Hi Friends!

We hope this newsletter meets you well, and healthy! November was a good month for us. We had so much fun doing our first patron-only concert, and are looking forward to doing more! How great was it to have such a tight knit community hanging out and laughing together!

As you may have already seen, this month we are doing another concert on Saturday December 19th at 8pm, so save the date! This one will be open to everyone, and will be a bit of a Christmas party, so definitely bring a hat, or a cape if that's your thing...

We have quite the elaborate project in our sights right now and are really excited to share about it! Back in 2014, when we first met, we were talking about making a book that you would follow along with music. Our idea first was an album with a book of album art to follow the music. Then it became a graphic novel. We also toyed around with the idea of creating a video game, then an animated film...  there were many big ideas and our main focus was always this project.

Art was made in bits and pieces to try to outline the story idea. 2 years ago we presented what we had, some art and 2 full songs, to a couple who has experience with coaching small businesses, and it did not go well... They had no idea what we were talking about, no idea what we were trying to make. It really hurt. Exhausted from this let down and years of nothing but abstract ideas, we dropped the project. We decided to move on to other things. Then, almost 2 years later, as we were deciding on this year's Christmas video content, this seemingly failed experiment organically came to mind. And since then it has been coming together... Like really coming together.

Leah

I recently had a meltdown on my first day of working on our holiday present for you all. I opened up Photoshop to edit my artwork for the first time in maybe 6 months. I started teaching myself Photoshop 4 or 5 years ago and have used it on and off since then, so I assumed it would be easy to pick it up again. But it wasn’t at all. Photoshop is not intuitive, and for me, I pretty much have to relearn the basics every time I use it.

I ultimately prefer analogue, I prefer to use my hands and cut and glue. But photoshop offers a whole universe of different possibilities for art and even video (if you know of the sailboat video composite that we've shared about in Patreon, that was all done in Photoshop). 

I initially started learning photoshop to work on that sailboat piece (pictures below). I wanted to be able to manipulate aspects of the piece without ruining the hard copy. So I took the original (left pic) to fed ex to be scanned, moved things around in photoshop, such as flipped the boat, added a reflection, extended/filled in foreground, and blended the sky. At some point in the process I took the digital version back to fed ex to print, and then painted or drew onto that print, and scanned again to work on in Photoshop (right pic- final version).

What photoshop offered me even in the limited way I knew, blew my mind. I continued using it to make small changes, such as to remove a page crease in the final print of my piece Russian River (I made the original over two pages in a sketchbook, the crease goes right down the middle). Pictures below are Russian River original and final.

At one point when I was really struggling with an art piece, I took a picture of it with my phone, opened the image in Photoshop, and tried different things with the brush tool to see what lines, colors, and composition changes might work on the original. It was an incredibly helpful tool that allowed experimentation without the pressure to 'get it right'.

Back to last week: My plan was to start editing some drawings in Photoshop- clean up lines, change lighting, etc. But I couldn’t even remember the button to create a layer mask and just that fact made me freeze up and have a meltdown. I was so confused because Elijah had figured out those things pretty quickly. I told myself I was stupid and cried and clenched my fists out of frustration. Then I kept trying to force myself to figure it out, under all that comparison and judgement. It was about 4 hours of struggling through a few small steps when I finally made myself stop working.

I was able to widen my mind's lens by sharing with our housemate John, and then moving on to other topics, after which I felt much lighter and was able to giggle about my total fixation.

Now Elijah and I are learning a whole new thing, After Effects (the video equivalent of Photoshop). It's very overwhelming. VERY. And an incredible tool. We're ridiculously amazed and excited about this new, big, intimidating video project we've started. You'll get to see it soon!

Elijah

After Effects

After Effects is all I am thinking about right now…

For those of you that don’t know, it is essentially Photoshop for video. It is a part of the Adobe Suite of products, and with the help of you amazing Patrons, Leah and I have upgraded from a Photoshop only account into the entirety of the Adobe Suite, and my goodness it is... overwhelming… Oh my goodness it is overwhelming…  

Don’t get me wrong! Adobe’s stuff is incredible, it’s absolutely incredible! What it can do is seems like magic, the possibilities at our finger tips would make film makers from 20 years ago green with envy.  

But none of it is intuitive! 

NONE 
OF 
IT 

As Leah and I are building our next video, the need for After Effects is apparent. We are building something that we have dreamed of making for years, and the tools are here. And none of it is intuitive! Ha! I keep thinking about how lucky I am.  

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day, and he was telling me how happy he is that I am still pursuing music; he told me that a bunch of people he knows have given up on music. Something about what he said really struck me, I remember when I decided to study music in college. I remember how I had this idea about graphic novel music videos, and when I explained it to my composition professors, they looked at me like I had grown a third eye.  

The music videos I have had in my imagination: music that tells a story, where the music, the art, the video are all working together to tell a story; they have always made sense to me. But most people didn’t really understand what I was talking about.   

Today, Leah and I spent several hours working on our next video, a video that we have brainstormed, given up on, picked up and set down for years. And here we are. All of the tools are at our finger tips, and we are doing it. We are making the thing. 

To be in the final steps of creating something that has been an uphill fight from the get go, I will take After Effects not being intuitive.

Inspiration

- Elijah

The Symphonies of Beethoven - The Great Courses on Audible. This has been an amazing exploration of Beethoven's Symphonies against their own backdrop of history, and artistic context. The professor has a deep love and respect for Beethoven's work which makes it that much more interesting.

-Leah
Wangechi Mutu

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If you know someone who might like our newsletter, or enjoy one of our concerts, or enjoy something we've made please feel free to share it with them. None of this is a secret, you are just hearing it first!

✄ Leah and Elijah ✍︎

    Collagist ▴ Artists ▴ Composer