Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Rabarbaro Zucca
A man walks into a bar, not just any bar, this is the famed Zucca’s Bar in Milan, and orders the speciality, Rabarbaro Zucca, a rhubarb-based aperitif. But he’s out of luck, I’m only halfway through the tutorial on how a character picks up an object in the Adobe Character Animator tutorial, so he’s going to have to wait until tomorrow to finally get that drink.
My latest animation: the Rhubarb Express from Ardsley Station in the heart of Rhubarb Triangle, taking forced rhubarb to London.
I’m steadily getting there with my animations for the Rhubarb Festival. For the forcing shed sequence, I’ve kept exactly to my original comic strip. I can add sound effects and lighting effects later, but for the moment, this tells the story just as I did in the booklet.
Take one of Culpeper’s talk about the medicinal qualities of rhubarb. Perhaps I’ll come back and re-record the voiceover and add one or two sound effects but after a weekend sorting out various technical challenges, at least I’ve got him moving and talking.
My latest, and simplest, animation for the Rhubarb Festival.
Buckets, pots or barrels are used to ‘force’ an earlier crop of rhubarb.
Let me introduce head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, a man so well-versed in all things rhubarb that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation on the subject with him, if you spotted him in the pub.
I’ve designed Rhuben to be a narrator in the opening Brief History of Rhubarb section of my animation for next month’s Rhubarb Festival. In the original comic strip, a Victorian gardener makes a brief appearance, followed by a couple of frames about the cultivation of forced rhubarb, so it made sense in my animation to have the gardener himself addressing the audience directly.
I can think of several gardeners I know who would be brilliant doing the voiceover for Rhuben, but to keep things simple, it’s going to have to be my voice. But that’s quite appropriate as whenever I record a voiceover it always sounds exactly like the kind of character ‘that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation with, if you spotted him in the pub.’
When rhubarb arrived in Europe, it was prized as a medicine:
“It is under the dominion of Mars . . . It is good against venomous bites.”
Nicholas Culpeper, 1653
In my Rhubarb Festival animation, A Brief History of Rhubarb, herbalist Nicholas Culpeper will be giving the 17th century equivalent of a TED Talk. In the final version he’ll have his own version of a Power Point slide to point at: a scroll nailed to the wall. I’ll record a line of dialogue, so his mouth and eyes will be animated and, yes, that impressive moustache will twitch expressively too.
Today’s snippet of animation: Marco Polo visit the mountains of Tangut, China, where he finds rhubarb in great abundance.
In the final version there will be some lip-synced dialogue, eye movement and some twitching of the moustache. And I won’t be able resist having the top of his hat moving a little.
Ghengis Khan’s men bring two camel-loads of rhubarb back from China in today’s test animation. Still going through the basics, I’m adding voiceover, titles and sound effects (yes, me tapping on a cardboard box is intended to represent a camel’s footsteps).
My next cartoon illustrates the use of powdered rhubarb as a medicine in China, 2,700 years ago.
Experimenting with animation, I came up with this warped out-of-register effect, which could be an appropriate way to suggest the malady affecting the over-indulgent mandarin.