"The packaged printed grill gives people the power of transformation through movement. ... The outer packaging with its printed grid means as soon as people pull the insert out it will cause the effect without instruction needed. As well as the primary kinetic piece on each side there is a secondary more subtle one in the background."
(Nottingham design agency: Seismik)
An event and films curated by Vivian Halas and guests: 4pm / ScreenTalk with Vivian Halas, Clare Kitson, Jez Stewart and Brian Sibley, Thursday 13 April 2014. Barbican Centre, Silk Street London, EC2Y 8DS
"Joy Batchelor was one of the pioneering creative and commercial forces in UK animation with her output of witty public service short films after the second world war, as well as the BAFTA nominated Animal Farm adapted from the novel by George Orwell.
This event, celebrating the centenary of her birth, looks at Joy's life as both a professional co–running a creative studio and her role as a mother."
"After the war years the studio made this beautifully fluid experiment in animation, a remarkable achievement before computers were born. The film shows how the union of the material and spiritual natures of man can lead to fulfilment. John Halas with the Hungarian designer Peter Foldes produced and directed Magic Canvas with an original score by Matyas Sieber, a student of Bella Bartok."
Year: 1948; Length: 10 mins; Production: John Halas, Joy Batchelor; Direction: John Halas; Script: John Halas; Design: John Halas, Peter Foldes; Animation: Wally Crook; Music: Matyas Sieber.
"Animator vs. Animation plays with the idea that the little stick figures that you animate can fight back and do damage to your computer. Since the world of computers is so vast, the possibility for gags is endless. I've had the stick figure engage in matrix style fighting with all the icons on the desktop, a one–on–one duel with Clippy (the old Microsoft Word Assistant), a solitaire fight with another stick figure using cards, the list goes on."
(Alan Becker)
Fig.1 Chris Wedge (1998) "Bunny", Blue Sky Studios.
"Preferably Blue is a bittersweet fairytale that your parents would never have read to you before bedtime. Their fear that you may turn out to be a bitter adult, knocking back anti–depressants like they were liquorice allsorts, if you didn't get what you wanted for Christmas, was probably the reason."
(Wayne Ching, 2010, Yukfoo Ltd.)
"We made this animation in BrosFx Studio. It is an opening to the TV series 'THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH', an adaptation of a book by Ken Follett. The series director is Sergio Mimica Gezzan, who cooperated, among others, with Steven Spielberg. Our goal was to create an animation which would render the colourful and vivid world of medieval England. The next step was to create a distinctive style that the audience would remember. After many tests, we opted for a hand painted stop motion, which suited perfectly the spectacle."
(Michał Socha)
"for over 40 years, Pablo has been putting his stamp on the moving image through works such as the opening of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and the revolutionary split–screen montage of 1963's The Thomas Crown Affair. He has also created the opening titles for Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) and Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995)."
(Art of the Title)
"After debuting at the Expo 2010 Shanghai China (2010上海世界博覽會) and traveling to Hong Kong and Macau, an animated version of the Song Dynasty painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河圖), by 12th–century artist Zhang Zeduan (張澤端), is on show in Taipei. The 25cm by 529cm original is a panoramic portrayal of everyday life in Bianjing (汴京), today's Kaifeng (開封), the capital of China during the Song Dynasty. Despite its name, the scroll depicts the architecture and scenery of the period and the apparel and activities of the rich and poor, not the rituals of the Qingming Festival (清明節), otherwise known as Tomb Sweeping Festival. Thirty times larger than the original painting, the animated version, which is titled River of Wisdom, is beamed onto a 6m by 110m screen by 12 projectors. The entire work was digitalized by Crystal CG (水晶石數字科技公司) and its subjects and backdrops move and make sounds."
(Lin King, 29 July 2011, Taipei Times)
Director, Concept, Animation – Kijek/Adamski, Production – Katarzyna Rup / Ab Film Production, Cast – Artur Cetnarowski, Gaffer – Heliograf, Blitz, Studio set – PlumArt Marcin "Śliwa" Śliwiński, Arek Szot, Joanna Kijek, PVC cutting – Dawid Krzyżanowski/ My–Art myart.com.pl, Thanks – Studio Las, Paweł Reyman.
"This is delightful: a campaign by Pixar for its upcoming film Monsters University that spoofs those wonderfully cheesy college–recruitment ads that air during NCAA sporting events. The spot below, which ran during this week's Rose Bowl telecast, promotes the movie's eponymous institution and imitates the source material perfectly, from the tagline ('Image you at MU') to the awkwardly saccharine student testimonials. The whole spot is nicely paced ahead of the amusing reveal halfway through. (The realism of the animation helps a ton, too, and is its own best marketing for the film.) The website, monstersuniversity.com/edu, is quite brilliantly done as well. The 'Student Policies' section is particularly inspired. On the issue of 'Basic Monster Respect,' it offers this advice: 'All monsters are unique – by heritage, number of appendages, or simply number of eyes – and all monsters deserve respect.' Pets, it should be noted, are not allowed on campus, 'with the exception of seeing–eye snakes.'"
(Tim Nudd, 03 January 2013, Adweek)
"Did you have a mentor when you were starting out?
I worked with some great illustrators when i started. We shared a building with the Central Illustration Agency and so met and listened to a few of them. Brian Grimwood, Simon Spilsbury, Robert Shadbolt, Geoff Grandfield. At the time illustration was being battered a bit because everything was going digital. But as we always say – good art will always find a way.
What's your process for writing a treatment?
We like to try new things whenever we can, so it's about getting the idea and pushing to see what we can do with it. And we like to get something drawn or made or modelled quite quickly. One piece of art will always inspire you to the next step we find.
Do you often collaborate in the early stages or do you work alone?
There are 20 of us at 12foot6 and we all do slightly different things, so everyone has to rely on everyone else – all we ever do is collaborate.
Pencil & Paper or iPad ?
it's a bit hard to send an email with a pencil and pen. But i know what you mean. We find there is a pretty simple rule in animation, in fact with any work I think – you get out what you put in. Put good art in and you stand a good chance of coming out with something you'll be happy with. Use whatever tools you like, as long as it works."
(Millie Ross, 13.07.2012, Jotta)
[The Animation/Illustration agency 12foot6 was started by Dave Anderson and Tom Mortimer. Their name was derived from their collective heights i.e. (6 foot 3) * 2]
"Special guest James May explores how music is inextricably linked to our emotions, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes apart an electric guitar and neuroscientist Tali Sharot reports on the ground breaking research which treats Parkinson's Disease with rhythm. Plus, science journalist Alok Jha asks whether computers are ruining music."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 6 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 30 Dec 2012 at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Dara Ó Briain, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 19 Dec 2012 by BBC.
"The Virtual Reef is a life–sized marine ecosystem expanding across two levels of the new Science and Engineering Centre. Multi–touch technologies enable the user to manipulate, intimately explore and interact with the reef world, specific behaviours and relationships.
Australia's leading marine science and interactive and visual design organisations, QUT and the Queensland Museum, bring knowledge and research of the underwater world to your fingertips through multi–touch screens and projectors.
Users will have the opportunity to go beyond the cinematic experience and interact with the marine world. Each interaction has associated content designed to complement the aims of the National Curriculum and provide an exploratory learning experience."
(Jeff Jones, the Cube, QUT)
Fig.1 "The Virtual Reef" project team: Professor Jeff Jones (Cube Project Leader), Associate Professor Michael Docherty (Project Leader), Warwick Mellow (Principal Animator/Art Director), Joti Carroll, Paul Gaze, Sean Gobey, Ben Alldridge, Sophia Carroll, Sherwin Huang, Bryce Christensen.
"Dara traces the brain's journey from a useless organ once ditched by Egyptian embalmers to the centre of everything that makes us human. Science journalist Alok Jha asks whether smart drugs really make you brainier, oceanographer Helen Czerski explores cutting edge therapies allowing the brain to control limbs remotely and materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes apart a smart phone."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 5 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 04 Dec 2012 at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Dara Ó Briain, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 5 Dec 2012 by BBC.
"Science journalist Alok Jha asks whether it is a good idea for humans to reach out to extra–terrestrials and oceanographer Helen Czerski comes face to face with extreme radiation, energy so deadly it could seriously curtail humans travelling further than the solar system. Plus special guest Josh Widdecombe visits NASA in Houston to find out the challenges we face to get humans to Mars and materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes apart a space suit."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 4 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 27 November at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Dara Ó Briain, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 27 Nov 2012 by BBC.
"deadmau5 and Imogen Heap have set up a global competition for animators to produce a segment of the official video to 'Telemiscommunications'. ...
We want to find 20 animators to make this video with. Each animator will be able to take ownership over their own segment, working in their own styles and mediums and with their own character and background designs. A selected few will also have a brief appearance at the end to tie all the characters into the same scene when they receive the text. We have created a sketch for the length of the video with the position of the character on the screen including a 3D plane so you can see what the camera is doing. This way we can connect the animations together. Also you'll see below each clip we've chosen a colour palette and given some direction for the mood we'd like to have in that section."
(Joel Thomas Zimmerman and Imogen Heap)
Video #9 Published on YouTube 23 Nov 2012 by Peter Jackson (WingNut Films), Film premiere: 28 November 2012 (Wellington, New Zealand) Release Date: 13 December 2012 (UK)
"Spot hecho en stop motion utilizando alimentos. Producción realizada entre Can Can Club y JPZtudio para la feria Tecnópolis, a traves del Instituto de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA)."
(Juan Pablo Zaramella, 2010)
"A few hundred years ago, extinction as a concept made no sense to anyone. But then fossil finds and advances in geology showed that it's part of life, and a statistical certainty – even for human beings."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 3 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 20 November at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Helen McCrory, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 19 Nov 2012 by BBC.
"'Set fire to your hair, poke a stick at a grizzly bear ... Dumb ways to die ... dumb ways to die–ie–ie.' If the chorus isn't stuck in your head, it will be soon. Melbourne Metro Trains' darkly cute – and irksomely catchy – new ad for transport safety has gone viral, notching up a whopping 4.2 million YouTube views in less than a week. And nobody is more stunned by its success than the man behind the music, Sydneysider Ollie McGill. The Cat Empire keyboards player was commissioned to write the score to accompany lyrics to the McCann Group's new ad and has watched Facebook likes, Twitter shares and YouTube hits skyrocket as word of the animated video has spread like wildfire. ... In the ad, cartoon characters meet their ends in a number of colourful, sardonic ways, including a couple of nasty mishaps on train tracks, while the sweet chorus, 'dumb ways to die ... ' is instant earworm material."
(Daisy Dumas, 19 November 2012, Fairfax New Zealand Ltd.)
"Balls, pendulums, apples and magnets all played their part in the story of modern physics, but then things got weird. And when Albert Einstein combined time and space, things got even weirder – step forward quantum uncertainty, black holes and the Big Bang."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 2 of 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 13 November at 9pm on BBC Two, voiced by Dara Ó Briain, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 13 Nov 2012 by BBC.
"Young cancer patients have told their stories in a cartoon that shows children and parents what it is like to have treatment. The six children, who received radiotherapy in Bristol, teamed up with the animation house Aardman for the production called One of a Kind! Their voices were recorded and given to the animated characters in the short film. It will be made available to hospitals all over the UK. The cartoon was the idea of Jancis Kinsman, advanced practice therapy radiographer at Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre."
(15 June 2010, BBC News)
Fig.1 Emma Lazenby (2010). "One of a Kind" concept by Jancis Kinsman, directed by Emma Lazenby, produced by Aardman and ArthurCox, 6min.
"Sita Sings the Blues in an animated movie created by Nina Paley. Using 4 different animation styles, Paley weaves together the breakup of her marriage, the singing of Annette Hanshaw and the epic story of Ramayana."
(Ray, 2009–05–15, Four In The Morning)
Fig.1 Nina Paley (2009). "Sita Sings the Blues"
"I envisioned This Land Is Mine as the last scene of my potential–possible–maybe– feature film, Seder–Masochism, but it's the first (and so far only) scene I've animated. As the Bible says, 'So the last will be first, and the first will be last.'"
(Nina Paley)
Fig.1 Nina Paley (2012) "This Land Is Mine".
"This first episode in a new six–part science series presented by Dara Ó Briain takes a look at the weird and wonderful world of reproduction and inheritance.
Dara chats to leading biologist Professor Steve Jones and finds out how the bicycle did more to improve the human immune system than any other invention, comedian Ed Byrne discovers just how closely related he is to a Neanderthal and materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik creates a DNA cocktail with the help of some strong Polish vodka.
Dara is also joined by neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who explores the cutting–edge science of epigenetics and reveals how exercise can change your DNA. Science journalist Alok Jha asks if the human genome project was oversold and the studio audience are put to the test in the elusive search for attraction.
Combining lively and in–depth studio discussion with exploratory films and on–the–spot reports, Dara Ó Briain's Science Club takes a single subject each week and examines it from lots of different and unexpected angles, from sex to extinction, Einstein to space exploration and brain chemistry to music. It brings some of the world's foremost thinkers together to share their ideas on everything, from how to avoid asteroid impact to whether or not we are still evolving."
(BBC Two, UK)
Fig.1 this animation is from Episode 1 or 6 of Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, Tuesday 6 November at 9pm on BBC Two, animated by 12Foot6, Published on YouTube on 5 Nov 2012 by BBC.
Fig.1 Victor [http://www.11secondclub.com/users/profile/22666] (2010). "unBearable", Eleven Second Club. "A teddy bear is at the centre of a dispute between a monkey and a bear". Audio taken from the feature film "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" (1987).
Ruslan Khasanov (2012) Lumen type: experimental typography.
Conference date: 30 November 2012
"A young boy who likes to play the flute dreams that he has lost his water buffalo."
(IMDb)
"Shan shui qing ('Feelings of Mountains and Waters') finished production in 1988. This water/ink animation was Te Wei's [特伟] fourth and final major production, and is in many ways fittingly so. 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters' is a masterpiece. The film runs slightly under twenty minutes, moving the viewer through an emotional journey cleanly articulated by deep and vivid imagery, wrought with incredible artistic purity.
The film's subject is a young girl, whom ferrying an aging man across a river, generously nurses him to better health after witnessing him collapse on the shoreline. In 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' Te Wei uses earthy watercolors and craggy puffs of ink to maneuver hillsides, paths, valleys, and waterfalls. He uses the high–values where the ink ends and the paper begins not as an artifact of the landscape, but as the landscape itself. The watercolor paintings move and flourish, the water and ink are the animation; and the rosy–cheeked girl, through muted conversation with the humble old man, learns to play a plucked, string instrument under the quiet and almost sentient backdrop of the mountainous milieu.
Te Wei served as general director for 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' and retired after its completion, at the time well into his seventies. The film deservedly earned multiple awards, including high honors from international film festivals in Montreal and Shanghai. In 1995, the global professional animation community ASIFA honored Te Wei with a Lifetime Achievement Award."
(Aaron H. Bynum, 12th February 2010, p.3, Animation Insider)
"Brooklyn–based trio The Saline Project are best known for creating music videos for the likes of Eminem, 50cent, and The Cure. Now a new art project sees them looking to evolve the gif format to something they're calling 3D lenticular…"
(Gavin Lucas, 25 July 2012)
"A small test getting a drawing animated. I made one main drawing, and on the following page redrew some elements so I could scan both into Photoshop and cobble together a looping animation. I staggered the elements out over more frames for a little more variation than a simple 2 frame flip."
(Yi–Piao Yeoh, 27 January 2012, Eraser Dust Everywhere)
"Animating animals is usually fun, but can often be complicated and technical. Figuring out what to do with all those legs can really trip up an animator. We can animate human–shaped characters a lot easier than multi–legged beasts because we have an intuitive knowledge of the way bipeds move.
It is easy for an animator to act out a motion when the character moves like us; feeling the action 'in the body' helps us understand how to animate it. So what happens when the character is a quadruped and you don't have that intuitive feel at your disposal? How do you make that movement believable? Suitable reference and a sophisticated media player is the place to start.
Luckily for the animation community, there is a wealth of reference material that can help. I'll walk you through my process for animating quadruped locomotion and share classic references that will help you deconstruct the fundamentals of the four gaits: walk, run, trot and gallop. I'll also share an example of my own 3D walk animation and offer technical tips for creating believable quadruped locomotion cycles."
(Cathy Feraday Miller, Gamasutra)
Fig.1 Richard Williams, uploaded by "animan1999" on 25 Aug 2009, YouTube.
Fig.2 Richard Williams, uploaded by "animan1999" on 1 Sep 2009, YouTube.
"Famous Turkish sculptor İlhan Koman's boat Hulda arrives in İstanbul, its final destination, after its long journey which began in Stockholm. Hulda was both Koman's home and studio during his residence in Stockholm.
The exhibition consists of the photographs and videos from Hulda's journey, 10 original sculptures such as Whirlpool and Dervish by İlhan Koman and a video –dedicated to İlhan Koman– by young artist Candaş Şişman. The photographs and videos are from the cities Hulda visited during its journey –Stockholm, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Barcelona, Naples, Malta, Thessalonica and İstanbul. The exhibition in Plato Art Space is also the final leg of the activities of Hulda Festival (www.huldafestival.org).
The exhibition is also undertaking the mission of building a bridge between young generation artists and Koman by presenting Candaş Şişman's work. Şişman's video Flux is influenced by Koman's sculptures (Pi, Moebius, Whirlpool and Ogre) and is dedicated to İlhan Koman's inspiring art. The video has a sound design which is also inspired by the materials of Koman's sculptures and is produced by Candaş Şişman.
The exhibition is curated by Yıldırım Arıcı and accompanied by a reader (published by Plato College of Higher Education) and it is featuring texts by Çetin Kanra, Aykut Köksal, Abidin Dino, Ferit Edgü, Burcu Beşlioğlu and a poem by Oktay Rıfat. "
(Plato Art Space, İstanbul contemporary art)
Fig.1 "Flux", Candaş Şişman, Hulda Festival 21 September 2010 – 23 November 2010 İstanbul, Turkey.
"I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad's successor, a campaign for a movie 'coming to theatres' last February, was only removed recently – with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it's relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash–strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope–like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek's ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris' Metro. The company they co–founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States – and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico."
(Christopher Szabla, Urbanphoto, 20 November 2010)
Fig.1 Bill Brand, "Masstransiscipe" New York subway installation.
Fig.2 New ad–places in the tunnel. // Новые рекламные площади в тунеле киевского метро. Между станциями Лукьяновская и Львовская Брама
Fig.3 "Tokyo Subway Ad ", Uploaded by ivanptse on 19 Apr 2008.
Fig.4 "Target ad, on the washington D.C subway.", Uploaded by kikyobackfromthedead on 1 Sep 2006.
"Ray Harryhausen is known as the godfather of stop motion animation, having worked on classic films such as Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and Sinbad. Ray Harryhausen stands as a beacon to today's fantasy filmmakers as the creator who inspired directors such as George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg.
As Ray can no longer attend events, this talk will be given by Tony Dalton, curator of the Ray Harryhausen collection and co–author of Ray's books about his film work. Tony Dalton will be bringing a selection of Ray's models to the talk."
(The Marlowe Theatre, UK)
New York invasion by 8–bits creatures ! PIXELS is Patrick Jean' latest short film, shot on location in New York. Written, directed by : Patrick Jean Director of Photograhy : Matias Boucard SFX by Patrick Jean and guests Produced by One More Production www.onemoreprod.com
FIlm4 are running a competition whereby users recreate a favourite scene from a Film4–funded movie. I chose to recreate the opening of "Sexy Beast" in low–fi animation.
Fig.1 Francis Glenday "Sexy Biscuit", Country: New Zealand, Submitted: 31/07/2012, Recreating: Jonathan Glazer (2000) "Sexy Beast".
"boolab is a production house dedicated to motion graphics, animation (2D and 3D) and the development of other visual techniques, both traditional and cutting or bleeding edge. It came into being in 2004 within the framework of Booker, an advertising production house in the field of live–action, founded in 1996. Initially, boolab was envisaged as an in–house lab for research into new audiovisual languages, but it soon set its sights beyond the company walls. Success was not long in coming, and it rapidly developed into what it is today – a production house that is a benchmark in audiovisual innovation throughout Spain and Europe."
(Boolab)
Fig.1 Pilot: 'Evolution' – boolab, uploaded by boolab Plus 1 year ago.
"RKCR/Y&R, Red Bee Media and Passion Pictures' director Pete Candeland turn the UK into a giant sporting venue for the BBC's Olympics marketing trail and title sequences
Super–stylised athletes are seen competing in Scottish lochs, terraced streets and around London in the film which will be used across all the BBC's TV and digital Olympics content. The film also features Five Steps, the Olympics 'theme tune' written by Elbow.
RKCR/Y&R developed the concept, the animation was by Passion and the sequence was produced by Red Bee Media. It will be used for the BBC's 2012 title sequences and on desktop, mobile tablets and 'connected' TV content. A full two–minute, 40 second version will be premiered on BBC ONe on July 3. 60, 40, 30 and five second versions will be used throughout the Games."
(Creative Review, 2 July 2012, 10:12)
Fig.1 BBC "Stadium UK" created by Agency: RKCR/Y&R; ECD: Damon Collins; Creatives: Jules Chalkley, Nick Simons, Ted Heath, Paul Angus; Production company: Passion Pictures/Red Bee Media; Animation production company: Passion Pictures; Director: Pete Candeland.
Fig.2 Published on 24 Jul 2012 by "london2012", the London 2012 Olympic mascots Wenlock and Mandeville.
"The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sound sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a Laura Keil, a berlin based dancer to interpret a musical piece – Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek – as closely as possible with the movement of her own body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three–dimensional volume (3d point cloud), doing so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.
The three–dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi–dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective.
Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the 'alternative worlds' we project and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.
Using 3 different microsoft kinect cameras the movement of the dancer was recorded into those 3d pointclouds that were synced and exported as one large dataset as Krakatoa particle files to be loaded into 3ds max for further rendering and creation of the 3d scene including the camera movement that is controlled by the audio as well."
(Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub, onformative a studio for generative design)
"The International Journal of Design is a peer–reviewed, open–access journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, including industrial design, visual communication design, interface design, animation and game design, architectural design, urban design, and other design related fields. It aims to provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas and findings from researchers across different cultures and encourages research on the impact of cultural factors on design theory and practice. It also seeks to promote the transfer of knowledge between professionals in academia and industry by emphasizing research in which results are of interest or applicable to design practices."
(International Journal of Design)
"We're excited to announce that Dreamworks and Double Negative have been confirmed to attend Anifest 2012. Happening on the 5th and 6th of October, there are a number of talks, workshops and animation competitions. Watch this space as we confirm more details. ... Canterbury Anifest is the South East's animation festival giving an insight into everything animation. In 2012 the festival will take place over the weekend of the 5th & 6th October and will include industry professionals providing talks, master classes and screenings."
(Canterbury Anifest, UK)
Fig. 1 "Canterbury Anifest 2011 Highlights Trailer", Animate & Create Studios.
"Annual International Conference on Computer Games, Multimedia and Allied Technology raises a platform for the Asian Gaming Community to realize, recognize, and reveal the technological interplay at work behind the immersive and compelling world of gaming. The conference mantles the experience, expertise, and technological know–how flowing in from academicians, researchers, and industry professionals and provides an apt platform for view and review.
The Conference Themes on Animation,Multimedia, IPTV, Edutainment, Mobile, Virtual Reality nunciating [sic] the evident convergence of technology while focusing on the differing facets of the gaming industry. The world of gaming is a result of numerous technologies, game tools and systems, the conference strives to discuss the technological advances, perspectives of future developments, and innovative applications while exploring the key concerns and issues related to Game security and Game regulations."
(Global Science & Technology Forum, Singapore)
"Inspired by the multi–award winning Not My Type (Lycette Bros. 1993–2002) and made specifically for the mobile medium, Typecast is a series of scenarios involving three central characters, an elevator and the mobile phone.
This series of five shortform linear works were created for the 'small of screen' and 'short of time' and as such they relied on easily recognisable scenarios, characters and devices – and of course – lowbrow humour.
In order to maximize the potential audience and provide performance on numerous devices of various resolutions, the challenge was to devise 5 animations of the same 30 second duration, without any dialogue or text and without changing scenes or cutting. The other major challenge was to create all of the characters and props using only typographic elements – letters, symbols, punctuation and fonts."
(John and Mark Lycette)
"The Not My Type animation series was primarily produced for distribution on the internet. Set in an office, the Not My Type series explores the various relationships within. While avoiding the use of language and dialogue, Not My Type, takes various typographic faces, symbols and characters and then duplicates, distorts and moves them to create a simple, stylistic production.
The initial version was created using Macromedia Director in 1995 (while John was at University) and was then recreated in 2000 for internet distribution using Flash – which was a perfect fit for a font based, primarily black & white animation. Not My Type I was so well received that another episode soon followed, culminating in four episodes by the end of 2002."
(John and Mark Lycette)
"A tax credit scheme for TV production and animation firms is to be introduced, in a bid to keep creative talent in Britain. Chancellor George Osborne announced the plans in Parliament as part of the new Budget for 2012. Mr Osborne said it was the government's 'determined policy' to keep Wallace and Gromit animators Aardman in Britain. Last month, Aardman bosses admitted they had been considering moving production abroad where it was cheaper. In reaction to the news, Aardman said the tax credit would be 'transformational for our industry'. 'We have seen a dramatic decline on UK television of home produced animation and we now have a shot a reversing that trend,' said Miles Bullough, head of broadcast and development. 'The credit will create thousands of UK jobs and our research shows that there will be a long term financial gain the for the UK.'"
(BBC Entertainment & Arts, 21 March 2012)
Fig.1 Mikey Please (2011), "The Eagleman Stag", Trailer for the BAFTA award winning short. Featuring the esteemed vocal talents of David Cann, with sound and score Benedict Please.
"GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from functional to entertainment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was created, they are experiencing an explosion of interest and innovation that is pushing them into the terrain of art. In this episode of Off Book, we chart their history, explore the hotbed of GIF creativity on Tumblr, and talk to two teams of GIF artists who are evolving the form into powerful new visual experiences."
(PBS Arts: Off Book, 7th Mar 2012)
"Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard and Navy oceanographer Don Walsh descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles below the sea's surface. It's the lowest point on Earth, and deeper than any human had gone before – or since.
Above is a new video chronicling the explorers' journey, weaving animation with audio from an interview granted by Piccard in 2005, three years before his death. The interview was conducted by New York writer Victor Ozols, but went unpublished and eventually ended up on his blog. There it was found by German design student Roman Wolter, who made the film."
(Dave Mosher, 21 January 2011, Wired Science)
"Each day, Cartoon Brew brings the latest news and trends in animation to over 20,000 different artists, entertainment execs and cartoon aficionados. Animation authorities Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi ... cover a wide range of topics, including contemporary and classic animation from around the globe, CGI, advertising, design, anime and industry/business news."
(Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi)
Fig.1 Joshua Catalano (2011). "Demoreel 2011".
Music "video for the Macabees directed by UK–based animator David Wilson."
(Christopher Jobson, Colossal)
Fig.1 Music video: Director: David Wilson, Producer: Tamsin Glasson, Prod co: Colonel Blimp, Director of Photography: Tim Green.
Fig.2 Making of: Created by Jake Hopewell, shot by Jake Hopewell and Josh Hine.
"Although the 'Atoms for Peace' campaign was formally launched in 1957, corporate America began to promote peaceful uses of atomic energy as early as the first few months after Hiroshima. A Is For Atom, an artifact of this effort, takes this highly loaded and threatening issue straight to the public in an attempt to 'humanize' the figure of the atom.
A Is For Atom speaks of five atomic 'giants' which 'man has released from within the atom's heart': the warrior and destroyer, the farmer, the healer, the engineer and the research worker. Each is pictured as a majestic, shimmering outline figure towering over the earth. 'But all are within man's power – subject to his command,' says the narrator reassuringly, and our future depends 'on man's wisdom, on his firmness in the use of that power.'
General Electric, a long–time manufacturer of electric appliances, power generation plants, and nuclear weapon components, is staking a claim here, asserting their interest in managing and exploiting this new and bewildering technology. Its pitch: this is powerful, frightening, near–apocalyptic technology, but managed with firmness, it can be profitable and promising. This 'Trust us with the control of technology, and we'll give you progress without end' pitch resembles what we've seen in films like General Motors' To New Horizons (on the Ephemeral Films disc). But the automobile, of course, wasn't a weapon of mass destruction.
In its first two years of release, A Is For Atom was seen by over seven million people in this version and a shortened ten–minute theatrical cut. In 1953 it won first prizes in both the Columbus (Ohio) and Turin (Italy) Film Festivals, the Freedoms Foundation Award, an 'oscar' from the Cleveland Film Festival, and a Merit Award from Scholastic Teacher. In 1954 it won first prize in the Stamford Film Festival, a Golden Reel Award from the American Film Assembly, and a second Grand Award from the Venice Film Festival. The film was remade in the mid–sixties and is still available for rental.
Like other John Sutherland films, A Is For Atom presents a portentious message in a visually delightful and often self–deprecating manner. 'Element Town' and its quirky inhabitants, including hyped–up Radium and somnolent Lead, is unforgettable, and the animated chain reaction manages to avoid any suggestion of nuclear fear."
(Internet Archive)
"The Fox Is Black, formerly Kitsune Noir, was started in April of 2007 as a way of sharing interesting ideas with likeminded people. The blog has now become a staple in the design community as a destination for creativity and fresh ideas. Updated daily, the blog shares a melange of topics ranging from design, culture, music, and films. Every Wednesday we release a new desktop wallpaper on The Desktop Wallpaper Project, a way to decorate your computer background with the work of the best illustrators, designers and photographers in the world."
(Bobby Solomon)
Fig.1 Hans Andersson's "Time Twister" clock.
Fig.2 Fleet Foxes, animation by Sean Pecknold using illustrations by Stacey Rozich.
Fig.3 Lei Lei/Raydesign "My… My…".
"Super short advertisements used during intermission at drive–in movie theaters during the 1950's and early 1960's to get people to consume junk food from the concession stand, may be viewed here."
(Internet Archive)
"Star Wars Uncut is the brainchild of Casey Pugh, a developer dedicated to creating new and fun experiences on the web.
In 2009, Casey became interested in using the internet as a tool for crowdsourcing user content.
Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web – the response from fans has been overwhelming worldwide and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch."
(Casey Pugh)
"Since 1987 IRC researchers and students have been exploring the rapidly developing landscape of visual technology. Initial research involved high–end 3D computer animation to create rich worlds and characters. Visualizations of the otherwise invisible, ranging from biology to long–gone or unrealized architecture continue to be created at the IRC for national broadcast and current feature films.
As digital media tools became more powerful, the IRC began developing interactive, real–time virtual worlds that could respond to the decisions of an involved viewer. Researching and utilizing current game–art technologies, the IRC has created internationally recognized interactive visualizations for museums and other institutions. Additionally, pure research in real–time visualization has involved UMBC students in immersive projects that have attracted national attention.
Today, visualization capabilities have become all but limitless. At the same time, the role imagery plays in contemporary culture is of rising importance. Research at the IRC has expanded to include multidisciplinary research projects to better understand and realize an effective use of imagery to help culture process its most profound ideas. Understanding social media, online communities, and interactive collaborative virtual spaces are basic aspects of this research."
(Imaging Research Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County)
"Professor Fletcher's invention of the CellScope, which is a Nokia device with a microscope attachment, was the inspiration for a teeny–tiny film created by Sumo Science at Aardman. It stars a 9mm girl called Dot as she struggles through a microscopic world. All the minuscule detail was shot using CellScope technology and a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics."
(Nokia)
Profile of the animator Richard Williams, creator of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
"I made this interview for http://www.adventuretime.tv and http://www.frederator.com ––– Man, I don't know what I'm sayin. To follow up on some of these ideas.. what I'm trying to do with Adventure Time is create a cartoon that kids are going to have fond memories of after they grow up.. and hopefully will be able to go back into and watch again and appreciate it a new way after they grow up. I'm tryin to make it timeless – – – like peewee's play house. With jokes that should be funny for adults and kids. When I was muttering about "real characters" What I mean is.. when I was a kid.. I cared about cartoon characters. I cared about Lisa Simpson when she loved her substitute teacher and how she felt when he left town on that train.. I cared about Doug Funny when he was nervous around Patty Mayonnaise. Even Beavis and Butthead had real moments.. when Butthead choked on that chicken.. it was real.. it wasn't.. cartoony.. but it was still funny. So I'm into that idea. Not that my characters are overly sensitive like Doug or Lisa.. I'm not trying to re–create those emotions. But just find out how Finn and Jake would react to the situations they are in and then play them real. Finn is turning into a little spitfire actually.. and Jake is Bill Murray and The Dude from The Big Lebowski.
The show is turning out really good I think. There are a lot of amazing people working on it. Thanks for staying interested and watching this video."
(Pendleton Ward)
"Greg Jardin directs countless jellybeans for Kinna Grannis' 'In Your Arms' promo."
(Justin Cone)
Written by Kina Grannis; Directed by Greg Jardin; Produced by Daphne Raves; Concept Art by Lauren Gregg; Wardrobe by Gillian Zwick; Sound Design by Suzanne Goldish; Production Company: @radical.media; Jelly Bean Animation Team: Kristina Carucci; Lauren Cunningham; MacKenna Dixon; Marcus Demmon; Kevin Harman; Alexandra Judelsohn; Jay Kim; Pearl Lung; Ptolemy Slocum; Erin Thiele; Clarisse Wiedem; Additional Animators: Monica Ahanonu; Matt Beans; Sarah Burt; David Chang; Jane Cohen; John D'Arco; Hope Marquardt; Erin McLaughlin; Krisztianna Ortiz; Kyle Padilla; Allen Marshall Palmer; Natalie Pasallar; JJ Rubin; Cherie Saulter; Susan Wiedem; John Sheptock; Janine Sides; Hethur Suval; Chelsea Stark; Sarah Tejeda; Special thanks to Jelly Belly.
"Treat is a loose collective of animators and illustrators, formed in 2008.
Many things have changed since then but not our love of making things move that aren't supposed to, e.g., Drawings, pictures, hearts, mountains, molehills, rock.
We've sprayed our work through TV, music videos, live visuals, installations and feature films. We like to illustrate as much as animate so that's another reason for us to exist, and we are happier for it.
We all have different ways of making so our work is an eclectic mix of styles that somehow fit together and help one another progress and vibrate into new and exciting structures."
(TreatStudios)
"As a music and graphic duet, Gangpol und Mit works on a peculiar world of digital pop inhabited by colourful and geometrical characters – a bestiary that evolves in lysergic musicals and takes part in apocalyptic cartoons. In this project, music jumps from synth assaults and woody flute leads to mondo beats and cinematic harpsichord keys, with futuristic social songs wrapped in fake MIDI string quartet attempts. Meanwhile, on the visual side, salarymen dive into greasy food, call–center employees start a batucada, and computer motherboards are slaughtered on a wild island while some terrorist confettis explode everywhere."
(Gangpol und Mit, 29 Octobre 2011)
"We are a not–for–profit festival celebrating the wealth of talent working across all genres of short film including live action drama, documentary, animation, music video, and work that pushes boundaries including online or mobile content, title sequences, and idents.
The work of newcomers and established filmmakers is promoted by screening work at cinemas, screening rooms and cafes throughout Soho and London's West End. In conjunction with the competitive program [sic] we hold a large variety of debates and discussions on all aspects of media and filmmaking. The event program [sic] also builds in networking and case studies. Our aims are to provide an arena introducing creativity, new/established practitioners and those partners that can help assist in supporting and furthering people's ideas."
(Soho Shorts, 2011)
"They say knowledge is power, but how do we make knowledge powerful? The challenge of communicating information becomes especially difficult when trying to convey a message full of complex data, which is often difficult to interpret quickly and clearly to the naked eye. This motion graphic looks at some of the many visual techniques used by Column Five to communicate information effectively to a large audience."
(Column Five)
"Though this is just an early teaser trailer to the upcoming Danish platformer, Limbo, it's already looking brilliant and I'm already thinking of the possibilities. An indie game to the core, Limbo is being produced by 1 extremely talented individual, Arnt Jensen, who is behind the art, concept and design. Limbo has recently received a healthy grant from the Danish government in order to continue the development of the game, more proof of the good that government funded innovation achieves."
(Playthrough.net, 26 September 2006)
"To celebrate the Red Bull Academy World Tour, the Academy produced a music film that encompasses musical styles from around the world.
Berlin: The soundtrack for this clip is inspired by one of Hansa's iconic album's Iggy Pop's Lust for Life. Like the creation of the music in the studio, the cityscape is built from the many organic, analogue musical artifacts used in the recording studio. Tape creatures climb across the concrete city jungle towards the Berlin Wall–a nod to the studio's physical location.
Paris: The visual inspiration for the Parisian leg of the tour is an collision between the flesh and blood textures of the African soul and funk that comprised the concert, and the architectural backdrop of Paris–the home of the Afrobeat Picks event. Musically, the rhythm builds and the acoustics echo and bounce off the city walls as we travel across the avenues.
Detroit: Inspired by the Detroit automotive industry, from the start the viewer is immersed inside the iconic TR 909 drummachine–a nod to the intersection of man and machine central to the city's musical innovation. As we travel through a CG circuit board city, the cyclical nature of the assembly line process is increasingly apparent transitioning us from the hey days of Motown R&B to the minimal stylings of techno. The theme of repetition was also carried through to the construction of the musical score.
Toronto: The animation style here is directly referenced from the iconic soundclash album Scientists meets the Space Invaders. The four superhero characters battle it out across the streets of Toronto–each one representative of one of the four soundclash crews competing in this event, Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation, Mad Decent, LuckyMe and Toronto All Star. The beginning of the battle is marked by the sound of the airhorn, a nod to the dancehall musical score underpinning this piece.
Melbourne: The bright, visually rich palette of this section is inspired by the coastal location of Melbourne city. Like the experimental nature of the event itself, the narrative of this film explores the relationship between sound and space. The audio of the Melbourne tram chimes set off a wave of fluid illustrated animations that bounce around the screen, visually inspired by traditional aboriginal paintings.
New York: When hip–hop first emerged in the 70s it was the ghetto blaster that amplified the sound of New York streets to the world. To pay hommage, the setting of this film was built from the original tape deck devices. We see a Hudson River constructed of unwound mixtapes. The trains all disappear to one of the five boroughs, a nod to the albums and boroughs celebrated in this event.
Rome: Italy and the Cinecitta studios are credited for producing some of the most influential cinematic masterpieces ever. To celebrate this we created a film that paid tribute to the different genres, from comedy to spaghetti western, 70s cop films & blood–filled horror flicks to psychedelic animations, in one narrative mash–up. A Spaghetti Western inspired track provides the aural backdrop as we pan across the scene culminating in a classic Sergio Leone shot. Along the way we reveal a chaotic assortment of villains, ghouls and policeman all participating in one comedic battle conducted to the tunes of a dead Mexican mariachi band.
London: Inspired by the event theme, Revolutions in Sound, we wanted to create a dominating creature that visually embodies the innovative qualities of the event itself. As the camera cuts around the robot's CG body we see it is inspired by components of modern London architecture. His head is a pulsating subwoofer, an iconic musical artifact central to London's influential bass music scenes and inside his chest we see the magnificent London Eye, the heart of the event itself."
(Red Bull)
Fig.1 'Red Bull Academy World Tour' (2011). Passion Pictures
"Hilarious and frequently surreal, the stop–motion extravaganza A Town Called Panic has endless charms and raucous laughs for children from eight to eighty. Based on the Belgian animated cult TV series (which was released by Wallace & Gromits Aardman Studios), Panic stars three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town that never fails to attract the weirdest events.
Cowboy and Indians plan to gift Horse with a homemade barbeque backfires when they accidentally buy 50 million bricks. Whoops! This sets off a perilously wacky chain of events as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe of pointy–headed (and dishonest!) creatures. Each speedy character is voiced – and animated – as if they are filled with laughing gas. With panic a permanent feature of life in this papier–mâché burg, will Horse and his equine paramour – flame–tressed music teacher Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar) – ever find a quiet moment alone? A sort of Gallic Monty Python crossed with Art Clokey on acid, A Town Called Panic is zany, brainy and altogether insane–y!."
(Adriana Piasek–Wanski)
"Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of amazing power and energy. Film pioneer Dziga Vertov uses all the cinematic techniques available at the time – dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames."
(Moving Image Archive)
Fig.1 Dziga Vertov (1929). 'Man With A Movie Camera', VUFKU (The Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Administration).
"Painter, photographer, filmmaker, set designer, teacher, metalworker, [Alexander Rodchenko] revelled in the new freedoms thrown up by the Russian Revolution and was fiercely committed to liberating art for the masses.
Whether it was his blueprint for the ideal working man's club showcased at the Paris Exhibition of 1925, his illustrated covers for engineering manuals or his pioneering film poster for Sergei Eisenstein's classic Battleship Potemkin, Rodchenko's experimentation embodied the spirit of the early Soviet era.
But just as he thrived in the intellectual ferment of the Lenin years, like so many other artists–cum–revolutionaries of the period he was to fall foul of Stalin's increasingly paranoid and brutal regime.
Today his influence lives on, not only inspiring modern–day photographers like Martin Parr, but his designs are perhaps best known for the art school chic they afford to the covers of records by the Scottish indie band Franz Ferdinand."
(Arifa Akbar and Jonathan Brown, 2 January 2008, The Independent)
Alexander Rodchenko (1925). "Lengiz books on all subjects!"
2011 First year Multimedia BA (Honours) and Media Creatives (FdA) degree students at Nottingham Trent University get to play on their first Day. Music By Owen Baxter
Robyn (Robin Carlsson) with Kleerup revision of Oskar Fischinger's (1935) "Komposition in Blau": http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/kBpPBtQ48v0/
"During World War II, Disney's provided some political education for Americans at home –– and for soldiers on the front, too. 'Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi' appeared in movie theaters in 1943. The tone of the movie was serious, and it didn't feature the likes of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse. Instead, it used impressive images to describe how children in Nazi Germany were raised to hate and to participate in the war effort –– and how little blonde Hans' only purpose in life was to die on the front."
(Sven Stillich, 2009)
"Wow, here's something I'd never seen before: Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam discussing his animation techniques on Bob Godfrey's Do–It–Yourself Animation Show in 1974. Godfrey's show, which made animation accessible to the masses by taking the mystery out of the production process, was vastly influential and inspired an entire generation of kids in England, including Nick Park, who created Wallace & Gromit, Jan Pinkava, who directed the Pixar short Geri's Game, and Richard Bazley, an animator on Pocahontas, Hercules, and The Iron Giant.
In a day and age when more kids are interested in animating than ever before, it's a shame that TV shows (or Web series) that are fun and informative like this don't exist. The DIY advice that Gilliam gives in this episode is not only brilliant, but still as relevant today as back then: 'The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.'"
(Amid, 4 August 2011)
"Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch's tremendous spending power and reach––what the media has dubbed the 'Kochtopus'––is unrivaled. The conservative nonprofit David founded, Americans for Prosperity, has said it plans to spend $45 million this election cycle, more than three times the $13 million the Democratic Governors Association has on hand as of mid–October. There's no way of knowing how much the Kochs have given to the AFP or any other group; new Senate legislation allows tax exempt nonprofits to raise unlimited funds without disclosure. Publicly, only about $3.9 million can be traced to the brothers, including a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association from David, a former vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party."
(Clare O'Connor, Forbes.com, 21 October 2010)
Fig.1 Scott Mitchell (6 April 2011 at 01:32pm). "The Beast File: Koch Brothers", ABC News, [available at: http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/beast–file–koch–brothers] via: mrpolity1 (uploaded 2 June 2011). "Koch Brothers – The Kochtopus", YouTube
"Animate Projects, with support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, invites UK–based artists and animators to submit proposals for films that – in a broad sense – explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the 'digital'.
To apply, read the guidelines and download the submission form from the Opportunities section. The deadline for proposals is 4pm, 24 August 2011.
The Digitalis Commissions are part of Digitalis, a strand of activities for 2011 that focus on the potential of the digital space as a site for artistic production."
(Animate Projects)
Fig.1 Teaser for "AnimateTV – 20 Years of Experimental Animation from the UK" (DVD features acclaimed works by key figures in British artists' animation, including Phil Mulloy, Paul Bush, Sarah Cox, Tim Macmillan, Run Wrake, Petra Freeman, Ruth Lingford, Jonathan Hodgson, AL and AL, Keith Piper, Andrew Kötting, Semiconductor, Chris Shepherd, David Shrigley, Stephen Irwin and Simon Faithfull).
Fig.2 Young–Hae Chang Heavy Industries (2008). "I'm Sucking on a Tailpipe in Seoul"
"I got a second place and a yellow pencil! I'm so pleased it's unreal.
The award ceremony was great fun, so much free wine and Pimms! And obviously the chance to meet loads of professionals.
I had an amazing opportunity to speak to the Disney guys that set the brief I did. And it turns out that I'll actually be working with them on a few projects. I really hope to show them the best of what I can do and someday soon be working with them on my own show, or anything really, I'm still in shock."
(Alex Card, 29 June 2011)
[Nottingham Trent University Multimedia BA (Honours) student Alex Card commenting on winning 2nd place in the Animation / Crafts section of the 2011 D&AD Awards.]
Fig.1&2 Maxim Zhestkov (2009). Art film for MTV International Rebrand / Universaleverything
"Danae Diaz and Patricia Luna made an amazing animation video for our piece 'Caffeine'. It's all drawn with pencil on paper and based on Danae Diaz' cover artwork of our album 'You Make Me Real'."
(Brandt Brauer Frick)
Fig.1 "Caffeine": written and directed by Danae Diaz and Patricia Luna; music by Brandt Brauer Frick; art concept and illustrations: Danae Diaz; hand drawn animation: Danae Diaz, Benjamin Karré; computer animation, compositing and editing: Patricia Luna; 3D design assistant: Maria Diaz; sound design intro and outro: Lenard Gimpel; Studio !K7, Initiative Musik, 2010–2011 Berlin–Barcelona.
Client: inCulto; Design, direction & animation: PetPunk; 3D Graphic: Romanas Zdanavičius
"You know how people sometimes say that jazz is the only truly American art form? Animated GIFs are like the jazz of the internet: they could only exist, and be created and appreciated, online. That said, PopTart Cat is not exactly on par with Thelonious Monk. But photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg may have finally found a way to elevate the animated GIF to a level approaching fine art, with their 'cinemagraphs' –– elegant, subtly animated creations that are 'something more than a photo but less than a video.' ...
The pair was inspired to create these cinemagraphs while preparing to cover Fashion Week this past February: 'We wanted to tell more of a story than a single still frame photograph but didn't want the high maintenance aspect of a video,' they told Co.Design via email."
(John Pavlus, Co.Design)
"A winner of the Cannes Film Festival 1973, 'Fantastic Planet' is a full length animated fantasy set on the planet of the Draags in a far–off solar system where humans are kept as pets by a race of huge blue creatures."
(Alice in Videoland)
Fig.1–8 René Laloux and Roland Topor (1973). 'Fantastic Planet/La Planète Sauvage'. France: 72 mins.
"As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic–realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Niebla's precise setting is uncertain–somewhere in rural Latin America–and the story's narrator is El Pep, an old man being interviewed in his living room by a documentary film crew about the mysterious fog of the title and the resulting visitation by a strange flock of flying sheep. 'The character is strongly based on my grandmother,' Ramos says. 'She was a very complex person, with many frustrations in life. She was born during the Mexican Revolution, so she experienced a lack of material possessions all her life. But she was also very kind and loving with her family (well..., most of the time). She was a combination of marked strenghs and weaknesses. At the end of her life, she suffered from dementia. 'My mind is leaving me,' she used to say, distressed, when she noticed. The only moments we could communicate with her were when we asked her about her past life. Those memories were the last to vanish.'"
(Emilio Ramos)
Fig.1 Emilio Ramos (2006). 'Niebla (Fog)', Short Film | México–Spain | 8 min. | 2d/3d digital
"A compendium and leading web resource of film and television title design from around the world. We honor the artists who design excellent title sequences. We discuss and display their work with a desire to foster more of it, via stills and video links, interviews, creator notes, and user comments."
(Ian Albinson)
Fig.1 Ian Albinson, David Horridge, M. Keegan Uhl, Bill Simmon (2011). 'A Brief History of Title Design', Music: RJD2 "Ghostwriter"
"This Gilliamesque 60–second adaptation of Inception uses delightful Victorian woodcuts to tell the story. It was an entry in a Jameson's whisky competition by Wolfgang Matzl."
(Cory Doctorow, 11 March 2011, Boing Boing via Super Punch)
"Alberta sits over one of the largest recoverable oil patches in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. It covers 149, 000 square kilometers, an area larger than Florida, and holds at least 175 billion barrels of recoverable crude bitumen. Canada has become the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., with over a million barrels per day coming from the oil sands. Currently 40% of all oil produced in Canada is derived from the oil sands.
The crude oil produced from the oil sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, could keep the global appetite for oil at bay for another 50 years.
But oil sands are a fundamentally different kind of oil. They take a lot of energy and a lot of water and leave a very large environmental footprint compared to all other forms of oil extraction. Because of this, the massive changes to the boreal forest and the watershed have prompted the United Nations to list this region as a global hot spot for environmental change.
In addition, oil sands projects are major emitters of greenhouse gases. They accounted for 4% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, making it impossible to meet obligations set out in Kyoto for emissions–reductions."
(H2Oil)
Fig.1 Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé, James Braithwaite, Daniel Legace. 'La Moustache'.
"I have questions that do not occur in words: questions about space, about material moving in space, and about the intermingling of space and object. I feel that space disguises itself and its nature by its transparency. It is, strangely, this very transparency that makes space opaque to our awareness. This new work uses skinny lines moving in space. Emptying out the volume reduces the visual mass so that more of the space around the work gets implicated in what the work finally is. The space shares in creating, or manifesting, the function of the work itself. This emptying–out of the mass makes it possible to imbue space without occupying space."
(Anne Lilly)
Fig.1 Parietals 2005;
"Norman McLaren is [one of] the most influential animator in the history of the art of animation. Over many years of constant groundbreaking research and experimentation he has created a coherent and extraordinary body of work with a unique inventiveness. This is best exemplified by his most important film, the anti–war parable Neighbours."
(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1995 – 2010)
Fig.1 Norman McLaren (1952). 'Neighbours', National Film Board of Canada.
Drew "Berry's animations function as a tool for representing activities occurring within our bodies that could otherwise only be seen at a magnification of 100 million times. What distinguishes these works in the context of the moving image art form is the creation of a visual landscape that is extraordinary, strange and other–worldly, even though viewers are armed with the knowledge that they are scientifically exact. To follow the virtual camera through this strange world reminds them of the constant energetic presence of their own seething, pulsing, cellular functions. Watching these works, viewers become strangers in their own skin, inhabitants of a foreign landscape. Berry uses this synthesis of scientific and digital technology to create a holistic sense of the world beneath people's skin, sending a ripple across the viewers' bodies as they interact with the work, enlivened with the knowledge of their organic relation to the alien world on screen."
(Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Australia)
Fig.1 Drew Berry (2003). 'Body Code' 3D computer animation displayed as single–channel DVD projection; stereo audio. 8:34 mins; colour. Sound design: Franc Tétaz. Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Courtesy: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and the artist.
[These animations demonstrate the potential of design practice for revealing insight that might not otherwise be revealed. In this way preoccupations with visual fidelity and scientific accuracy must recognised as being only peripherally important.]
"Cameraless film refers to a method of producing moving image where the artist or filmmaker bypasses the photographic process and directly manipulates film stock (either additively or subtractively) with methods such as drawing, collage and painting. Due to the inherent difficulties of generating handmade images on film, direct animation doesn't lend itself to pictorial illusion or linear narratives. The imagery tends to be atavistic, animistic, frenetic; and due in part to this visual proximity to pure abstraction, the conceptual content of this genre has been largely overlooked. Since they sit so ambivalently between fine art and cinema, both camps have historically positioned these films as being principally concerned with formalism and material experimentation. But revising this apprehension, Zelluloid: Filme Ohne Kamera brings together a selection of films, tracing the ideational threads which significantly inform and influence this manner of filmmaking.
In 1935, Len Lye's film A Colour Box was so different in its use of filmic language that the Brussels Film Festival had to invent a new prize for it to win. As vivid and enchanting today as they were visionary and challenging, Lye's animated shapes dancing to the percussion of popular Cuban and African music were a hit with audiences more accustomed to viewing cinema in its industrial, commercial capacity. The very act of painting abstract imagery on film was a conceptual leap in terms of severing film's indexical relationship with the world and using it to explore an abstract, synaesthetic experience."
(Genevieve Allison, 5 August 2010, EyeContact)
"The Save the Arts campaign is organised by the London branch of the Turning Point Network, a national consortium of over 2,000 arts organisations and artists dedicated to working together and finding new ways to support the arts in the UK. ...
The first stage of the campaign presents a new video animation by artist David Shrigley highlighting the effect of the funding cuts and a new work by Jeremy Deller with Scott King and William Morris. Each week, the work of a different artist will be released. Mark Wallinger will present the next project.
The costs of David Shrigley's animation have been covered with a grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. All artists engaged in this project have generously donated their time, talent and art."
(Turning Point Network, UK)
Fig.1 David Shrigley (2010), 'An important message about the arts'.
Fig.2 Mark Wallinger (2010), 'Reckless'.
"A curious cat investigates an empty cardboard box."
(Simon Tofield)
"Toon Boom Animate Pro is the only software capable of combining the benefits of vector animation with textured pixmap, preserving artistic details while creating unique organic styles. Developed for animators by animators, Animate Pro is designed to help you achieve the look and feel you are looking for and unleash the endless stylistic possibilities not available in any other technology.
Toon Boom Animate Pro brings together the most advanced feature set available for Flash–style and cut–out animation in the market. This feature set is embedded in a flexible environment including; vector, pixmap, symbols, pegs, morphing, hierarchy–based rigging, timeline view, node view, 3D space, forward and inverse kinematics as well as advanced lip–sync"
(Toon Boom Animation Inc.)
"the husband and wife–run Halas & Batchelor, sometimes called the British Disney–which for more than 50 years produced adverts, public information pieces, feature films, TV cartoons and serious award–winning animation respected the world over.
Today, 15 years after the studio's last release, the British Film Institute will announce that it has been given the Halas & Batchelor archive, including film prints, stills, scripts, correspondence and original cells. It is the largest ever single donation of British animation and was welcomed as 'an extraordinarily rich gift' by the BFI director, Amanda Nevill. 'We look forward to working on ensuring these films and artefacts are enjoyed by the widest possible group of people in years to come,' she said. ...
Curator Jez Stewart hopes that the BFI will be now be able to open up Halas & Batchelor to new generations of animation fans and practitioners. Aardman Animation's Nick Park said he had fond memories of watching the company's animated educational films at school. 'They have always been part of my life,' he said. 'John Halas was the judge on the first animated competition I ever entered–I didn't win, but admired him and looked up to him as a great figure in British animation.'"
(Mark Brown, 3 December 2010, The Guardian)
2010 First year Multimedia BA (Honours) and Media Creatives (FdA) degree students at Nottingham Trent University get to play on their first Day. Find more at: http://reflectivejournal.co.uk
Music By Owen Baxter
"Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer–generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm.
Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking."
(Davide Quagliola aka Quayola)
Fig.1 2007/8, Live Audiovisual Performance, 1, 2 or 3ch HD projection | 2ch sound, Duration: 40:00, PTA is a live audio–visual performance focusing on precise synchronisations between sound and image. It is a result of multiple collaborations with various musicians worldwide.
Inspired by waveforms, PTA takes form as a central spine where ever–evolving graphical compositions grow from and within.
Sound by: Autobam, Audion, My My, Peter Spiess, Oliver Hacke, RunStopRestore, JPLS, Hearthrob
"This is my final project for motion graphic design, which is a Flash animation that depicts an 'origin myth' of the self–created hero, Hundred Pacer.
The name Hundred Pacer derived from a kind of very venomous snake that exists in mountain areas of Taiwan called Hundred Pacer snake, and the protagonist, Hundred Pacer, was an ordinary Paiwanese Indigenous girl until her and her father were killed by the mudslide, and the snake God chooses her to revive in passing down the power...
The story was inspired by the Typhoon Morakot happened in August 2009, which killed nearly 500 people and destroyed half of Taiwan at that time."
(Jonghsiang Kwan, 2010)
"The Tagtool is a performative visual instrument used on stage and on the street. It serves as a VJ tool, a creative video game, or an intuitive way of creating animation.
The system is operated collaboratively by an artist drawing the pictures and an animator adding movement to the artwork with a gamepad. The design achieves virtually unlimited artistic complexity with a simple set of controls, which can be mastered even by children.
The project is coordinated by OMA International. Our approach is that all knowledge acquired within the Tagtool project should be shared. We are inspired by the open source movement and believe that it is also relevant for the digital arts."
(OMA International, Austria)
Fig.1 Hagleitner, Krenn, Kermer, Rieger, 2008. 'Tagtool' (short video documentary).
"By now it seems like just about everyone has seen the iPhone 4 vs. HTC EVO video (and the rebuttal video). The video portrays an electronics store employee trying to convince a person looking for an iPhone 4 to buy an HTC EVO 4G instead. It's hilarious – like all good humor, so funny because it's at least partially true. But you know who didn't find it funny? Best Buy. How do I know that? Because they're trying to fire the kid who made it.
The video in question was made by Brian Maupin, a 25–year–old based in Kansas City, Missouri. For the past three and a half years he's been working at Best Buy selling mobile phones. He's probably not going to be doing that anymore as Best Buy has suspended him indefinitely and is currently taking the steps to terminate him, Maupin tells us. The reason? The video.
The video became so popular (it currently has nearly 1.3 million views on YouTube) that someone at Best Buy corporate saw it. They then put two–and–two together that it was an employee at one of their stores that made it, and the hammer came down. 'They felt it disparaged a brand they carried (iPhone/Apple) as well as the store itself and were fearful of stockholders & customers being turned off to Best Buy Mobile,' Maupin says."
(MG Siegler, TechCrunch, 1 July 2010)
Fig.1 Tiny Watch Productions, 2010. 'iPhone4 vs HTC Evo'.
Fig.2 Tiny Watch Productions, 2010. 'HTC EVO vs iPhone4'.
"xtranormal's mission is to bring movie–making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie–making, short and long, online and on–screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century.
Our revolutionary approach to movie–making builds on an almost universally held skill–typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop."
(Xtranormal)
[The Xtranormal Text–to–Movie authoring tool allows you to produce short films. It does so through adding your typed dialogue (in the form of 'text to speech') to supplied animated character assets.]
"The Second City is a 1930's Chicago inspired street scene. This was created for a client who was looking for a proof of concept, with a view to presenting it to games publishers. All assets were modelled and textured by myself, from an extensive catalogue of reference photography. ...
This is a fly–through video recorded in Fraps straight from the UDK viewpoint. Breakdowns of meshes and lighting can be seen. Thanks to Robert Antill for the work he did in After Effects on this."
(Philip Howlett)
"H5 est l'auteur de nombreux clips (Alex Gopher, Massive Attack, Röyksopp...), et a été régulièrement exposé (Nuit Blanche 2007, Beaubourg, MoMA...).
Avec Logorama, H5 (François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy et Ludovic Houplain) signe son 1er court métrage (17 mn)."
(H5)
"n 1969, a 14–year–old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel–to–reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon's "bed–in" phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell–binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message."
(Josh Raskin)
Fig.1 'I Met The Walrus' (2007). Josh Raskin – Animator, Josh Raskin – Director, Josh Raskin – Editor, Josh Raskin – Composer (Music Score), Alex Kurina – Cinematographer, James Braithwaite Computer Illustrations – Cinematographer, Jerry Levitan – Producer, Josh Raskin – Screenwriter, James Braithwaite – Illustrator, Alex Kurina – Illustrator [6 minutes].
"GameCity is a lot of things, but most of all it's an ongoing project to find out what a videogame festival could be. Unlike a lot of videogame events, it's not really a place to come and play them – we'd rather do that at home on the sofa. But if you do love videogames, you're going to find lots here to enjoy."
(http://gamecity.org/)
"Richter and Eggeling were among the first creators of abstract film. Although the films themselves were produced in Berlin, the works were grounded in Zurich Dada's experiments with abstraction. The artists originally experimented with painting on scrolls before turning to animated film. Eggeling directly transposed his scroll drawings to film to create "cinematic drawings"; Richter more fully exploited the new medium, abandoning his drawings altogether and filming paper rectangles, squares, and lines of various sizes and shades suggestive of movement and depth."
(The Museum of Modern Art)
Fig. 1 Germany, 1921. 3 min. Film in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2010 Hans Richter
"The Blue Bell website featuring Tony Ward in an interactive undressing is exciting and ingenious.
You can control the legendary model's every move, right down to stripping off his shirt. Using digital film and cinematic special effects to achieve an incomparable level of user interface."
(AJANAKU:Marco, 9 February 2010, http://www.ajanaku.nl/wrangler–blue–bell–springsummer–2010–website/)
"When [Marco Brambilla] asked us to work with him on Civilization, a vision he had of taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven, we knew that it was going to be huge challenge but one we were very excited about....
The project had two huge challenges. Firstly we needed to figure out how to create content that could move with the elevator where it would ultimately be viewed. The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.
The second challenge was creative. What are we seeing through this 'elevator window'? We only really knew at the beginning that the canvas or environment would be very tall and skinny due to the physics of elevator travel and we wanted to go from a hellish landscape to a heavenly one.
We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn't fly. We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.
Another technical wrinkle was more human. Would we create motion sickness by subjecting riders on the elevator to the video art? To test this we shot some footage of a rising and falling landscape on a glass enclosed elevator and played back the footage on a 42inch plasma in a fully enclosed elevator. Not one person in the 30 we used in the test got sick so we knew our gut check was all right.
In parallel to the technical research, Marco and his studio staff began the process of researching and collecting a vast amount of footage sampled from both mainstream and more obscure film sources. Marco then assembled still grabs from each piece of sampled footage into photomontages, which we would review weekly while Marco's editor cut together a linear chronology of what the components in journey from hell to heaven may look like.
The logistical task of collecting and cataloguing all the clips involved a great deal of coordination between our producer and Marco's studio and stretched over a period of almost three months. Once the material was imported into Flame we would invariably make adjustments and receive more photo–collages that would polish to make the 'video mural' look as seamless as possible. The clips were used in much the same way the way a painter would use a colour or texture. We felt it was like audio sampling, using the clips as beats and timing them all to work together to create something new and original. Marco and our team experimented in the Flame and played with the clips for about six weeks, arranging and rearranging them on the 2d canvas over and over to find the right compositions. Most of this work was done at night because we couldn't afford to do it during prime time hours.
Not only were we playing with where on this huge canvas the clips should go, we had to consider the looping aspect of this project. We wanted the canvas to loop once it got to the top of heaven and come right back around to hell again. Once the canvas looped, each of the 500 clips had to be looped individually as well. Along with colour correction, each clip required careful vari–speeding and stabilization to allow all the pieces fit together. We ping–ponged most of the clips as to avoid any cutting on the loop points. With all the clips treated and placed into the canvas we color corrected the entire thing as one big piece of wallpaper. We had over a hundred 'power windows' on the piece to isolate sections and make each station gel together. We ended up with six main stations on the canvas. Hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heave/lower hell which was the loop point.
After all this was done we set out to redo the entire piece in 3d space! We took each station, rendered it out as a static 2.5 minute plates and then projected those onto geometry modeled to match the stations layout. We then had to go in and render the stations with and without most of their elements so we could achieve the proper parallax. Essentially it was like recreating the entire project over again but with most of the guesswork taken away with the 2d final as our road map."
(Motionographer)
Credits: Title: Civilization (MEGAPLEX), 2008 By: Marco Brambilla; Client: The Standard Hotel, New York; Editor/Research Assistant: Beau Dickson; Assistant: Swapna Tamhane; Production Company: Crush, Toronto; Representation/Images Courtesy of: Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; Marco Brambilla Directorial Representation: The Ebeling Group; Ebeling Group U.S.A.
"From the 24th of September until the 11th of October 2009, the iconic Liberty Hall building in Dublin's city centre will be transformed into a giant 50 metre, low resolution, TV screen. Members of the public are invited to create animations with sound and music, via our website, and broadcast them across the city's skyline.
Powering the display are 100,000 low–energy LED lights, installed into 330 windows on the south and west faces of the building. These lights can illuminate each window as a solid colour turning it into a tiny pixel that's part of a giant display.
Playhouse Daft.ie were approached with the Playhouse idea late last year. They loved the idea and jumped on board as main sponsor and agreed to fund the project. The team was then pulled together through connections made at the Trinity Science Gallery. For nearly a year, the team have been busy creating some amazing technology and are looking forward to showcasing it to the public on the 24th of September.
Originally inspired by the Blinkenlights installation in Berlin, Playhouse raises the technological bar with the ability to produce colour animations along with sound and music (broadcast over FM radio within the vicinity of the building)."
(Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival)
"Bruce Bickford was born in 1947 in Seattle Washington. He began animating clay in the summer of 1964 at the age of 17. He graduated from high school in 1965; and engaged in military service from 1966 to 1969. Upon his return he resumed animation, and did his first line animation in 1970, then in 1973 he went looking for work in Los Angeles–where he met Frank Zappa. He worked for him from 1974 through 1980. Afterwards, he returned to Seattle and resumed animating mostly his own personal work."
(Bruce Bickford)
"Jim Carrey described it as 'the psychedelic landscape of my brain' and Jim Carrey Online members have called it 'amazing and fabulous, the weirdest one on the web.' Jim's website has finally landed and you won't have seen anything like it before."
(Nicola West, 30 Oct 2009)
"[United Airlines commercials have been] created by artists from around the world, including South Africa and India, each of the six spots paints a picture of optimism and exploration using unique artistic forms such as shed bird feathers, colored sand and plastic modeling clay on glass. Custom scores of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue were performed by members of the L.A. Philharmonic Symphony and in one of the ads, Grammy award–winning American jazz legend, Herbie Hancock, and the classical world–renowned Chinese concert pianist, Lang Lang, who is performing live during the opening ceremonies, played a piano duet. The voiceover tag line is read by Robert Redford. ...
[1] 'Sea Orchestra' (60 seconds)–'Sea Orchestra' is a lively and visually rich commercial that introduces United's new international first and business class cabins. In it, a United airplane crosses the ocean and is serenaded by an orchestra of animated sea creatures that are playing a unique version of Rhapsody in Blue using tubas, violins, French horns and the Indonesian gamelan. The score was created by Shy the Sun, a South Africa–based directing team, which used hand–drawn textures, computer animation characters and photographs of water, reefs and skies.
[2] 'Heart' (60–seconds)–'Heart,' United's new brand ad, portrays the connection between a husband and wife and United's role in reuniting them. The commercial depicts a woman leaving her husband to fly to Europe for a business presentation. As she says goodbye, she leaves her heart behind as a symbol of her love. The musical score for 'Heart' is a piano duet of Rhapsody in Blue performed by Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, who recently performed Rhapsody in Blue together at the 2007 Grammy Awards. Using stop–motion animation and paper puppetry, California–based director Jamie Caliri and his team, place dimensional cardboard puppets in miniature sets that were shot frame by frame.
[3] 'Two Worlds' (60 seconds)–'Two Worlds' is a celebration of color and beautiful images that portrays United's effect on international travelers. In it, a weary business traveler leaves a mundane, monotonous black and white world and enters a fantasy of color, representing United's new international first and business class service. When he lands, he is once again in a black and white world, but has brought a bit of the magic of the new United experience with him. The commercial combines two different and distinctive animation styles created by directors SSSR, a Norwegian and Japanese team, who was responsible for the monochromatic world that was mostly computer–generated with a hand–crafted feel, and Gaelle Denis, a French director, who was responsible for the colorful fantasy world that uses using live action, computer generation and matte paintings, including textures such as Japanese rice paper.
[4] Moondust (60 seconds and 30 second)–'Moondust' is a luminous, dreamlike commercial with an artistic interpretation of flying in United's new international first and business class cabins. The spot focuses on United's 180–degree, flat–bed business class seats and is animated to a spare, intimate interpretation of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Ishu Patel, an Indian–born and Canadian–based animator, used his world–renowned back–lit technique in which a thin layer of plastic modeling clay is applied to a glass plate that has a 1000–watt light positioned beneath it and an animation camera above it.
[5] Butterfly (30 seconds)–'Butterfly' is a fluid, animated commercial with an artistic interpretation of flying in United's new international first and business class cabins. The spot focuses on United's 180–degree flat–bed business class seats and comes to life against a violin version of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. In this spot, the Polish director Aleksandra Korejwo manipulated colored salt using shed condor bird feathers on a black canvas positioned under a downward–facing camera."
(United Airlines press release, 8 August 2008)
"Jan Švankmajer has gained a legendary reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop–motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish and yet somehow funny pictures. He is still making films in Prague to this day. His movies utilise exaggerated sounds & sped–up sequences and often involve inanimate objects being brought to life through stop–motion to perform perverse and often violent acts. While many of Jan Švankmajer's films depict destructive aspects of the human psyche, 'Darkness, Light, Darkness' is a depiction of Man building himself."
(beinArt International Surreal Art Collective/Jon Beinart)
"I use V–Ray. Illumination has fascinated me since as long as I can remember: Years ago, it was quite difficult to simulate global ilumination by traditional techniques. So after trying several GI engines, I found V–Ray to be the best solution by far to suit all my needs in these terms."
(Jorge Seva alias 'Alex Roman')
"Founded in 2000, LeCielEstBleu specializes in the creation of highly interactive, original interfaces and applications. Their work has received numerous international awards and has been exhibited throughout the world. They are best known for PuppetTool, an experimental animation tool; SetSearch, a visual search engine; and La Pâté à Son [Sound Dough], a generative musical composition tool and sound toy recently exhibited at Ars Electronica. LeCielEstBleu's principal artists are Frédéric Durieu (code), Kristine Malden (media), e Jean–Jacques Birgè (music)."
(Interferenze 2006)
"John Whitney, Sr. was one of the earliest and most influential of the computer animation pioneers. He came at the problem from the background of film, working with his brother James Whitney on a series of experimental films in the 1940s and 1950s. His work in this area gave him the opportunity to collaborate with well known Hollywood filmmakers, including Saul Bass.
His earliest computer work used analog devices for controlling images and cameras. After the second world war, Whitney purchased surplus military equipment and modified it to be used in his art making. One such device was an analog mechanism used in military anti–aircraft controllers, the M–5 (and later the M–7). Whitney and his brother converted this device of war into an animation controller, and used it together with a mounted camera as an animation stand. ...
After establishing his company Motion Graphics, Inc in 1960, he used his analog devices for the opening to the Hitchcock movie Vertigo in 1961. His company was focused on producing titles for film and television, and was also used in graphics for commercials. But Whitney was far more interested in the use of the technology as an art form, and began a series of collaborations in art making that has lasted for years. Many of these early collaborations revolved around the advancement of the vector graphics device as a viable tool for making art. Whitney received funding from IBM to take a look at the use of IBM equipment in the design of motion. He worked with IBM programmers in the development of a language for extending the computer to the control of graphics devices. This resulted in one of his most famous animations, Permutations in 1968."
(Wayne Carlson)
"Created in 1973 by Roger Price, 'The Tomorrow People' was always entertaining, full of fresh, innovative ideas, and larger–than–life villains."
(Clive Banks)
[The series was directed by Roger Damon Price (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069647/fullcredits#cast) its Graphics and Titles designer was Jerome Gask (http://www.tv.com/jerome–gask/person/367501/appearances.html?tag=content_wrap;cast_crew_list) and its theme was composed by Dudley Simpson (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0800981/)]
"The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers 'Galerie der Gegenwart'.
Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself."
(Daniel Rossa)
Production: urbanscreen.com; Art Direction: Daniel Rossa – rossarossa.de; Technical Director: Thorsten Bauer; 3D Operator: David Starmann shineundsein.de; Sound Design : Jonas Wiese; Realized with mxwendler.net mediaserver
The following are 2 recent examples of NTU Multimedia animation work. 'iDOG' was created as a 2nd year project by Troy Browne and 'Don't be a Klaus: Anti–Piracy Ad' was created as a 3rd year project by Kane Pickerill.
Fig.1 Troy Browne 2009. 'iDOG'; Fig.2 Kane Pickerill 2009. 'Don't be a Klaus: Anti–Piracy Ad'.
"Sony is using this 174–year–old technology to draw attention to the new Bravias' MotionFlow interpolation technology, which guesstimates new frames between existing ones, smoothing out content to display it up to a massive 200Hz.
Weighing over 10 tons and spinning at about 25MPH, the so–called Bravia–drome can be seen above displaying Brazilian soccer player Kaka juggling the ball around a bit, but Geek.com claims the ad was filmed using 'a huge crew and tons of extras', so it'll be interesting to see what they manage to come up with."
(Gizmodo via Sal Cangeloso, Geek.com 2008)
"Taiwanese comics are the most Japanese of all Asian comics. Many Taiwanese comic artists copy the Japanese style faithfully and one can hardly find any Taiwanese elements in their works. However, there are Taiwanese artists who have attempted to create something original based on their mastery of Japanese techniques. The most successful example is perhaps Zheng Wen who has skillfully combined Japanese (particularly Ikegami Ryoichi and Kojima Geseki's) and Western comic styles with Chinese painting and calligraphic skills in his comics, such as Stories of Assassins (cike liechuan, 1985) and Stories of Eastern Zhou Heroes (dong Zhou yingxiong chuan, 1990). Taiwanese animators have only produced a few commercial animated films and television cartoons, but they are very active in making on–line animation. The most successful Taiwanese on–line animation is perhaps Ah Kuei, a satirical and humorous short piece, in which character design and visual presentation are influenced by Japanese animated works, such as Crayon Shinchan and Chibimaruko–chan. Ah Kuei will be made into a television cartoon series, live–action drama serial and animated film. Recently, Taiwanese on–line animators have begun to experiment animated serials and movies. A three–hour on–line animated film, Love 1/2E, has been serialized. Its story is similar to Tokyo Love Story and Beautiful Life and its drawing is very Japanese. Besides, influenced by the Japanese, Taiwanese animators pay attention to the important role of 'voice actors or actresses.' (seiyu). This is an area that most other Asian nations have overlooked."
(Ng Wai–ming, Hong Kong)
Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry: July / August 2002 p.2
"Lenticular imagery, the types of photos which change depending on the viewing angle, are really common in children's books and display advertising, but it's also possible to create a simple lenticular image yourself using your own photography."
(2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
"T. Enami (T probably stood for Toshi), whose real name was Nobukuni Enami (or, in Japanese name order, Enami Nobukuni) was a 'photographers photographer' who in his youthful 20s was a student and assistant to K. Ogawa , and then a professional until he died at age 70 in 1929.
His own studio, established in Yokohama in 1892 when he was 33 years old, then passed to his son, Tamotsu (not a photographer), who carried on as a commercial DPE photo processor and printer for locals and tourists, as well as a publisher of his father's photographs."
(Okinawa Soba)
"A (very) quick look back at the Google story over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome."
(GoogleChannelUK)
"At first I photographed stop motionanimation. And I displayed the photographs in my room and photographed it again. Enjoy a connection with the world of the room and the world in the photograph. Thanks for watching.Some musicians add music on my video and reupload it. Thank you very much.
オオカミとブタのコマ撮り写真を撮って、それを部屋に置いていく様子を再びコマ撮りにしました。２重コマ撮り。写真と部屋、２次 元と３次元が織りなす、次元ハイブリッドコマドリエクスタシーー!!!!!!"
(Takeuchi Taijin, 09 April 2009)
"This Way Up presents the work of graduating students from the Bachelor of Creative Industries, Communication Design and the Bachelor of Fine Arts, Animation degrees in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. The exhibition features final year projects, including experimental tangible media installations, virtual environments and animation. The tangible media projects by communication design students build on years of knowledge acquisition in visual and interactive media design and are a site of innovation in embodied interfaces. The animation show–reel features progressive and major new works in motion graphics, character animation, visual effects, computer graphics, visualisation and 3D animation. And the virtual environments projects combine the forces of the two cohorts in an exploration of the design potential of interactive 3D space."
(Jillian Hamilton, Queensland University of Technology)
"The term 'animated documentary' can still upset a truth–seeking purist. But over the last few years our understanding of what a documentary is has expanded from the narrow direct cinema/cinema vérité definition of the 1970s and the 1980s. A more inclusive definition with room for both classic documentaries like the European city symphonies of the 1920s and the personal film essays of the 1990s and the 2000s is now gaining support.
There was a close connection between animation and documentary filmmaking in Europe in the 1920s (Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, Dziga Vertov) and in the UK in the 1930s (John Grierson, Len Lye, Norman McLaren). This close connection continued at the National Film Board of Canada after World War II and through to this day. Even Hollywood's Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences accepted the animated documentary as documentary proper by giving the Oscar to McLaren (Neighbours, 1952) and Saul Bass (Why Man Creates, 1968). The direct cinema/cinema vérité movements and the total dominance of TV documentaries closely based on journalism have dominated the documentary tradition since the 1960s. But postmodernist thinking combined with more individual/personal artistic filmmaking have brought the artistic elements of the European documentaries of the 1920s and 1930s back. And this scene has also opened up for the modern animated documentary.
At the NFB the filmmakers never stopped making animated documentaries, and a similar tradition has been kept alive in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. I believe a major reason for this is the social democratic political thinking that lies behind both the ideology of the NFB and the film politics in Scandinavia. The film industry deserves state funding because the films play a vital role in our democracy."
(Gunnar Strøm, March 2005, 'How Swede It Is ...and Danish and Norwegian: Scandinavian documentary animation', p.13, fpsmagazine.com)
Fig.1 Monika Forsberg & Susie Sparrow 2006, We Believe in Happy Endings
"This is another official update to the original 'Shift Happens' video. This completely new [Autumn] 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist."
(Xplane and The Economist)
"Los aparatos 8 bits está viviendo en los últimos años una segunda juventud tras su nacimiento en los 80's, ya que agrupaciones como Crystal Castles, Houratron y Meneo las usan de forma desenfrenada. Éstos últimos son una banda audiovisual conformada por Rigo Pex y Vj Entter, quienes se están consolidando como una de las bandas con más proyección internacional dentro de esta escena, denominada chiptune. Ambos integrantes se conocieron gracias a un anuncio que puso Rigo en un portal de anuncios: busco Vj con dotes bailarines y afición por los glitches, al cual respondió Entter: 'Hola, hago pixelart y conozco varias posturas: perrito, carretilla, etc.'"
(Meneo)
"Alexander Calder magically breathed life into inanimate objects, using wire and recycled materials to create this army of circus characters. Beginning in 1927, Calder performed the Circus in Paris, New York, and elsewhere. He would issue invitations to his guests, who would sit on makeshift bleachers munching peanuts, just like the real circus. With the crash of cymbals and music from an old gramophone, the circus would begin. Many of the individual circus animals and performers include mechanized parts – Calder was originally trained as a mechanical engineer.
It wasn't the tricks or gimmicks of the circus that appealed to Calder, but the dynamic movement of bodies in space. He first went to the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus in 1925. He was inspired by the mechanics of the circus and made hundreds of drawings of the equipment and the ropes and the guy wires for the tents. Later in his career, Calder turned his attention to more abstract work. ... He went on to invent the mobile and other works of moving sculpture."
(Adam Weinberg, Whitney Museum of American Art)
Read 'We Think' Research Reports covering: Web 2.0 Overview; Web 2.0; Wikipedia; Linux; Brazil and Open Source; World of Warcraft; Encyclopaedia of Life; Human Genome; M–Pesa; Ubuntu.
This video combines illustrations created by Debbie Powell, which were animated to music by Amiable Fellow by Tim Cowie.
"The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn's artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy between human physiology and the operation of contemporary technologies. Therefore, by illustrating the body as a factory, Kahn was able to relate the body's complex organic interior to the industrialized space so common in society during that period of time (the poster was created in 1926).
From the moment on that Henning Lederer got to know Kahn's poster 'Man as Industrial Palace' in 2006, he had the idea to animate this complex and strange way of explaining the functions of a body. He wanted to continue Fritz Kahn's act of replacing a biological with a technological structure by transferring this depiction with the help of motion graphics and animation."
(Henning M. Lederer)
Concept & Animation: Henning M. Lederer; Sound–Design: David Indge
"When a reader follows the passage into a fictional world, the realm of possibilities is recentered around her. For the duration of her immersion, she accepts the sphere created by the narrator as the actual world in the same way that the interlocutor will try to imagine the other as an Inca and the children will take the bucket for a pie. For Ryan, this fictional recentering presupposes three modal systems and three actual worlds. The first is our native system with the actual world (actually actual world) at its center. Textual fiction provides a passage to a second universe with the world projected by the text at its center (textual actual world). The third, then, is the system to which the text refers , a system that contains everything projected by the text, but also everything that is not mentioned and is filled in by the reader (textual reference world). While in fiction the world described by the text is always different from the actual world (as opposed to non–fiction), it will generally be indistinguishable from the world to which it refers (the third system). Only when a narrator lies and this can be inferred, the reader will know that what is described by the text is not what the world it refers to is like. Since this is a marginal case and insignificant for this study, I will focus on two systems when dealing with recentering: the actual world on the one hand, and the textual world on the other. Moreover, I tend to take the poststructuralist stance that the actual world is equally a cultural construct. It should be seen as a representation conforming to the reader's image of the world, not as something that exists anywhere outside of representation. This perspective permits to install a symmetry between two representations: the representation of the actual world present in the head of the reader, and the representation of the textual world built from the text, and it explains why the reader can slip from one world into another so seamlessly."
(Jan Van Looy, August 2005)
Issue 12. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative – ISSN 1780–678X
"The Animation Archive is a project of International Animated Film Society: ASIFA–Hollywood, a 501(c)(3) non–profit educational organization. We are building a museum, library and digital archive for the benefit of animation professionals, cartoonists, designers, students and the general public. Our database of images, biographic info and films contains thousands of entries– animated cartoons, artwork, and filmographies. Contributions and volunteers are needed to make the dream a reality."
(ASIFA)
The 2D animation sequence entitled Vuccumprà was created by Julien Attard and Cibic & Partners in 2004. The clip has a strong graphic style and simple camera movement.
Kyle Cooper "specializes in crafting title sequences – the short introductions and closings to films, videogames, and television shows that list the names of the cast and crew involved in the production. In this boutique industry, Cooper is king. He has designed the lead–ins to 150 features – including Donnie Brasco, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mission: Impossible, Spider–Man, Sphere, Spawn, Twister, and Flubber. The movies themselves may not be cinematic classics, but Cooper's credits – which operate as minifilms in their own right – consistently stun and entertain audiences. For this spring's Dawn of the Dead, he even used real human blood. Critic Elvis Mitchell, in his New York Times review of the movie, summed up the Cooper effect: 'The opening and closing credits are so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for.' Indeed, the word in Hollywood is that some filmmakers have refused to work with Cooper, says Dawn of the Dead director Zach Snyder, because he's 'the guy who makes title sequences better than the movie.' Not since Saul Bass' legendary preludes to The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Vertigo (1958) have credits attracted such attention. Cooper counts Bass' work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead–in for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as his greatest influences."
(Jon M. Gibson, Wired Issue 12.06 – June 2004)
"2009 First year Multimedia Students at Nottingham Trent University get to play on their first Day. ...Music By Owen Baxter"
(Andy Love)
"This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post–it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post–it notes to do pixel–like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post–its."
(Bang–yao Liu)
Directed by Bang–yao Liu; Music by Röyksopp (http://royksopp.com); Sound design by Ian Vargo, Shaun Burdick; Actor: Chun–yao Huang
"When [Image Metrics] first started working on Emily, our goal was to create an exact replica of the real actress Emily O'Brien. Why? Because there was no other way to determine how close we had come to reality if we did not replicate a 'real' person. Judging from the reaction of people at SIGGRAPH 2008, and the hundreds of media hits, we've come pretty close to the mark.
...
Image Metrics began planning the Emily project in March 2008. After Image Metrics developed a script for the animation, the ICT Graphics Lab scanned O'Brien to develop the template for her CG double. A team of eight artists working part–time on the internal project then built a custom rig for the Emily character, captured O'Brien's performance with video and applied it to the CG character with its proprietary facial animation solution. Once the capture and rigging processes were finalized, the 90–second animation took just one week to complete."
(Image Metrics)
"Tiny Inventions. Features vocals by Robin Goldwasser and horn arrangement by Dan "The Machine" Levine. From TMBGs new DVD/CD set Here Comes Science."
(ParticleMen, 24 August 2009)
"A Chilean super–group, Los Mono is the collaborative effort from some of the top musicians/producers of the country: Cristian Moraga aka Funky C, (also released by Sonic360) is one of the most recognised musicians in Chile and, as founder of the 'Los Tetas', which was one of the most influential alternative bands that heralds from Santiago in the last decade with sales that garnered 4 Gold Records. Other members include Sebastian Silva (member of the popular Chilean band CHC), Gonzalo Gonzalez (acclaimed sound engineer –Los Prisioneros, Los Tres, Los Bunkers), Vicente Sanfuentes (as part of the duo 'The Hermanos Brothers', winner of MTV Latin America's 'Best Independent Artist' and Nea (singer from the bands CHC and Yaia)."
(Sonic360)
[This Los Mono music video uses lo–fi compositing and motion–tracking as a central feature.]
"An experimental animation exploring the "Stratastencil" technique that I've devised. Inspired by the Stratacut technique, Stratastencil is an additive process. Stratacut removes material to reveal another layer, while this technique adds another layer while still showing the layer before it."
(Javan Ivey)
"The Animator's Survival Kit – Animated is about how things move, and specific work methods used to make characters live, breathe, think and give a sustained commanding performance. Williams demonstrates his points with drawing, performance and over 400 specially animated examples – many from his best–selling book."
(Richard Williams Animation Masterclass, 2008)
"As visualists, the sad truth is we have a poorer sense of the history of our medium than musicians. Part of this is simply a lack of access. YouTube is a weak substitute, but it's a start. In that spirit, Karl (Format K) sends us the minimal geometric machinations of pioneering electronic graphics artist and animator John Whitney. We've previous mentioned the role of Whitney and Larry Cuba in helping the modern computer graphics industry to be born – with a little help from a movie called Star Wars. Here, you get a real sense of an artist working within the restrictions of the technology to produce something beautiful. It's a chance to recognize how we're indebted to this kind of work. While the temptation may be to replicate effects like this with more modern tools, they also illustrate how you can focus on a technique within a tool – and perhaps there's a digital equivalent of focusing on artistic limitations.
The musical score turns this into a dream collaboration, with the work of Terry Riley.
It's nice to have access to this, but boy, would I love to have an HD–quality rendition of many of these films available for download or on a high–quality medium like Blu–Ray. Any chance a modern–day Voyager would re–release seminal visualist work from decades past?"
(Peter Kirn)
"International Animation Film Festival
Monday 8 to Saturday 13 June 2009
Annecy has been showcasing the very best in animation for over 45 years, making it the industry's leading international competitive festival.
The competition is open to the following 5 film categories, each using different animation techniques:
– feature films,
– short films,
– commissioned and TV films,
– graduation films"
(Annecy 2009)
"Manhattan–based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding–edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio–electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, 'we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.'"
"After the Second World War, The Marshall Plan, the US government project to hasten European economic recovery, provided over $13 billion to 17 European countries.
By 1951, in response to the threat of Communism and the impact of the Korean War, the focus shifted to European security and military issues.
Propaganda and information films revealing the activities of the Marshall Plan were shown in cinemas, including those in Britain.
Embodying 'the largest peacetime propaganda effort directed by one country to a group of others ever seen' (David Ellwood), these films illustrate in surprisingly specific terms the strategy implemented by the Truman Administration in the 1950s for 'winning the peace'."
(The Barbican Centre, UK)
"A series of three tv commercials made to promote the spoken word on radio. Each spot focuses on a sound recording from on–location reporters that unfolds over thirty seconds. We chose the final three recordings from dozens, supplied by the radio station, before setting out to visualize the stories"
(tomato, 1995, UK)
Fig.1 Motion graphic spot directed by UK design collective 'Tomato'.
"The seventh Fantoche will be held in the town of Baden from September 8–13, 2009. The international show of animation film has become one of the world's most prominent animation festivals and is the only cultural event in Switzerland that is devoted exclusively to the full array of animation techniques, content and media.
Since making its debut back in 1995, Fantoche has shown hundreds of short and long films from right around the world every two years. It offers the very best in entertainment for young and old alike, makes new discoveries for all animated film buffs and serves as a meeting place for animation specialists in Switzerland and abroad.
With a programme containing over 100 events, along with screenings of 300 short films and feature films from all over the world, the last edition of Fantoche in 2007 proved to be a great celebration of animated film–making, attracting 25,000 fans of the genre to Baden.
The seventh edition of Fantoche in September 2009 will build on this achievement: In light of the growing success of the festival and of the tremendous diversity and dynamism of animated film–making, Fantoche has decided to increase the tempo and let Baden and Switzerland immerse themselves in the flood of new animated pictures every year."
(Fantoche 09)
[Revision created by Gareth Scott (pseudonym 'Electrobronze') of Kraftwerk's famous 'Man Machine' track. The clip is accompanied by a 'contemporary retro' animated music video.]
"There's an authorial consciousness and meta narrative that's noticeably at play in many of the Bugs Bunny cartoons. In fact, the opening of this film started out with the well–known ending, "That's All Folks!" which was then corrected by Bugs to say, "That's Not All Folks!"––a phrase that included copyediting marks. So we know from the start that the narrative is all a game, that beginnings and endings (or any traditional narrative arc) shouldn't be taken seriously, and that Bugs will always toy with our expectations.
One episode stood out spectacularly. In Duck Amuck (created in 1953), Daffy Duck is exquisitely tortured by his creator. In the course of the film the animator messes with and changes the scenery, interchanges props, replaces the soundtrack, mutes Daffy, and even erases and physically alters Daffy himself. For example, as Daffy strolls with a ukulele, singing a lazy, tropical song, he's tossed into a variety of climates, ending up in the snow (you can almost hear the animator laughing––at Daffy and in celebration of his artistic, cruel freedom). Daffy keeps trying to live––and entertain––but he can't maintain any constancy or control of his surroundings, or even his body."
(Lit Matters , 15 December 2007)
[Duck Amuck can be interpreted as a (playful) allegory to Christian mythology where Daffy Duck represents humanity and Bugs Bunny (his creator) represents 'God'.]
"Animate Projects Limited is a UK–based, not–for–profit arts organisation, developing initiatives that explore the relationship between art and animation, and the place of animation and its concepts in contemporary art practice. We offer artists a unique space to create work and develop initiatives that allow an international audience to engage with the work via broadcast, gallery, cinema and online.
Animate Projects is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by Channel 4. "
(Abigail Addison, Jacqui Davies, Gary Thomas)
"Adding yet another string to Stark's bow are stop motion animations in which paper is further imbued with new significance. Often accompanied by light electronic soundtracks, the looped kaleidoscopic films draw viewers through benign wormholes of living color.
At an exhibition of Jen Stark's one does not so much view work as observe extraordinary behavior in a state of stasis. With surprisingly simple means the artist succeeds in extending our world by venturing a furtive, unspoiled dimension of sentient forms.
Referencing geometry, meteorology and drawing freely from her own inimitable individuality she refines her message with economical yet expounding titles. Often scientifically and biologically dependable they call to mind established truths in nature and fortify our impressions of them with a greater sense of purpose."
(Tom Hollingsworth, May 2008)
"Her Morning Elegance has become a pop–art phenomena and the most successful stop motion video ever.
It earned a nomination in the 52nd Grammy Awards and has been screened at film festivals around the world. The video was created from 2096 still photographs that were shot and sequenced to create the sense of movement."
(Oren Lavie)
"Her Morning Elegance", Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan, Featuring: Shir Shomron, Photography: Eyal Landesman
"'History of the internet' is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time–sharing to file–sharing, from arpanet to internet.
The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of my diploma."
(Melih Bilgil)
Created by: Melih Bilgil; Steve Taylor; Stefan Badragan; Arnaud de Mouhy
[An elegant 2D animation illustrating aspects of the development of the Internet. Despite its strong visual aesthetic however the project offers little more than the rather familiar tale oft told of technological innovation and development. It overlooks the profound social and cultural factors that initially gave rise to the development of the Internet and that has enabled it grow in significance since.]
"'Vision On' ran for over ten years on BBC and made Tony an international star. Hosted by Pat Keysell, Vision On was the first programme to successfully bridge the gap between children with hearing and those with limited hearing. It broke new ground in entertainment programmes and used very little dialogue. It was a combination of quirky animation, art and performance with an emphasis on being creative.
Tony produced perhaps some of his most stunning artwork and Vision On inspired millions, many of whom went on to be artists or performers in their own right."
(Tony Hart)
[The claymation character 'Morph' débuted on Tony Hart's television programme 'Take Hart'. The character was created by the Peter Lord and David Sproxton who with Nick Park went on to set–up Aardman (creators of Wallace & Gromit).]
"Once upon a time, not long ago, it looked like bedroom coding was dead – at least as a commercial pursuit. The nineties brought in a growing obsession with detailed 3D visuals, requiring ever–larger teams of ever more specialised coders, artists and designers. And while an indie gaming scene continued to flourish online, the fruits of those labours were largely unseen and unappreciated by mainstream gamers.
But a lot has happened over the last three years. Vitally, Microsoft started trawling the indie scene for content to fill its Xbox Live Arcade service. Sony and Nintendo soon followed suit, resulting in the likes of Braid, World of Goo, Mutant Storm and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People becoming key downloadable releases. At the same time, the growing PC casual gaming scene, together with the arrival of the iPod and iPhone as fully–fledged gaming platforms, has built an audience that clamours for graphically simple puzzle and word games. In a sense, casual gaming has legitimised non–naturalistic, often 2D, visuals and intuitive gameplay, reclaiming videogame culture for the masses.
Bedroom coding is back."
(Keith Stuart, 6 January 2009, The Guardian)
[This represents a broadening of the rather narrow trajectory of hyper–realism that has preoccupied the games development industry since its adoption by computer science advocates. This departure can be seen as a strengthening of voices questioning the authority of modes of representation derived (seemingly unquestioningly) from a default Modernist position e.g. favouring authenticity and fidelity over audience and interpretation.]
"is the last film he made before his death in 1969 and reflects Trnka's own struggle to create art under a totalitarian regime."
(Seksu Roba)
"The Animex International Festival of Animation & Computer Games takes place every year in Middlesbrough in the North East of England.
Animex seeks to educate, entertain and inspire at every level from school children right through to the highest level of professional practitioner.
Using a unique blend of talks, presentations, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and awards Animex brings the world of animation and computer games to audiences from any background."
(animex.net)
"It's Nice That was launched in April 2007 by designers Will Hudson and Jez Burrows to document and inspire creative talent."
(Will Hudson and Jez Burrows)
"You'll have seen the adverts for the UPS widget, which is designed to help you make better use of their services, and you probably also know about the EasyJet widget for booking flights. Both these tools are designed to help the user interact with the company – as well as make more sales."
(Corporate Eye, September 28 2007)
"Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been working for 16 years to create sculptures that move on their own in eerily lifelike ways. Each generation of his "Strandbeests" is subject to the forces of evolution, with successful forms moving forward into new designs. Jansen's vision and long–term commitment to his wooden menagerie is as fascinating to observe as the beasts themselves.
His newest creatures walk without assistance on the beaches of Holland, powered by wind, captured by gossamer wings that flap and pump air into old lemonade bottles that in turn power the creatures' many plastic spindly legs. The walking sculptures look alive as they move, each leg articulating in such a way that the body is steady and level. They even incorporate primitive logic gates that are used to reverse the machine's direction if it senses dangerous water or loose sand where it might get stuck."
(Wired News)
"Welcome to Interesting 2008: a one day conference of ideas for people who want to know about the world. Here animator Jim le Fevre shows off his attempt to build a zoetrope with a turntable, a pen and some paper."
(25 June 2008, Guardian News and Media Limited)
"Recent years have witnessed the birth of a new paradigm for learning environments: animated pedagogical agents. These lifelike autonomous characters cohabit learning environments with students to create rich, face–to–face learning interactions. This opens up exciting new possibilities; for example, agents can demonstrate complex tasks, employ locomotion and gesture to focus students' attention on the most salient aspect of the task at hand, and convey emotional responses to the tutorial situation. Animated pedagogical agents offer great promise for broadening the bandwidth of tutorial communication and increasing learning environments' ability to engage and motivate students. This article sets forth the motivations behind animated pedagogical agents, describes the key capabilities they offer, and discusses the technical issues they raise. The discussion is illustrated with descriptions of a number of animated agents that represent the current state of the art."
(W. Lewis Johnson and Jeff W. Rickel)
"Because of budgetary limitations and the pressure to create television animation within a tight time frame, the show was the first to use the 'Syncro–Vox' optical printing system. Syncro–Vox was invented by television cameraman, and partner in Cambria Studios, Edwin Gillette (1909–2003) as a means of superimposing real human mouths on the faces of animals for the popular 'talking animal' commercials of the 1950s. Clutch Cargo employed the Syncro–Vox technique by superimposing live–action human lips over limited–motion animation or even motionless animation cels."
(Air Cargo News)
"The ad was shot in Saudi Arabia, all the post was done in Amsterdam and the music is by a hip hop band out of Kuwait."
Client: Snickers; Agency: BBDO/Impact Dubai; Creatives: Jennie Morris, Sian Binder; Production Company: X Ray Films; Director: Joeri Holsheimer.
"The giant spider of Liverpool arrives at the city hall, wakes up after a sleep and, in some dramatically speeded up footage, crawls up a building to rest.
La Princesse was created by a French company, La Machine, as part of the Liverpool European Capital of culture programme. – filmed and edited by Giselle Leeb
Director & Producer Giselle Leeb, Imperfect Productions
Documentary / General interest"
(Giselle Leeb)
Jan Svankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue 3 [963]
"In the third segment, the two bald human heads from the first segment, now fully dimensional on what is clearly a tabletop, gauge each other by eye, trying to figure out how to interact without fighting.
They cooperatively offer objects from their mouths that they think would help the other... toothpaste vs. a toothbrush, a pencil vs. a sharpener (held by disgusting tongues), etc.They start off okay, but eventually in their haste anticipate the other's needs, they start getting things wrong... a piece of bread gets a shoelace through it, the toothbrush goes into the pencil sharpener (not a pretty sight), etc., until the two collapse into panting wrecks, torn up by their hasty actions."
(Tim Fitzpatrick)
"Mothlight visualises a 'day in the life' of an insect from birth to death; however, it summons some of the more positive associations of lepidoptera, such as creativity and the soul (1). You could say Brakhage puts the 'anima' back into animation, reanimating the dead, painstakingly affixing the remains of dead insects, leaves and the like onto the film strip, and feeding it through the projector back to life. Of course, the principle of film projection is the illusion of life through light, with the audience gathering to watch like moths attracted to a lamp: the beauty of Mothlight is the way Brakhage evokes the moth not through cartoon mimicry, but by the fragile sensation of its movement, batting against the screen, hurtling in descent. The effect is exhilarating and terrifying.
Brakhage might be accused of playing God (or Dr Frankenstein), and it is no coincidence that Mothlight was assembled during the long production of his creationist epic Dog Star Man (1961–4). ... Its making is also a dismantling – imagine celluloid flypaper – and its examination of life's remains looks forward to The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). Mothlight acknowledges the limitations of the screen, the way film traps subject matter in a box, suffocating the life out of it."
(Darragh O'Donoghue)
"Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), a four–minute, hand–painted Dufaycolor film 'with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye', matches visual motifs to musical instruments: diagonals introduce piano phrases, circles express drum beats, wavy horizontals represent guitars licks, vertical lines map base parts, etc. Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik–like patterns."
(Brett Kashmere, May 2007)
[Distributors: Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand]
"The stark videos of Brandon Morse present the viewer with exercises in tension, set tableaux in which structures morph and twist under physical constraints. Stripped–down architectural forms that ought to exhibit the rigidity of highrise buildings instead engage in a tug–of–war, the result of a string simulation distributing kinetic force through a network of nodes."
(Marius Watz, 09 April 2008, Generator.x)
The following clip was produced by 1st year NTU Multimedia students as part of their 'induction' programme for 2008–09. The students were given a simple brief to 'solve' through producing group animation sequences of sets of drawings made through drawing with marker pens on whiteboards.
"Muto est une "animation ambiguë" de 7 minutes 26 secondes, peinte sur les murs de Buenos Aires, accompagnée par une bande son grinçante du percussionniste italien Andrea Martignoni, co–fondateur de l'inventif Laboratorio di Musica e Immagine dans les années 90. Son auteur, qui a également grandi à Bologne, porte le pseudonyme de Blu.
Blu n'utilise pas de bombes ni d'échafaudages, il rallonge les manches de ses brosses, retrousse les siennes et il peint, il efface, il recommence, se transporte, et il prend le temps de bloguer ! Blu badigeonne ainsi les murs de Berlin, Londres, Sao Paulo, Bethlehem, Vérone, Milan, Bologne, au Mexique, au Guatemala, au Nicaragua, au Costa Rica... De plus, ses sujets n'ont rien d'innocent. Ils sont sévères, critiques, incisifs et réfléchis.
Son site est un carnet de croquis dont les onglets se nomment murs, dessins, nouvelles, liens, vidéos, boutique. Blu ne perd pas le nord. S'il sait garder le contact avec un public qui le regarde travailler, il apprend à négocier avec les galeries et les musées et il commet de fantastiques films d'animation dont le support sort du cadre habituel pour investir l'espace urbain, souvent en collaboration avec d'autres artistes de la rue.
Muto, réalisé seul avec une petite caméra DV, est son dernier né. Son trait noir sur fond blanchi contraste avec les couleurs outrées des graffiteurs et s'intègre astucieusement avec les murs de la ville pour faire ressortir la narration."
(Jean–Jacques Birgé)
"Pixilated means literally "affected by the pixies" (1848, from pixy–led: bewitched). A pixie is a playfully mischievous sprite (elf). That's why the proper spelling of pixilated contains only one 'l'. And the word has nothing to do with computer pixels (picture elements) and 'pixellation,' as reflected by the different spelling."
(Stephen X. Arthur)
Fig.1 Adam Pesapane 'PES' (2007). "Human Skateboard".
"SitePal is an Internet–based subscription service that allows you to create a wide–array of animated speaking characters, which can be added to your website for a variety of professional and personal applications."
(Oddcast Inc.)
Rocco Stallvord
Probably inspired by the very viral Animator vs Animation, Club Internet released a surprising and entertaining campaign site that keeps your attention just long enough to get the commercial message. Club Internet sells Triple Play (Phone, TV, Internet) in France and is part of Deutsche Telecom.
This advert uses the familiar meta–subject strategy that incorporates both framed content and the frame that encloses it. There are numerous examples of entertainment that use this approach from Federico Fellini's casting sequence in "8 ½" (1963) to Oska Software's "Pong Animation" (2001).
Tokyoplastic is a unique animation collective comprised of the pioneering directing talents of Sam Lanyon Jones and Andrew Cope. ... Created originally as a small personal project born out of frustration with the lack of innovative media available online, this inspirational site broke many of the perceived rules and conventions for online media.
The animation has subsequently been used by Microsoft as part of their marketing campaign for the Zune mp3 player and online media store. The animation is included in the Zune–Arts online collection.
[Zune–Arts is owned by Microsoft Corporation]
"Norton did not begin Testimony with a linear story or a plot. Inspired by the collage writing technique developed by novelists William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the 1960s, Testimony emerged from cutting–up newspaper articles, literature and his own writing. He then drew a few sketches, cut them up into squares, laid them out on a table and checked whether they could make sense in any order. They did, and since he had only precursive control over the readers' associations he looked forward to their unpredictable inventive links."
(Christy Dena)
[Animated interactive narrative created by Simon Norton. The events of the story are able to be explored through connecting–the–dots.]
"This hilarious animation is about a funny fight between two pixel men, who come out of the paddles of a pong game and start quarrelling over a foul. They become violent and try to kill each other until they meet a surprising end!"
(Andreas Lange)
Heads: A Video Installation Prototype [621]
Heads is a video installation piece. The work builds on illustrations by Edward Gorey – in particular his Nursery Frieze drawing. Heads is a playful work that operates through a recursive logic in a looped nonsense world. Heads was designed as a video–box (digital mutascope, and) work to be installed within a gallery context.
World: Enclosed And Recursive [619]
"World is one of my recent projects exploring aspects of enclosed and recursive worlds. The inspiration for the project draws on the design of: orreries; Ptolemic science; dreams of flying and the work of Constantin Brancusi."
(Andy Love)
Beatscript: action-centred scripting for shortfilms and animations [475]
"Beats are a unit of action first described by Constantin Stanislavski. Although details about his specific terminology are sketchy, varying between beads, bits and beats, the meaning is consistent. Terence Smith who has published notes on Stanislavski explains that 'identifying actions involves breaking the play into segments (bits or beats). Each bit embodies a single action'.
Accordingly a beatscript is a scripting aid used for describing story ideas. It offers a level of detail not afforded by the standard feature–film screenplay format. This makes it especially useful for describing short–film, animation and short sequence ideas. Its structure is focused on action rather than thought. This allows screenwriters to organise their narrative ideas in a concise manner that is conducive to screen presentation. It prevents authors from describing non–tangible, subjective elements that are unable to be effectively represented in screen form. Beatscripts are used as the starting point for generating storyboards and shootingscripts. While beats are used to describe action, shots are used to describe the visual screen presentation of action. There isn't a direct relationship between individual beats and shots. In situations where an event is significant in a sequence, a single beat might equate to a single shot (and is likely to be framed as a close–up). Whereas where a series of beats might describe a general idea, these beats might collectively equate to a single shot (which is likely to be framed as a long–shot). The specific visual treatment of beatscript ideas is usually determined by the cinematographer or director (which on small projects is usually the same person)."
(Simon Perkins, 2005)
"L'installation et les réglages avaient commencé dès le 15 septembre, le spectacle a duré jusqu'à la grande soirée organisée pour la 1re Nuit Blanche de Paris, du samedi 5 au dimanche 6 octobre 2002.
Le principe, simple en apparence, mais terriblement complexe à réaliser, était d'animer sur toute sa hauteur (20 étages, 88 mètres) la tour de la BnF pour la transformer en un immense moniteur de 20x28=560 pixels, gérés en 256 teintes de gris.
L'éloignement suffisait à créer l'illusion d'une image définie (et du reste, les myopes avaient tout intérêt à ôter leurs lunettes pour mieux jouir du spectacle)."
(Jean Bonnefoy)
Michael Quinion
It used to be that the process of creating an animated film, even digitally, required long hours of labour using specialised and expensive software. Then moviemakers cottoned on to the potential of the image–generating engines that exist inside animated computer games such as Quake. Some games, especially Quake 3, allow the user access to the underlying code to customise scenes or create new ones. It didn't take long for audio–visual experts to spot their potential for creating entirely new animated sequences. Films so made have been around for several years, but the technique, and the results, have begun to attract mainstream interest only recently. Machinima is usually said to be a blend of machine plus cinema; the large number of Web sites in German that feature it suggest the term may have been coined in that language.
"Surfaces dominate in the abstract animated film 'Komposition in Blau/ Lichtkonzert Nr.1' (Composition in Blue / Light Concert No. 1). Colorful geometric figures are set in rhythmic motion. The music from Nicolai's 'The Merry Women of Windsor' is impressively visualized through a blending of form and color. Fischinger created wooden cubes and cylinders as three–dimensional animated models, approximately as tall as a cigarette, some of them painted and others covered with fabric. 'At first the set seems to reveal a room. But then the floor begins to reflect the geometric figures. Cubes perfectly–aligned in a row, forming a flat mosaic–like surface, tumble apart to form a stairway. In this perpetually changing universe, a cylinder pounds at the floor and sets off a series of waves, and a decorative, flat circle flies into the empty space. The beauty of the colored, geometric forms–a yellow rectangle descends gracefully into the frame–escalates to the frenzied magic of the impossible.'"
(William Moritz, Media Art Net)
Source: William Moritz: 'Oskar Fischinger', in: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Optische Poesie. Oskar Fischinger Leben und Werk, Kinematograph Nr. 9, 1993, p. 42)
"Set in an office, the Not My Type series explores the various relationships within. While avoiding the use of language and dialogue, Not My Type, takes various typographic faces, symbols and characters and then duplicates, distorts and moves them to create a simple, stylistic production. The Not My Type series continues to be created for online viewing and distribution.
The Not My Type series of Flash animations were created by the Melbourne design team Mark & John Lycette. Each of their film narratives reveal their stories through framing and audio effects ? without having to resort to complex screen action and character dialogue."
(Lycette Bros)
"Soft Cinema bridges the gap between today's interfaces and tomorrow's cinema. This programme assembles a variety of audio–visual materials (city impressions, 2D animations, infrared images, music) from a database and edits everything into stories. Software decides what appears on the screen, where and in what order. The screen's lay–out is refreshed at the start of each new episode and the corresponding material is distributed across multiple windows. The resulting clips will be shown on monitors in the festival lounge, with a voice–over guarding the overall storyline."
(V2_Archive)
Provocative personal narratives set to music and animated using Flash.
sodaplay was devised by a london based company called Soda Creative Ltd. we made it as part of our ongoing ideas generation, research and development process.
[OnLine virtual creatures that interact with/within their environment according to their creature–type definition and user–defined parameters]
"le collectif H5 (Hervé–Ludo–François) est vite sollicité par des artistes de tous les styles: Zebda, Röyksopp, Massive Attack…"
[Animated information diagram as Remind Me music video: created by French agency H5]
"A father says goodbye to his young daughter and leaves. As the wide Dutch landscapes live through their seasons so the girl lives through hers. She becomes a young woman, has a family and in time she becomes old, yet within her there is always a deep longing for her father."
(Animation World Network)
Fig.1 & 2 Directed by Michaël Dudok De Wit; Produced by Claire Jennings; Willem Thijssen; Written by Michaël Dudok De Wit; Music by Normand Roger; Denis L. Chartrand; Release date(s) 2000; Running time 8:30 minutes; Country United Kingdom; Belgium; Netherlands; Language no dialogue.