If you read just one article this week, no, make that this month, make it Kevin Kelly’s “Becoming Screen Literate” from last weekend’s NY Times Magazine. It is essential reading for anybody who works in the visual arts. In the piece, Kelly argues that images have replaced words as our dominant form of expressive currency, though we have not yet achieved “screen fluency” that allows us to utilize and manipulate moving images in the same way that we can do with text.

It’s interesting to note that a lot of Kelly’s descriptions of contemporary live-action filmmaking basically describe the process that animation artists have been pioneering for the past century. Even before CGI, animation has always been a more flexible and fluid art form than live-action. Finally, live-action is achieving that malleability, he writes:

For directors who speak this new cinematographic language, even the most photo-realistic scenes are tweaked, remade and written over frame by frame. Filmmaking is thus liberated from the stranglehold of photography. Gone is the frustrating method of trying to capture reality with one or two takes of expensive film and then creating your fantasy from whatever you get. Here reality, or fantasy, is built up one pixel at a time as an author would build a novel one word at a time. Photography champions the world as it is, whereas this new screen mode, like writing and painting, is engineered to explore the world as it might be.

Another major theme in Kelly’s piece is that the line between creator and consumer is blurring to the point where average people are not only consuming visuals but also creating their own through remixing and repurposing existing imagery.

Rewriting video can even become a kind of collective sport. Hundreds of thousands of passionate anime fans around the world (meeting online, of course) remix Japanese animated cartoons. They clip the cartoons into tiny pieces, some only a few frames long, then rearrange them with video editing software and give them new soundtracks and music, often with English dialogue. This probably involves far more work than was required to edit the original cartoon but far less work than editing a clip a decade ago. The new videos, called Anime Music Videos, tell completely new stories. The real achievement in this subculture is to win the Iron Editor challenge. Just as in the TV cookoff contest “Iron Chef,” the Iron Editor must remix videos in real time in front of an audience while competing with other editors to demonstrate superior visual literacy. The best editors can remix video as fast as you might type.

What is most thrilling, however, is Kelly’s vision for the future of media, which is something that I’ve long thought but been unable to put so eloquently into words. Having witnessed the technological progress of the past twenty years, we’re not too far from achieving these possibilities:

With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. With the assistance of screen fluency tools we might even be able to summon up realistic fantasies spontaneously. Standing before a screen, we could create the visual image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen literate, maybe even faster. And that is just the opening scene.

I’m no expert on the box office, but when Disney’s CG “blockbuster” Bolt opens with less than the studio’s throwaway live-action film Beverly Hills Chihuahua, there’s going to be some eyebrows raised. Here’s some analysis of Bolt’s tepid opening from BoxOfficeGuru.com:

Disney’s big offering for the holiday season Bolt opened in third with sales that were a bit disappointing. The PG-rated animated flick took in an estimated $27M from 3,651 theaters for a $7,395 average. The debut came in well below what other November toons in recent years have opened to - 2005’s Chicken Little,2006’s Happy Feet, and last year’s Bee Movie all bowed in the $38-42M range. Like Bolt, these films were non-sequels and did not have Thanksgiving to provide a boost. The canine flick even screened in 980 3D theaters and featured the voices of John Travolta and Miley Cyrus, but that did little to spark excitement. However with kids getting out of school for the holiday this week, sales could stay strong in the days ahead giving the Mouse House a respectable ten-day start.

We’ve posted about Benji Davis and Jim Field’s Frater Films before (their music video Out on the Water is still one of my favorites). They’ve been chugging along making several nice commercials and videos since - check this page for some of their highlights. They have a new short film in development - Grub (pictured above) - and are currently seeking funds to produce it. A teaser trailer is online here.

Their studio works in a variety of techniques. Here’s one of their best spots, for Oxfam, animated in After Effects, using vectors and a few handmade rubber stamp prints for the patterns:

Way back in September 2006 we pointed towards a promising new short, produced as a labor of love by a small animation collective in Chicago, ChewBone Animation. The piece is now complete and lives up to its promise. Check out the finished film, The Shaker Brothers (and its modest production blog here). Congrats to BJ Crawford and his crew.

Here’s the entire Sonic The Hedgehog short (mentioned previously here), released to You Tube today by Sega:

It seems like suddenly everyone has just discovered animator, cartoonist and director Irv Spector. I’ve been a fan of his comic books for years, and now his son Paul has dedicated a new blog to his work, Spectorphile. I look forward to whatever goodies he posts from the family archives.

One of my prize finds, several years ago, was an original Spector storyboard for a Famous Studios cartoon Fido Beta Kappa (1954). I’ve been meaning to put it online for sometime and have finally posted it below (click on thumbnails to enlarge).

People have knocked Famous Studios for many things. In my opinion, the problem wasn’t the animation nor the stories - it was the direction. Here’s a perfect example. First read the Spector storyboard below and think about how you would pace the gags and time the animation. Irv’s sketches are great and poses are perfect. Next watch the finished film (You Tube video embed below; note the changes to the opening sequence). Almost every gag falls flat. The revised character designs don’t help.

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Bolt opens today. The film may need the Dalmatians “Twilight Bark” to fight off the blood-sucking box office competition this weekend.

What did you think of the film? This post is open to our readers who have actually seen the picture. Please submit your comments below.

This teaser trailer for Imagi’s Astro Boy is attached to today’s release of Twilight. I love Tezuka’s original manga and TV series - and I really want to like this feature. I hope they can pull it off.

How does it look to you?