A blogsite not for me to bloviate; but for me to share my origami videos with the origami community. I am affiliated with the Westcoast Origami Guild, Pacific Ocean Paperfolders, Origami Paperfolders of San Diego, Origami USA, and the Origami Interest Group (Origami-L/O-List).
Some photos from today's Pacific Ocean Paperfolders meeting, which made its return to the new and improved Roxbury Recreational Center in Beverly Hills last month, after over a year of reconstruction:
NYTimes talks about the rise of online tutorials in comparison to "traditional" books and diagrams:
For
centuries, lovers of the ancient art had to consult books to uncover
such secrets. Increasingly, though, experts and novices alike are
learning about origami through online films and videos.
There are animated shorts — like Sipho Mabona’s “Origami Rhino Unfolding,” a 21-second wonder of stop motion animation — and commercials, like one Mr. Lang did for Mitsubishi,
in which an S.U.V. rolls through a forest and then a city constructed
purely of origami figures. There are documentaries, like Vanessa Gould’s
seminal 2008 film “Between the Folds,” and scores of time-lapse shorts, like “Origami Scaled Koi,”
by a Munich folder, Sara Adams, condensing 14 ½ hours of labor into a
minute-long video. Perhaps reflecting the ever-growing complexity of
some pieces, there are even “making of” films, like the one produced for
Mr. Mabona’s origami installation “The Plague,” a socially conscious work in which stacks of dollar bills are transformed into a swarm of locusts.
And
then there are the online tutorials, which teach in ways that origami
books, with their arrows and dotted lines and static images, never
could. Creators of these videos, like Ms. Adams, have their own fan
bases, with their most popular lessons drawing millions of YouTube hits.
“The
advantage is that you can show the continuous action from one step to
the next,” Mr. Lang said. “In book instructions, each diagram gives you a
snapshot, and you have to infer the action between these snapshots. Now
that we have video, you can see the action. You can slow things down
and move back and forth between folds.”
I believe Marti went straight from the OUSA Convention in NYC to England. She missed a really big turnout at her place, Sunday.
Jim Cowling came with a friend, just to check out Ken Hmoob's dollar horse book, which Ron Fujioka purchased and said he'd bring to the meeting. 120 pages of step photos, in black and white.
The four-day OrigamiUSA convention, held at the Fashion Institute of
Technology in New York, drew 650 people from a dozen countries across
the Americas, Europe and Asia. The largest contingent was from the U.S.,
followed by Japan. And the convention is serious business — each
attendee received a “survival kit,” which included a packet of origami
paper and a giant schedule of the 215 classes offered.
Susan Wettling, of Knoxville, Tenn., was seeking help from Hajime
Komiya, a Tokyo-based origami artist. Despite no shared language, Mr.
Komiya was walking her through the steps. “I knew he was going to be at
this convention and needed his help,” Ms. Wettling said.
Soon after the convention opened on Friday, a crowd had gathered at
the colorful display of origami models, which represented the classes
offered, ranging in level from simple to complex.
By Saturday morning, 20 classes were sold out, including Jeremy
Shafer’s “One-Piece Super Boomerang.” Primarily a juggler and children’s
entertainer, Mr. Shafer is the author of three origami books and has an
origami YouTube channel with about 25 million views and 70,000
subscribers.
He spent two days designing the one-sheet boomerang. Over the course
of 50 rejects, he realized his mistake was in making it like a pinwheel.
“I had to do a special move” to get the four arms into an exact “X,” he
said.
Robert J. Lang’s 3D origami cat was another sellout class. A physicist and engineer, with dozens of patents, who became a full-time origami artist, Mr. Lang says the math ideas behind the art form of origami have applications in engineering.
Such examples are air bags, medical implants as well as solar arrays
and telescopes that have to get into the rockets that carry them.
“Folding helps make a big thing small in a controlled way,” he said.
