End of Week 2: Afternoon Ducks & Late-Night Donuts

It’s already been another week here at Tiny Circus! We started week two with three new members in the community, but in the past two days we’ve welcomed another four--- three ducks, one person. Yesterday afternoon, in the midst of our exceptionally focused animating and sound-editing, we watched as Turtle, Enya, and No. 3 crawled their way from their dark shells into the light and love of Circus.

Their arrival could not have been more timely. This week’s animation explores some of the complications of age and aging. We do this through collected interviews from the Grinnell community, and short animations of animal kingdom milestones. Watching the ducks hatch added both a more tangible and more magical element to our project.

Because of the ever-changing roster of this year’s summer session, we have been spending only one week on each animation. The compressed timeline is exhilarating. Some of our members have observed that this lifestyle is something lik

e a cross between a music festival and finals week. 

Last night (or this morning?) we all worked hard until midnight. After checking in on audio and visual progress, we decided that a) some people needed to sleep b) some people needed to animate, and c) some people needed to go get donuts for the animators (there is a Grinnell tradition of 2 am “bakery runs” to the local bakery in town). The donuts (and espresso) did their job, and the animators finished another scene at 3:30 am this morning. 

Tonight will be our second potluck-screening-dance party of the summer session. Tomorrow, a few more members will leave town, and those staying at Circus will spend the next week planning the Tiny Circus event for the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI).

End of Week 1: Before Sleep

Tiny Circus has been hard at work creating our first animation of the summer session. We set a goal for ourselves to make a visually and aurally compelling documentary animation, all in only four days!

The premise of the animation is to explore the peoples’ thoughts in the moments before they fall asleep. We’ve had a lot of fun interviewing people of all ages in town on this subject and experimenting with animation on a multi-plane table that some of our members constructed. We’re excited about how everything is coming together, both in the diversity of people’s responses and the images we are now able to create with the new equipment. 

We’re in crunch time now and are in the process of editing the audio and shooting final scenes. Then we’ll turn to final editing and create a whole out of the audio and visual parts. We’ve invited friends and community members for an evening showing of the completed piece and can’t wait to pose our question to more viewers!  

We’re sad to see some of our Circus members leave but we look forward to new arrivals this weekend for Week 2!

Hocus Focus

Today the Tiny Circus crew took focus to a new level with the construction of a brand new contraption for our latest animation.  We built a focal plane structure for the animating table that has already resulted in some truly stunning visuals!  For this project we are playing with depth of field as a way to communicate different perspectives we are exploring concerning the time before sleep.  Circus folks also spent the morning hyper-focused on collecting a myriad of imagery and editing together the community interviews we conducted yesterday.  In the afternoon we listened to the compiled interviews as a group as well as viewed multiple test animations.  Afterwards we continued to collaboratively develop ideas surrounding these audio and visual materials.  The nifty "exploration map" created as a group the day before helps guide our discussions and ideas as we continue to move towards to the finish line.

Its been a highly productive day, which means its time to shift our focus to... DANCE PARTY!

Tiny Circus is back.

Tinny Circus Summer session is back! This is the 6^th edition, and we are excited to be back in Grinnell. Participants come from all over the country and we even have an international visitor this year.

Our day starts with a nice breakfast and some group cleaning. We are then energetic and ready to start working.

This year project, based in thoughts before sleep, it’s starting to shape. So far, we have been recording interviews with some local folks and we are now in the audio editing process.

This year, the rooms have been named so everyone knows where they belong. Check out those names:  Peatang, Zebaby, Dungaroo, Whonky, Snooster, Porncupine. Yes, we know, those are impossible combinations in wild, lucky us, this is Tinny Circus.

A Kaleidoscope of Creativity

Over the past few days, Circus house has been buzzing with wonder and excitement as we further explore creativity!  We’ve focused our animation to examine the existence of and potential for creativity in everyday life.  After collecting audio interviews from different community members and animating a menagerie of household objects, we’re bringing it all together!  Concurrently, we have been exploring questions of process and collaboration in how we make animations together.  Daily group discussions have informed our storytelling and editing processes, and we are all looking forward to sharing the results.  

The newest Tiny Circus animation will be screened tonight at a Circus House hosted potluck with dance party to follow...

In DUCK NEWS: More excitement and more ducks! Four newborns hatched in one day, increasing the current duck count to 14!

Creativity and Ducks

Exciting things have happened at the Circus since our last post. Most of our animation for the Creativity Project has been shot and we're moving on to editing. Our sound department, which was a team of one for a while, has moved past its first edit and has welcomed new additions in recorded material and in team members. The project is moving forward and it's looking good. The whole circus is excited and rather passionate about the project at a personal and professional level and we all want to see it finished and done right. Everything we do seems to both intentionally and unintentionally shape the direction of our project. From our daily discussions at the drawing board to the actual shooting of the animation, everything seems to be serving a purpose that goes beyond just making an animation to creating something truly compelling as a fully collaborative community.

 

 

We've also put up some handmade curtains sewn by our very own circus folk.

And as for the most exciting news of all our ducklings have grown quite a bit! They've joined the big ducks in the yard and have grown tail feathers!

Summer Session 5 --- June 15 - July15, 2012

Summer session #5 is underway here at Tiny Circus Central. We come from local and far-away parts of the country this summer, California to Tennesee.  Over the last few days,  we've been talking and thinking about what Tiny Circus is and does and how to better engage our workshop participants and audiences in our process.  With this in mind, we've begun an animation about creativity - what it is, how it manifests in all of our lives, how thinking about the creativity that exists in our daily lives can make any activity more magical.  We've interviewed college students, ourselves, and folks from the local retirement home in order to get a broad sense of how people think about this topic - then we've talked for hours about how to create an animation about the topic.  

And after a good few days of work, we set up the speakers in the studio and invited some friends for an evening. 

Grin City Collective is a residency program in Grinnell that draws from a national applicant pool.  Residents come to work for a month in the summer, both on their own work and a collaborative project.  

More to come.  We'll be joined by more folks over the next few weeks.