Author Archives: Amid Amidi

About Amid Amidi

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Tinga Tinga Tales produced by Kenya’s Homeboyz

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This is the trailer for Tinga Tinga Tales, a 52-episode children’s series produced by Nairobi, Kenya-based studio Homeboyz Animation. It will air on Disney Channel and BBC’s children’s network CBeebies, among other broadcasters. This is a BBC video news story about Homeboyz that shows glimpses of their studio and interviews artists working there. As far as I know, this is the first 100%-animated TV series to be produced out of Kenya.

The animation world is on the verge of a revolution in ideas and content. Tens of thousands of artists from Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East have entered the industry in the past decade thanks to digital technologies that have made animation production affordable and accessible to all. As one of the Homeboyz artists says in the BBC piece, they’re gaining experience and knowledge so they can someday start producing their own scripts and ideas. It’ll be really exciting when they do.

(Thanks, Joe Fournier)

Scribble Junkies, a blog by Bill Plympton and Pat Smith

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Pat and Bill

Make room for another solid addition to the animation blogosphere: Scribble Junkies is a blog by well-known New York indies Bill Plympton and Pat Smith (who is currently living in Singapore). I know them both well, and I enjoy hearing their perspectives on the art form, even if I don’t necessarily always agree with them. If it’s not clear from the name of their blog, both of these guys are driven by their passion for the art of drawn animation, and they’ve told me that they plan to have guest contributions from other artists who are similarly passionate about drawing and draftsmanship.

The Indie Film Distribution Revolution

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Inspiring piece in the NY Times about the growing trend of indie film distribution, and its historical roots in indie filmmakers like George Lucas and John Cassavetes. With more independent animated features being made than ever before, finding ways to distribute them outside of conventional Hollywood channels is more important than ever:

In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including a weak opening weekend. (“After the first show,” Mr. Broderick said, repeating an Old World maxim, “we know.”) In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors. The Old World has ticket buyers. The New World has ticket buyers who are also Facebook friends. The Old World has commercials, newspapers ads and the mass audience. The New World has social media, YouTube, iTunes and niche audiences. “Newspaper ads,” Mr. Broderick said, “are mostly a waste of money.”

TUESDAY IN NYC: Spotlight on CGI & FX Studios

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Tomorrow night, ASIFA-East is hosting “A Spotlight on CGI and FX Studios.” Reps from five local studios–SpeakeasyFX, Hornet, NathanLove, Mechanism Digital and Framestore–will participate in a panel discussion about industry trends and the types of artists they’re looking to hire. It’s a positive sign to see a CG/VFX event being sponsored by ASIFA-East. These are big parts of the NY animation industry, and it’d be to everybody’s benefit if the organization incorporated them into the mix more frequently. The event begins at 7pm at the School of Visual Arts (209 E. 23rd Street, 3rd Floor Amphitheater). Admission is, magic word, FREE!

Black Lake by David OReilly and Jon Klassen

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An evocative and spare exercise in computer animation by David OReilly and Jon Klassen, who previously collaborated on the U2 music video “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”. The video is intended to be viewed as a loop, and contains a ‘making of’ portion at the end. It’s a revelation seeing how elegantly Klassen’s design-heavy illustrations work can be translated into CG imagery. I’d love to see these guys collaborate on something more substantial in this style.

The Revolution Will Be Animated

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A documentary by Marine Lormant Sebag about Nina Paley’s struggle with copyright while making Sita Sings the Blues. It’s difficult to meaningfully address copyright and public domain issues in such a brief piece, but I appreciate the film’s intimate look at the issue from the perspective of an individual artist who has to deal with the system. Bill Plympton also makes an appearance in the film.

Mickey and SpongeBob Drawn by Kids

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Rob Bohn of The Amigo Unit says:

I taught animation at a summer camp for the 92nd St Y this past summer. One of the lessons was drawing characters and exploring the developing process. For my examples I had the kids (ages 5-11) draw some well known figures to get the hang of it and warm up. Many of the kids enjoyed the process but some did not. Many of them crumpled the paper, ripped it up, threw it out, etc. Well, I couldnt let them go to waste – I fetched them out of the trash, collected them, and compiled them into sequences.

A lot of the designs by the kids are absolutely fantastic!

Homunculus by Sam Stephens

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An animated short directed by Sam Stephens from Humble‘s in-house directing collaborative Hydra. The film combines photography of decomposing fruit with CG characters on top. In the words of the filmmaker, Homunculus is:

a dark and twisted fable of spontaneous generation and untrammeled id. Taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter. The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id. These ideas, combined with our love of Dutch still life’s “beautiful decay,” sowed the seeds for this unique little monster of a film.

(Thanks, Mike Johnson)

Haiti Relief

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Haiti poster by Theo Ushev

A beautiful poster by animation director Theodore Ushev (Tower Bawher, Drux Flux). Hopefully this poster will prove to be less controversial than the last one Theo made.

I’m curious to hear about what animation studios are doing to aid those in Haiti? I know DreamWorks is matching contributions from employees dollar for dollar. Good on them. Please report in the comments what your studios are doing to help out.

If you want to donate on your own, I’d recommend Partners in Health, Operation USA, UNICEF, and American Red Cross.

The Samsonadzes, the Georgian Simpsons

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The country of Georgia now has a homegrown yellow cartoon family of their own–The Samsonadzes. If the clip above doesn’t convince you of the inspiration for these characters, check out the animated opening at the beginning of this video in the Guardian. The creator of the series, Shalva Ramishvili, says in that video:

I want to say it straight–this is not The Simpsons. This is The Samsonadzes. This is all about a Georgian family, with Georgian jokes, Georgian plot, with Georgian developments, and with Georgian social humor. The fact that it is about a family rings a bell for people and there is a certain resemblance in the family name of course. And I would be proud if anyone compared this series with The Simpsons…

(Thanks, Mike Grimshaw)

James Cameron: It’s Not Animation Because I Say So

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A video in which Jim explains that, “the thing that people need to keep very strongly in mind is that this is not an animated film.” So just to recap: yes, Avatar has 100% digitally animated characters in it; no, it’s not animation; why, because Cameron says so.

Regardless of how Cameron and Fox want to frame their marketing campaign for the film, I have little doubt that Avatar will be viewed by history as an animated feature, right there along with Zemeckis’s mo-cap works. Granted, none of these are particularly exemplary examples of animated films, but they do represent the beginning of a new animated technique. (It is a testament to how rapidly animation is evolving as an art that we can no longer even identify what is an animated technique.)

It’s important to stress that, as photography didn’t replace painting and drawing, performance capture won’t replace hand-drawn, traditional CGI (as practiced by the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks), stop-motion, pixilation or anything else. In fact, if we look at how the advent of photography pushed painting in a more expressionistic and abstract direction, perhaps the same will happen in animation. Traditional CGI clearly can’t compete with performance capture in terms of realism, so now computer animation can begin to move away from its preoccupation with slavish recreations of fur, hair and motion and mature in a more abstract and impressionistic direction. In any case, performance capture is here to stay and it is now one more tool in the animator’s ever-widening arsenal. I look forward to seeing more experimental uses of it as the technology evolves and artists aspire to use it in more creatively challenging ways.

(via Mark Mayerson)

Tuber’s Two Step by Chris Wedge

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This is a 1985 student film directed by Chris Wedge, who, of course, went on to become the creative head of Blue Sky and direct Ice Age. To give it a bit of historical context, it falls between The Adventures of André and Wally B. and Luxo Jr. From the YouTube description: “Though visually sparse, the film marks a significant turning point in computer animation, both for eschewing the usual chrome-and-perfect-geometric-shapes of the era, and for extensively applying traditional animation techniques — follow-through, squash-and-stretch, etc.”

The video is part of the Vintage CG Channel on YouTube which is filled with rare examples of early computer animation. It’s still hard to wrap my head around just how far CGI has advanced in a few decades.

Mak the Horny Mac-Daddy by Ian Miller

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I saw Ian Miller’s one-minute short last year at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, when I was a member of the festival’s three-person short film jury. We gave it an honorable mention for the undergraduate animation category (it was created at UArts in Philly). Looking at it again, I remain impressed by the insane amount of graphic inventiveness that Ian fits into every frame of his animation. There is nothing cliche about the way anything moves in this film. The ideas flow straight out of Ian’s twisted mind onto the screen, and it’s loads of fun to watch.

(Thanks, Brian Lonano, for the link)