Drawn Animation for Chris Milk’s interactive video “Three Dreams of Black” by Anthony Schepperd (US)

Brainflow by Fiorella Pierini (UK)

Jumpman by Denis Borisovich (Russia)

Hawaï Fish by Laurent Clermont (Sweden)

Droppp by Hajime Nagatsuka (Japan)

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack creator Thurop van Orman has taken fan interaction to a whole new level. This video (reposted HERE) recorded during the Ottawa International Animation Festival, which is happening right now, shows Thurop wrestling one of his fans to the ground. Here’s the setup, according to Andrew Stewart, who filmed the action:

A few of us were talking with Thurop (guy who created the show Flapjack.) and Steve Smith faked wrestled with him, but then Thurop took him out into the bushes. Steve then challenged Thurop to a 2nd match 10min later and this is that match!

Rest assured that this kind of wrestling is considered perfectly normal by Thurop, and according to Stewart’s followup tweet, might even be a kind of kinky foreplay in the van Orman household: “Thurop said he loves to wrestle and he does that with his wife too. He said she cheats by pulling his beard.”

Add this as one more reason why LA artists should consider attending Ottawa: if you’re looking for a good place to bodyslam your fans into the ground, Canada and its universal health care system beckons!

The inevitable has happened: CG provocateur David OReilly has partnered with Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, whose mocap news reports are at least as truthful as anything you’ll see in the mainstream media. The resulting short, Children’s Medium Used for Dissemination of Truth, is exactly what you’d expect of a collaboration between these two non sequitur aficionados in that it’s totally unexpected.

“Animated GIFs are the web’s vinyl records,” wrote Jamie Zawinski on Twitter a few months ago. It’s a sly but accurate observation. In the face of Flash and streaming video, the animated GIF, which has been around since the 1990s, has refused to fade away. It remains a ubiquitous part of Web culture and inspires countless memes amongst a new generation of Web users. While the underlying technology of the animated GIF hasn’t changed, artists continue to explore new approaches to the form, such as cinemagraphs and the recent animated GIF comics trend.

There are many reasons for the extended reign of the animated GIF, prime among them the form’s emphasis on cycles (or loops). Rhythmic repetition was a staple graphic technique of theatrical animation during the 1920s and 1930s before being cast aside in favor of more realistic approaches to movement. The inherent beauty of cycled movement, which was cheapened by limited TV animation in the 1960s, has enjoyed a creative rebirth with the advent of the animated GIF. The animated GIF is also a remarkably potent form, and combined with good timing, it can deliver a surprising punchline as funny as any comedian’s joke. The British animator Cyriak has perfected this type of animated GIF. Perhaps the underpinning reason for the endurance of the animated GIF is its utter simplicity: it has no sound, generally last less than 10 seconds, and require no technical knowledge to create, thanks to the abundance of gif-making websites.

This brings us around to the latest development in animated GIFs: a new iPhone app (also iPad/iPhone Touch compatible) called Gif Shop. Created by Daniel Savage and Matthew Archer, the app, which costs $1.99, streamlines the GIF making process on the iPhone, and makes it easier than ever for anybody to create their own animation. While it’s possible to make any kind of animation using Gif Shop, because of the app’s integration with the iPhone camera, it lends itself particularly to the pixilation stop-motion technique.

Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

Daniel Savage, the app’s co-creator, foresees a social media component to Gif Shop as well, and believes it can become to animation what Instagram is to photos. “The concept of simply creating animated GIFs,” he writes, “evolved into a service that enables our users to share animated GIFs across their networks with no concern for hosting and file size limitations other services may impose. Since the initial concept, Gif Shop is no longer the first of its kind, but we think there is one key factor the others have missed: simplicity. It is extremely important to us that we take the tedious act of making a GIF and make it as fun and intuitive as possible.”

It’s exciting to see the emergence of easy-to-use animation software for smartphones. These apps have the potential to make the act of animating as second-nature to the general public as taking a photograph. That’s a revolutionary concept, especially when one considers that fifty years ago, there were at best a few thousand people in the entire world who could animate. Most of the people using the Gif Shop app aren’t professional animators, but then again, most people who take photographs aren’t Cartier-Bresson. It hardly matters that every animated GIF be a masterpiece. The real victory is that as more and more people animate, appreciation and understanding for the art form will inevitably grow. That may end up yet being the greatest legacy of the animated GIF.

What’s the latest creepy intersection between art, performance and technology? Real-time facial substitutions. I love it!

Experiment by Kyle McDonald (US)

Experiment by Arturo Castro (Spain)

Experiment by Jason Saragih (Australia) that applies facial tracking to cartoon characters

(via Kottke)

Adrien Merigeau (co-director of Old Fangs) created this engimatic music video for the Irish band The Villagers and their song “Cecelia and Her Selfhood.” He made the film at his Dublin-based studio andmapsandplans. Merigeau is also the art director of
Cartoon Saloon’s next feature Song of the Sea. (The studio previously made The Secret of Kells.) The video was animated entirely by Merigeau except for the stop motion sequence with the jackal and dragon that was animated by Eimhin McNamara.

The lyrics are a bit confusing if you take them at face value and appear to suggest murdering petty vandals, but that’s not the case according to the Villagers frontman Conor O’Brien: “I called it ‘Cecilia and Her Selfhood’ because I wanted to show the sister who ends up destroying the statue, I wanted the sister to represent the inner wicked of Cecilia herself, so it’s almost like someone destroying herself…like an analogy of that.”

(Thanks, Tomm Moore)