“If Lily was a person her favorite show would be ‘Jerry Springer,’” said Michael Burton, sitting in his home studio with Lily, the Boston Terrier he and his wife rescued, on his lap. “She’s such a drama queen,” he says. It’s a Sunday afternoon and Burton, who is an artist and lecturer in the UNL Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design, has invited me to his home so he can show me the project he has been working on for the past year.
Burton is from Massachusetts originally, but came to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for graduate school after receiving a Hixson-Lied Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship offered to graduate students by the Department of Art and Art History and Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts. He graduated in 2007 and his wife, Anne, who is also an artist, graduated in 2008.
In November 2012, Eli Cane, the producer at Normal Life Pictures, an award winning independent production company based in New York and London, contacted Burton about a project inspired by University of Nebraska–Lincoln journalism professor and author Joe Starita’s Pulitzer Prize nominated book, “The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: a Lakota Odyssey.” Cane said he had seen Burton’s work on NET, Nebraska’s PBS station, and he wanted to know if he would be interested in paint animating the story of the patriarchs of the Dull Knife family.
Guy Dull Knife, the great-grandson of Chief Dull Knife, who fought alongside Crazy Horse and attempted to lead his people back to their homeland after escaping forced relocation, is a talented artist living on a reservation in South Dakota. Since Dull Knife is a painter, they thought Burton, who is also a painter, would be able to create animations that would fit in with the story they were trying to tell.
Burton agreed to help out with the project and he’s been working on it since, with the help of two art students he hired to help him. They are animating Dull Knife’s story using a technique similar to how old Disney movies were animated. Burton paints directly onto a panel that is fixed to a desk with a camera directly over it. When he is done painting one frame, he takes a picture, which is then transferred to a computer that is hooked up to the camera. From there, Burton can string together the frames and play them back, much like a digital flipbook.
It sounds complicated, but Burton says that stop-motion animation like they are using to animate this project is pretty straightforward. And it has come a long way since the days of old when artists would paint directly onto pieces of clear acetate that had to be photographed individually under a copy stand. Today digital and analog media coexist, which makes Burton’s job a lot easier, if not messier.
“All the electronics I use end up getting covered in paint,” Burton says. “I go through keyboards and mice constantly. They always seem to be somewhere between brand new and totally messed up.”
Although technology does make the animation process move faster, other things, such as working remotely and not being able to get immediate feedback, can slow the process down. The film’s director is in Kosovo, the producer is in New York and Dull Knife is in South Dakota, so all of their communication is done over e-mail and the phone.
“Once I am done with the animations I share them on Dropbox with our producer and director,” Burton says. “It’s amazing. They communicate better via e-mail than some people I know that live in the same town as me.”
The only time Burton has met the people he is working with in person was last summer when they met up at the reservation in South Dakota to meet with Dull Knife to get a better idea of what his vision for this project was.
“It’s all been a little bit nebulous in a way,” Burton said. “Guy has a lot of kids and a lot of responsibilities. They’re in the middle of protesting and trying to get everyone on board with the anti-alcohol movement on the reservation so there are a lot of complexities to that.”
Although Dull Knife is busy, Burton says that it has always been important to everyone working on this project that they stay true to his vision and his family’s story so Dull Knife has become kind of like an art director for the project. Burton recalls one time when he and one of his student workers had spent three weeks animating part of a blizzard scene with snow falling down and people walking through it. When Dull Knife saw it, he said there were too many people, and it probably wouldn’t have looked like that so they had to reshoot the scene. Although it wasn’t ideal, Burton said he and his team weren’t discouraged.
“The important thing for me to remember was that I knew this wasn’t going to be easy,” Burton said. “It hadn’t been easy from the get go, and it still isn’t easy now. We are learning a lot as we go. Good things are hard.”
As of now, Burton is only about 25 percent done animating. He says that when he started animating back in graduate school, his first animation was about 1,500 frames and 3.5 minutes long. The Dull Knife Project is currently 6,500 frames, and Burton estimates that there will be more than 80,000 by the time it is said and done.
Although this project is taking up most of Burton’s time currently, he is also working to expand the Vault Project, an online database that Burton started as a way to help teachers incorporate videos and animations into their curriculum as a new way to help their students learn.
“What I do in the studio and what I do in the classroom overlap in a lot of ways,” Burton said. “What I love about teaching is that these things relate to each other. They are all visual problems we have to solve. How do we show a certain character in a certain circumstance? How do we move the camera to capture that in an economical and a visually impactful way? Whether it’s the story of the Dull Knife family or a tutorial we are working on for the Vault, the problems are the same.”
--Miranda Milovich, College of Journalism and Mass Communications