later years traveling for weeks at a time with Colonel Cody's great wild west show, where his remarkable likeness to his friend caused many amusing situations to arise.

•••

Since first posting the above news excerpt, we have also found an article by David Whitsett, titled A CEDAR FALLS STOP: Four US Presidents, MLK Among Famous Visitors to Town, in the Cedar Falls Times (May 1, 2013), which is online here. It tells the story of the one occasion in which Buffalo Bill performed with the Wild West in Cedar Falls on August 31, 1912. Here is the excerpt pertaining to that—

[Cedar Falls resident] Stella Wynegar recalled that his [Cody's] crew set up their tents in “Mullarkey’s pasture,” which was on the northwest corner of Cedar Falls. She says that she and her son, Claude, did not attend the show but that they “were wandering around the grounds after his show, and Buffalo Bill came up and talked with us. He asked about our family and told us about his life and where he’d been. He was very interesting and very nice.”

Another Cedar Falls resident, Marie Cook, also recalled Buffalo Bill’s visit. She remembered that she and her family were living on West First Street near where his show was set up, “He came walking along and saw the chickens in our yard. He offered my grandma $1.50 to cook a chicken dinner for his troupe and she did it!” 

Both Marie and Stella also remembered that Annie Oakley was one of the stars of the Wild West Show when it was here. She was, perhaps, America’s first female superstar. She was a true sharp shooter who could split a playing card edge-on with her .22 rifle and put several holes in it before it hit the ground.

NOTE: There is a Wynegar Oral History Collection (Manuscript Record Series MsC-18) in the Special Collections and University Archives holdings at the Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa.

Animated Currency | Randy Timm

Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Randy Timm

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design paper currency, for a fictitious country whose name was somehow related to theirs. It had to be self-portrait currency (in one way or another), with proposals for both front and back (as shown above). And then to make it more challenging, they were also asked to design an animated gif, based on the same banknote (below).

Animated Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Randy Timm

Animated Currency | Kimber Bates

Animated Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Kimber Bates

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design paper currency, for a fictitious country whose name was somehow related to theirs. It had to be self-portrait currency (in one way or another). And then to make it more challenging, they were also asked to design an animated gif, based on the same banknote.

Animated Currency | Christian Gargano

Animated Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Christian Gargano

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design paper currency, for a fictitious country whose name was somehow related to them. It had to be self-portrait currency (in one way or another). And then to make it more challenging, they were also asked to design an animated gif, based on the same banknote.

Animated Currency | Kellie Heath

Animated Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Kellie Heath

In the fall semester of 2012, I asked my beginning graphic design students at the University of Northern Iowa to design paper currency, for a fictitious country whose name was somehow related to them. It had to be self-portrait currency (in one way or another). And then to make it more challenging, they were also asked to design an animated gif, based on the same banknote.

Versluis | Behrens Collaborative Bugs

Yellow Jacket Digital Collage (2012) © David Versluis & Roy R. Behrens

Many months ago, coincident with the New Year 2012, my fine friend David Versluis (a Dutch Master) and I decided to try something. He has a collection of Iowa bugs (dead ones) of which he made exquisite scans at high resolution. He began to send me the scan files, one at a time, with the challenge that I should respond to them by beginning to build a digital montage, using Adobe Photoshop. I could do whatever I liked. Then I would pass that back to him, in response to which he'd make a move—and pass it back to me again. And so on, usually with five or six back-and-forth turns, until we mutually came to suspect that the work was finished. So that's how we proceeded—with a beetle, a cicada, a dragon fly, and other creatures, including (here) a hornet (which, in the end, was discovered to be not a hornet but a yellow jacket wasp). I can't recall how many of these montages we made, but in a few short weeks we ended up with a substantial and interesting series. Posted above is a gif (pronounced jiff) animation of the stages in our process for the collaborative yellow jacket (the stages are not in the order, I think, in which the piece evolved). The final stage for this montage (which was recently selected for a national juried exhibition) is posted here.

Animated Currency | Dusty Kriegel

Animated Self-Portrait Currency (2012) © Dusty Kriegel

Above Teaching is so unbelievably difficult. I suppose it doesn't have to be, if you only pretend to do it (an ever present temptation), if you don't put your heart into it. If you do, there is nothing quite as devastating emotionally (when it fails) nor any greater source of joy (when it succeeds). This semester, I've been working with two groups of especially wonderful students in a beginning course in graphic design in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa. When the semester started in late August, many of them had little or no experience with Adobe Photoshop or other bewildering software (increasingly bewildering with each, more frequent, update). There were some who could only do email. Now they are soaring at perilous heights that I can barely imagine at times. Most recently, for example, I asked them to design the front and back of a hypothetical banknote (paper money). To complicate the problem, I told them that it had to be "self-portrait currency." I also threw in a subsequent stage: Having designed the banknote as such, they were then required to animate the face side of it (which they did in Photoshop, using the gif animation technique). We critiqued the initial results yesterday, and a number of their pieces were utterly amazing. I was especially taken aback by this extraordinary solution (above) by Dusty Kreigel. Delights like this restore my faith in a world that I find so disturbing, in education—and in a baffling human race.

Charlie Chaplin | Derek Miller

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. I didn't know who they would choose, since our generations are increasingly familiar with vastly different views of the past, the present and the future. Most of the time, I don't think they get my jokes (these days, even my obvious humor is dry), and, likewise, I sometimes don't have a clue about what they're alluding to. So, it is reassuring when someone in the class chooses a subject, in this case the British-born American film comedian Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), whom we both know and admire. This zingy and fittingly colorful portrait of Chaplin was designed by Derek Miller.

***

Robert Hatch, in the Reporter (November 25, 1939)—

There were two sides to Charlie [Chaplin's film character], as there are to most clowns. The first was Charlie the fantastic cock of the walk who kidded our sacred institutions ans solemn paraphernalia with merciless acumen. He kept a slop bucket in a safe and investigated a clock with a can opener. He slapped bankers on the back, and pinched a pretty cheek when he saw one. He had nothing but wit, grace, and agility with which to oppose the awful strength of custom and authority, but his weapons were a good deal more than sufficient.

The other Charlie was a beggar for sympathy and an apostle of pity. He pitied everything that stumbled or whimpered or wagged a tail, particularly he pitied himself. There has never been a portrait of self-pity so vivid or so shocking as Charlie with a rose in his hand.

Étienne-Jules Marey's 3-D Motion Picture

Without hesitation, one of my favorite people from the past was a 19th-century French scientist named Étienne Jules-Marey (1830-1904). The number and complexity of the things that he invented are almost beyond belief. He began to study animal movement in the late 1860s, then used photography and a photographic gun to record successive stages in the movements of a wide range of animals and of humans. By far, my favorite invention of his (shown here) was very likely the first 3-D motion picture device. Using a spinning drum-like motion picture toy called a zoetrope, he arranged inside of it (on upright wires) a series of tiny wax sculptures of ten stages in the flight of a seagull. By spinning the drum, while bending down and looking through the slits in its side, one could see the breathtaking illusion of a tiny three-dimensional bird, flying through the air. I wonder if this still exists, or if it could be rebuilt. More>>>