Steve Subotnick
	This month we're showing Steven Subotnick's film 'Hairyman,' and we took the opportunity to talk to him about his experience as an educator and his thoughts on the road ahead for animation, technology, and academic institutions. LUMEN ECLIPSE: When you were studying film and animation in college and grad school, what did you imagine that you would do with your degrees and your education? Where did you think you were going? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: I knew I was going to the East Coast. I had spent 15 years in Los Angeles. While I was in school, I did some commercial work in LA - rock videos, a weed-killer commercial. My experiences in LA helped me to focus myself – I knew that I didn’t want to work in the industry full time. I wanted to have a life that was balanced between personal art-making and making a living. LUMEN ECLIPSE: So teaching in some ways is a solution for avoiding the commercial world? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: Right, teaching helps make the balance work. I’ve combined teaching, some commercial work, some commissions, and some grant support. And that’s pretty much what I was aiming for – a balance. LUMEN ECLIPSE: How many years have you been teaching? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: Since 1989. LUMEN ECLIPSE: And you’ve taught at Harvard, and at the SMFA, and RISD; how does teaching, the academic environment, and being part of big institutions affect your work and your creative processes? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: One advantage of teaching is that you’re around other people who are either artists or are interested in animation—students and other faculty - you have a built-in community. A problem with being an artist, especially one who works alone is that you’re run the risk of being isolated, so it’s helpful to work with people who have some sensitivity to what it is that you’re interested in. I enjoy teaching. I like the emphasis in academia on process over product. Deadlines don’t rule the world. It’s about helping someone to find their voice. Also, the schedule of teaching is dependable, so you know when you have free time. And that’s really crucial to being able to establish a regular art practice. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Has the whole notion of skills that an animation department should be teaching evolved a lot since you were in school? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: Tremendously. I learned all my filmmaking on film when I was at school. I didn’t actually touch a computer until I got to my last year of graduate school at CalArts, when they had received a grant to get several computers. I spent my last year at CalArts making about eight short computer-animated abstractions, just because I was fascinated with the tool. I actually had to learn some programming in order to do it, it was all new. And then when I came to RISD, my first job was running a computer center at RISD for artists and students. There I got a crash course in learning and teaching computers. That was in the late eighties. The most advanced computer they had was a Mac 512. By the time I left, after three years, they were already working on color Macs. Since then, of course, things have changed at the speed of light. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Do you find in your teaching that student interest in has followed technological developments? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: It’s both; more and more people just accept CGI, Maya work, or 3D modeling work as a kind of standard now for employability, which it is. But there are people working still in a wide variety of ways; there are people making artwork on paper, sculpting, building real, physical puppets, as opposed to CG puppets, and there’s also people working in virtual CG worlds. And most of the productions end up on video, or some kind of digital format, but there’s still a few people, probably no more than 10 percent ever, who really want to work on film. I think it’s a little bit like 20 years ago someone really wanting to make lithography – a fascination with an older, romantic technology. Because really, I think filmmaking is pretty romantic at this point. LUMEN ECLIPSE: On that note, can you tell me a little bit about how you made ‘Hairyman,’ and the technical production of it? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: ‘Hairyman’ was shot on film. By the way, I had to shoot it three times, because there was a burr in the camera’s transport mechanism which kept scratching the negative. The film was inspired by a folk tale from Appalachia called ‘Wiley and the Hairy Man.’ It was about a wild, half-devil, wild man, who lives in the forests and eats children who wander in. A little boy named Wiley, with the help of his grandmother, tricks the Hairy Man three times, which magically makes Wiley safe. I developed three characters based on the folk tale: Hairyman, of course, and I changed the boy to a little girl, and the grandmother. And, rather than tell the story – I did actually storyboard the story several times, but I realized I was more interested in what the characters were rather than the folk tale. I began animating the characters improvisationally - like improvisational theater. When I accumulated enough scenes like this, I began editing them, and working with sound. I kept rearranging sequences until particular cuts began to suggest a narrative flow. So the narrative was woven out of the original improvisational scenes. For the sound, I worked with Caleb Sampson. He was a sound designer who had worked with other independent filmmakers, like Flip Johnson and Amy Kravitz. He was one of the founding members of the Alloy Orchestra. I met with him actually for an earlier film. I went to his studio with my film, and he said ‘I found this zither recently.’ It was missing strings and it was all out of tune, but he began strumming the zither. We played the film, and the two of us just kept making noises with the zither and our voices, watching the film. At one point, he started screaming and grunting while he played. Well, it didn’t work for the film I was scoring, but later, when I was working on ‘Hairyman,’ I pulled out Caleb’s screaming and zither. His sound was a crucial element to ‘Hairyman’. LUMEN ECLIPSE: So with works like ‘Hairyman’ – you’ve had experience with film festivals, screenings at schools and other institutions, and now your work will be in Harvard Square. What do you think about the possibilities and future for seeing this kind of work? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: My main venue has been film festivals. Other venues have included curated screenings at libraries or galleries, occasional TV programs, and then there used to be some theatrical packages that traveled around, but basically it was festivals. Festivals are still the main outlet for this kind of work. However, I’m very encouraged by the promises of new technology. Devices like the iPod, video blogs and web sites – the list is constantly growing. It will take time for us all to catch up with the possibilities. LUMEN ECLIPSE: We’ll have to catch up with the technology. STEVEN SUBOTNICK: Yeah, and it takes time to figure it out, but I think that each time that there’s some advance in the technology, it creates so many more opportunities for artists. You can see animation in traditional places like festivals, schools, galleries, and theaters, and I don’t think that will go away. But in addition, now you can see it on YouTube, you can see it on someone’s iPod they’re carrying around, or on their iPhone. Changes in technology also open opportunities for making different kinds of work. When we make animation for a film festival, we are geared toward a kind of standard, a beginning, middle and end, a certain duration – and that’s fine, it’s certainly a legitimate format. But then there are people like the animator, Ruth Hayes, who – in addition to making films - distributes her own animations for playback on an iPod. She used to make flipbooks and sell them on her website, and now she makes downloadable flipbooks, so people can just buy them and put them on their iPods. LUMEN ECLIPSE: How big a shift do you think needs to happen, say, in academic institutions? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: I think the shift is happening. New programs are popping up around the country where students go to learn interactive media. But sometimes it seems the technology is driving the curriculum. It can be hard to find a focus – it’s like the Wild West, you know? On the other hand, you have traditional film, video, animation, illustration programs, which are very focused. They have a lot of history and depth in what they teach, but it’s a bit harder to update that kind of curriculum because they have strong identities. It takes time to digest new technology. LUMEN ECLIPSE: It’s strange to imagine academic institutions becoming the guardian of art forms like filmmaking or animation. STEVEN SUBOTNICK: Film won’t disappear. It will become more romantic – like lithography. I was thinking about lithography because there was a period of time in US history, not so long ago, when lithography almost became extinct. It didn’t die, but it’s not a commercial medium any more. And I think filmmaking is going to be like that. It’s not going to be a commercial form anymore, as it was in the 20th century, but will be an art form. LUMEN ECLIPSE: I was hoping you could share some recommendations with our readers? What inspires you? STEVEN SUBOTNICK: I have inspirations and aspirations. My inspirations – where I find ideas - have been mostly folklore, history, and religion. So, for instance, ‘Glass Crow’ is based on reading about the 30 Years War, ‘Hairyman’ was based on a folktale, and the Devil’s Book was based on an idea about one of the services at Yom Kippur. My aspirations are mostly examples set by other artists. For example, I admire the spontaneity, delicacy, and freedom of Cy Twombly’s artwork. And I admire the simple power and emotional depth of Rembrandt’s paintings. I admire the poetic and personal musings on human evolution in the writings of Loren Eisley, and I admire the sophisticated comic imagination of Italo Calvino’s in his book, Cosmic Comics. The list could go on for a long time.