Author Archives: Amid Amidi

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Ray Harryhausen Presents The Pit and the Pendulum

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Pit and the Pendulum

Stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen doesn’t animate much himself nowadays, but he has a new production banner “Ray Harryhausen Presents” designed to promote talented filmmakers. The first short made under this banner, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, was completed a couple years ago and will be released onto DVD this week. The film was directed by stop-motion veteran Marc Lougee, who has also directed episodes of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch and the BBC/Discovery series Dinosapien.

The DVD release also includes behind-the-scenes video depicting the production of the film, storyboards and concept art gallery, and interviews with director Lougee, writer Matt Taylor, composer Philip Stanger, and animator Mike Weiss.

The DVD will debut this week at the Festival of Fear in Toronto (booth #1216). For more info about the film including how to order the DVD, visit the film’s official website. There’s also a ‘making of’ article at CGSociety.org.

Happy 100th Birthday, Animated Film

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Oops, we forgot to mention that yesterday marked the centennial of animated film. The animated film that started it all: Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, premiered on August 17, 1908. And just to recap, here’s where the art form currently stands after a hundred years of progress.

Perhaps the next hundred years will be kinder to the art form.

(Thanks, Craig Clark, for reminding us about the anniversary)

Making Sense of Cars

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Try as he might, illustrator Jake Parker couldn’t make sense of the world that Pixar created for Cars. He writes:

And that leads me to the one thing that didn’t sit well with me: the strange machine/flesh hybrids Pixar came up with to populate this world. It’s as if a mad scientist enamored with automobiles terraformed Mars and furnished it with cyborg vehicles with engines of steel and minds of flesh. You have these cars, but with actual fleshy eyes, with irises, and mouths of teeth and tongues. Where does the machine end and the flesh begin? So, to make everything piece together a little better in my head I drew up what I think the internal structures of Lightning McQueen might look like.

This amusing illo is what he came up with (link to larger image).

Cars

Rediscovering Irv Spector

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Irv Spector

Director Michael Sporn has recently been in touch with the son of animation legend Irv Spector. Spector worked as an animator, designer and storyman from the 1930s onwards. He asked the son Paul Spector to share photos, artwork and information related to his father, and Paul has responded with an amazing blog entry about his dad that includes lots of beautiful gag drawings by Sam Cobean. There’s other bits and pieces about Spector online such as this beautiful cartoony one-page comic and photos from his time at the Charles Mintz Studios.(On a sidenote, one of Spector’s commercial designs is printed in my book Cartoon Modern on page 29.)

Oktapodi Online

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Oktapodi

The French CG student film Oktapodi has been winning all sorts of awards this year including the “Best Animation” prize at the Imagina Awards 2008. It was mentioned on Cartoon Brew a few months back and now the entire short can now be viewed online at the Autodesk website (link to 60mb file) . It’s directed by Julien Bocabeille, FX Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier and Emud Mokhberi.

(Thanks, Matt Morris)

“Space and the Woods” Music Video

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Late of the Pier

Another recent music video to point out. This one is for the band Late of the Pier and their song “Space and the Woods.” The video is directed by the great Ian Emes, who’s been making animated shorts, films and music videos since the 1970s including Pink Floyd’s concert film “The Dark Side of the Moon.” The high-energy visuals do a fine job of evoking a Seventies early-CG vibe while simultaneously remaining fresh and contemporary.

(Thanks, Chris Padilla)

Three Music Videos

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Music videos are such a great place for experimentation with visual techniques and ideas. Here’s three that have caught my attention recently. One is cross-stitched stop motion, one is puppets, and one is digital collage and live-action.

“Like It or Not”
for Architecture in Helsinki
directed by Josh Logue at Mathematics

“Champion”
for Kanye West
directed by Neon

“Sophisticated Side Ponytail”
for Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head
directed by That Go

New United Airlines Animated Spots

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Sea Orchestra

United Airlines has unveiled five new animated spots for the Beijing Olympics. The commercial are elegant, visually-driven and beautiful to watch, just like the rest of the animated spots that the airline has produced in recent years. Pretentious to be sure, particularly for a carrier like United, but I still appreciate their attempts at fostering a more positive image by utilizing artistic animation. The ad agency responsible for these spots is the newly formed BDM, though two of its principals, Bob Barrie and Stuart D’Rozari, have been instrumental in United’s animation campaigns from the very beginning.

The real standout piece in this latest batch is “Sea Orchestra” (view hi-res version here) by Shy the Sun, the South African collective who also operates under the name The Blackheart Gang and who produced the short Tale of How. In this commercial, they combined hand-drawn textures and photographs into a brilliant and ornate CG package that is bursting at the seams with creativity. The commercial was produced in cinema resolution and I’m sure the visual effect of this on the bigscreen is overwhelming.

There are four other commericals in the series, including one by Ishu Patel. Click on each title below to watch a hi-res version:

“Two Worlds” – From the United press release: 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.

“Heart” – From the press release: 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. 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.

“Moon Dust” – From the press release: 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.

“Butterfly” – From the press release: Polish director Aleksandra Korejwo manipulated colored salt using shed condor bird feathers on a black canvas positioned under a downward-facing camera.

Animated Chicago by Joe Fournier

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Animated Chicago

One of the newest, and most unexpected, outlets for original animation nowadays appears be newspaper websites. For the past year or so, the NY Times has been commissioning beautiful animated pieces by animators like Jeff Scher and Gary Leib, and now the Chicago Tribune is getting into the act with a new politically-oriented series Animated Chicago by illustrator and animator Joe Fournier. I’m not sure if they’re planning to do more of these, but the first episode can be viewed on the Tribune’s website.

Animated Features for Grown-Ups

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Persepolis

FilmInFocus.com has a series of articles entitled “Adult Animation: A Look at How Cartoons Grew Up.” I wrote a piece for them about the upsurge of adult animated features in the US and abroad. The article covers a lot of ground but one of my goals was to show how animated features are on the verge of entering a renaissance period. From the indie features being made in the US by the likes of Nina Paley, Paul Fierlinger and Bill Plympton, to the mature and intelligent features being produced in all corners of the globe, the animated feature scene today is more vibrant than it’s ever been.

There’s also a piece by Sundance Film Festival programmer Mike Plante about how to create animation on a tight budget and Nick Dawson’s essay on the history of X-rated cartoons. It’s worth pointing out that FilmInFocus is run by Focus Features, the specialty film arm of Universal, that will be releasing two animated features of its own shortly: Coraline by Henry Selick and 9 by Shane Acker.

Who Needs to Pitch?

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Making Fiends

LA Weekly has two articles this week profiling Amy Winfrey and her animated webseries Making Fiends and Stefan Bucher’s Daily Monster video podcast. What do both of these creators have in common? Their ideas started out as independent self-financed Internet projects that gained a popular fan following and were ultimately given TV deals by major companies. Making Fiends is about to debut as an animated series on Nickelodeon, while Daily Monster was collected into book form this year and will also appear as a segment on PBS’s new Electric Company in 2009.

The paths that both of these properties have taken offer a view into how new TV animation ideas will be discovered in the future. The dysfunctional system of pitching and development in TV animation still exists, but it is on the wane and being dismantled by the Internet. As Winfrey and Bucher have demonstrated, creators are no longer beholden to clueless and sheltered development execs who don’t have the foggiest about what their audiences want to watch. Today an artist can create an uncompromised piece of animation independently, post it online, and attract a significant audience without any assistance from broadcasters. The cherry on top is that if your idea is successful, major companies will be knocking at your door to pay you money to produce more episodes.

Eric Goldberg Speaks

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Eric Goldberg

The cuddliest man in animation, Eric Goldberg, is interviewed on the latest edition of the Animation Podcast. The chat is an hour long, and it’s only part one of the discussion. Haven’t listened to it yet, but surely a lot of wisdom is being dispensed. On a related note, Goldberg will be signing his new book Character Animation Crash Course! tomorrow night in LA. It can also be ordered on Amazon.