Nina Shares The Blues

Last night, my roomate, Josh and I sat down and watched Nina Paley's wonderfully vibrant, beautiful and free-to-download animated feature "Sita Sings the Blues."


"Sita Sings the Blues" is a retelling of the Hindu epic "The Ramayana" and focuses on the story Sita, the wife of the deity prince, Rama. A story Nina Paley calls "the greatest break-up story ever told." For one reason or another Sita is removed from or rejected by her husband. Somehow, through it all Sita's love for Rama is undying.

To help tell Sita's story Nina uses songs by the 1920's jazz singer, Annette Hanshaw; songs she believed to be public domain. However, Congress had retroactively extended the songs copyrights and to as a result she ran into a plethora of legal issues and fees.

This lead Nina to release the film on the internet for free under the Creative Commons license. Below is a short 16 minute documentary on Paley, her film, and the Creative Commons license. It's pretty inspiring stuff, I think.



YOU CAN WATCH THE WHOLE FILM HERE.
Also don't forget to donate and support the artist.

The Map

My good friend, Michael P. Heneghan, and I were recently worked on designing the layout for The 2010 Map for Circle of Hope. The Map is basically a list of statements and goals that the community makes for itself to in the next year. It then gets printed up and distributed amongst the attendees and associates of the church. But like most of Circle's printed material it suffered from boring, unfocused layout.

So Joshua Grace, one of the church's pastors, came to Heneghan and I and set up a meeting to talk about ways to reinvent the look and feel of The Map. We looked at the The 2009 and pretty much threw all of its ideas out the door. It was basically your standard pamphlet; and two 8.5x11 inch pieces of paper folded in half with one placed inside the other.

So Joshua threw out his ideas for a booklet type layout instead of brochure, Heneghan put in his thoughts about a nautical theme and how he'd do the illustrations, and I just sort of sipped on cups of coffee and tried to mentally process how it was all gonna be put down on paper. I think I said something about the importance of typefaces hierarchies, I dunno.

We had a couple weeks to work on it but Heneghan and I really just sort of busted it out in the last couple days before it went to print. They were going to be presented at Circle of Hope's quarterly multi-congregational party, The Love Feast, so we had a pretty hard deadline. Kudos to Heneghan (and Daniel Pilger) who actually had to physically cut out and staple all the booklets together. I was out of town that weekend so I couldn't be there to help.

It was a real collaborative effort (Joshua, Heneghan, and myself) and I haven't really done a lot of those since my time at film school ended in '06. We strengthened each other and made a better piece as a result. And if that's not a metaphor for relationship, community, and life then I don't know what is.