Austin Kleon

The art of the Gross Up

I’ve been watching a lot of SpongeBob SquarePants with my kids over the holiday. My favorite comic effect in the early Spongebob episodes is what co-creator Bob Camp calls a “Gross Up,” when they cut to a close-up shot of a painting depicting some object more realistically (and therefore, gross):

I especially like it when they use a live-action shot, like the episode in which Spongebob and Patrick visit Sandy the Squirrel and dry up without water:

This technique was popularized by the animators of the The Ren & Stimpy Show (which was even grosser):

Here’s a little video essay about the Gross Ups, which also explores how a technique can be overused and watered-down:

More Spongebob reading: The SpongeBob SquarePants Experience and  “When SpongeBob SquarePants was just a sketch on a beach in Baja”

How they shot Elf with forced perspective

I’ve seen Elf probably a dozen times — it’s one of my favorite Christmas movies to watch with the kids — but I never bothered to watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes, so I was delighted by this clip from Netflix’s The Holiday Movies That Made Us that shows how they used forced perspective to make Will Ferrell seem gigantic:

I love practical effects like this. (Director Jon Favreau wanted the movie to look timeless, so he stayed away from too much CGI that might date the movie.) The forced perspective technique is also how they got Hagrid to look so huge in the Harry Potter movies and the hobbits so small in The Lord of the Rings.

The assembled artist

My apologies to Frederick Wiseman — they sent me two magazines in last week’s New York Times and I needed a guardian spirit for my notebook and I got a little carried away.

The profile these images came from — “What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?” is well worth reading. It reminded me of the Ross Brothers and the film editor Walter Murch.

The words I mutilated went like this:

He sees himself, he told me, like an artist who makes work from found objects, except in his case, the art is assembled from found events.

Many of Wiseman’s films are on the Kanopy streaming service and the new one, City Hall, is streaming on PBS.

Charles Portis’s True Grit

my wife got me this OG copy for Christmas

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees.” Charles Portis is the only novelist whose books I’ve read twice. (He only wrote five of them, so that helps.) True Grit is the most-perfect of his novels, a lean 215-page tale of a girl seeking revenge on the man who killed her father. Like all of Portis’s books, it is funny and absolutely packed with great sentences. No other fiction has given me so much comfort in the past few years. I plan on re-reading Portis until I’m as dead as Tom Chaney.

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

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