The geekiest, and therefore coolest, animation-related Tumblr I’ve seen: Smears, Multiples and Other Animation Gimmicks. Tumblr users are invited to submit their own examples of these animation ideas. The blog is run by Michael Ruocco, a promising recent grad of the School of Visual Arts whose knowledge of classic animation is second to none.
(Disclosure: Michael did some work for Cartoon Brew last year and has also assisted me on some of my recent book projects.)
Canadian artist Eric Bates made Sayonara while studying animation in Japan at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. “This story was inspired by my life in Japan and having to say goodbye myself,” he wrote on his site. “Every part of this animation abstractly relates to my experiences, friends, foods, things I saw, and things I felt over this time.”
I love the mix of minimally rendered CG, detailed puppet modelmaking, and hand-drawn animation It’s fun to watch how he put it all together in this video:
(Thanks, Tim McCourt)
Semi-disturbing fact from an interactive John Lasseter graphic in the Wall Street Journal: He received 74 rounds of applause in the course of a single day at the studio! According to the paper, “During the day’s five half-hour-long and two hour-long meetings, each time Lasseter signed off on a scene the room erupted.” I usually get one round whenever I leave a room, but dozens every day is just plain nuts.
It obviously begs the question, What happens if you don’t clap?
Bill Porter‘s On Time Off will either inspire you to head to the beach or make you want to stay as far the hell away as possible. His melancholic and satirical take on beach life stems from his own experiences working in an ice cream shop in Cornwall. It’s a Royal College of Art graduation short that I first encountered on the festival circuit back in 2008.
Reuben Sutherland, whose zoetrope music LP appeared on the Brew a few months back, recently directed this music video for Seasick Steve’s “You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks.” Sutherland has packed the video with weird and funny imagery, and his rhythmic repetition of visual elements and handheld camera effects nicely match the energy of the song.
(Thanks, Noel Barrot)
A trailer (en français) for Bibo Bergeron’s long-gestating CG feature Un Monstre à Paris has popped up on the website Catsuka. Bergeron, a veteran animator who co-directed the DreamWorks features Shark Tale and The Road to El Dorado, made the film at his French studio Bibo Films. Un Monstre à Paris opens wide in France in October.
(via Sketchcrawl Twitter)
Continuing the trend of documentaries that incorporate animation, Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave recounts the “Green Revolution” following the 2009 elections in Iran. The film uses live-action interviews and video footage from the protests alongside original animation created by Ali Soozandeh (art director), Ali Reza Darvish (drawings), and Prof. Dr. Sina Mostafawy and Ali Soozandeh (motion directors).
The Green Wave, which appeared at Sundance earlier this year and is currently on the festival circuit, premieres in New York this week as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and will screen on June 18, 19 and 21. A q&a with the director is scheduled after every screening.
ASIFA-San Francisco president Karl Cohen wrote in the ASIFA-SF newsletter that the film is “not an intellectual discourse, but a powerful emotional experience…The story is so powerful and gripping that it didn’t bother me that much of the ‘animation’ was simply camera movement over static drawings or that the artwork was not of the highest quality. What counted was the story of the suppression of a popular movement by a brutal regime.”
For more info, visit The Green Wave website or watch the trailer below:
Designer Chris Abbas downloaded a public domain archive of still images captured by NASA’s Cassini Solstice Mission and composited them into an animated short. The pixilation approach shows fly-bys of Saturn, its rings and other objects in Saturn’s neighborhood. Abbas made some stunning artistic and editing choices that transforms raw scientific data into a marvelous visual achievement. For more details about the imagery, visit Astronomy Picture of the Day.
(Thanks, Pell Osborn)
“In a room there is a box. In the box there is a forest. In the forest there is a lost child.” The Smaller Room (Der Kleinere Raum, 2009) by Cristobal Leon and Nina Wehrle may be short, but its claustrophobic and foreboding atmosphere leaves an impression on the viewer.
(via Jeff Scher’s Twitter)
Striking mixture of stop motion imagery and experimental techniques in “Second Song,” a music video for TV On The Radio. The director is Michael Please whose Royal College of Art graduation short The Eagleman Stag was awarded a “special distinction for student film” at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this weekend. The short also won the BAFTA earlier this year.
Video credits after the jump.
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John Kricfalusi and Gary Panter speak about their collaboration with clothing line Stussy to create Marvel comic-related merchandise.
(Thanks, Jason Groh)
The legendary Tyrus Wong, who art directed Bambi among countless other accomplishments and who is one hundred years young, was hanging out at Pixar yesterday. Here are some impressions of his visit as tweeted by Pixar artists:
Today I shook Tyrus Wong’s hand and listened to his many stories. He’s got 100yrs worth of them! His secret to a long life: sense of humour! – Daniela Strijleva
You know it’s a great day when Tyrus Wong’s hanging out, chatting on the patio. I wish Maurice was here, too. – Scott Morse
Tyrus Wong is 100 yrs old & looks AMAZING ! He is so impressed by the studio he asked for a job ! – Matt Jones
Today, the rumor is that he’ll make an appearance at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, though they haven’t officially announced it. The museum is hosting a lecture at 3pm called “The Art of Tyrus Wong” with historian Charles Solomon, and production designers Ralph Eggleston (WALL·E, Finding Nemo) and Paul Felix (Lilo & Stitch, The Emperor’s New Groove). I imagine that’s the event Ty will appear at, but even if he doesn’t, it still sounds like a terrific presentation. I’d recommend purchasing an on-line ticket before showing up because it’s probably going to be a sell out.
Rebellious Bird is a fresh looking watercolor cut-out animation created by Philadelphia-based Jennifer Levonian. The documentary short ostensibly revolves around Wendy Ramsburg, an American Civil War reenactor who portrays women soldiers that disguised themselves as men, but the film also asks broader questions about gender roles in society, which Levonian smartly ties together with the story of Albert Cashier (as recounted in Spanish by her husband) and her own pregnancy. Levonian created the film during a one-year artist residency at The Library Company of Philadelphia with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program.
(Thanks, Greg Condon)
A short piece about Alejandro Garcia, a professor at San Jose State who teaches physics to animation students and is now consulting DreamWorks animators on how to incorporate believable physics into their films.
(via CatHicks Twitter)
There are few things more aggravating than when ad agencies and art directors troll the Internet for innovative animation techniques that they then pilfer wholesale without rewarding (or even acknowledging) the original creator. Technically, there’s nothing illegal about such behavior, but the fact that these deep-pocketed firms often take ideas from the most vulnerable people in the community–students and independent filmmakers–shows an awareness of their unscrupulous actions. This sort of thing unfortunately happens over and over again, two of the more recent examples being the cases of Javan Ivey and Takeuchi Taijin’s short A Wolf Loves Pork.
Saatchi & Saatchi’s Geneva office has proven that it doesn’t need to be that way and that agencies can collaborate respectfully with student filmmakers. They did just that for their recent “Africa is Moving” HIV/AIDS spot, which is posted above.
First, a little background: last March, we posted Cyclotrope, a film by British animation student Tim Wheatley. Many other sites posted it too and the film went viral within twenty-four hours of appearing on-line.
When the creative team at Saatchi & Saatchi decided to create their AIDS spot using Wheatley’s animation style, they brought Tim, a first-year student, on board to work on the commercial. Andy Wyatt, the head of the animation department at University College of Falmouth where Tim studies, filled in more of the details:
Once Saatchi and Saatchi’s creative team Frederic Doms and Frederic Bry devised a script, they worked closely with Tim as animation consultant to develop the animations that would communicate the messages. Subsequently, Fred Doms and Tim Wheatley travelled to Cape Town to produce the film with South African production company 7Films and their new director called Wednesday at the helm.
“It just shows the power of the Internet,” said Wheatley. “We are encouraged to put our coursework online and in my case it lead to a fully paid trip to Cape Town to work with some of the world’s leading media professionals. It was a fantastic opportunity and experience.”
A making-of video for the commercial by Tim Wheatley and commercial credits after the jump:
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