The animation students at Gobelins l’école de l’image are rolling out some fabulous work. Check out the fantastic student short: Burning Safari.
(Via | Previously)
Lunar Eclipse
On Saturday and Sunday we, the human population, had an opportunity to see the moon completed blotted out by Earth’s shadow in one of those rare events known as a Lunar eclipse. Personally I’ve always thought solar eclipses to be the more interesting variety and so I never even bothered looking for the moon over the weekend.
However, thanks to the power of modern computing, here is an animated version of the entire phenomena, for those like myself that want all the reward without any of the effort.
I have to admit, the orange glow that appears on the moon during the middle of the action is kind of cool.
Stop and Go Snickers Ad
Here is an interesting use of camera tracking, 3d animation, and possibly some motion capture: Snickers Stop and Go ad. It scores points for being new and different, but as Matt Haughey observes, “the message is: nothing makes me hungrier for a Snickers bar than beating the piss out of someone within an inch of their life.”
Uploaded by Razorbuzz
Hit play or watch at Daily Motion.
Ira Glass on Storytelling
Ira Glass bequeaths the tricks of the trade in four YouTube videos that are extremely interesting, whether or not your are in the publishing/podcasting/video making business.
… It is your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions — you don’t have the story part that works or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works and you’re going to need both, and in a good story you’re gonna flip back and forth between the two like to be a little bit of action and someone will say something about it and then a little more action and someone will say something and it and that’s really like a lot of the trick of the whole thing you know is to have the perseverance that if you’ve got an interesting anecdote that you also uh… can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that will support it and then the two together interwoven into three minutes or six minutes or however long your story is will make something that’s larger than the sum of its parts.
(Via Kottke)
The Danish Poet
Please enjoy the beautiful Oscar winning animated short, The Danish Poet. It’s done in a very traditional Canadian animation style and has a storyline that will melt even the coldest of hearts.
The Danish Poet, Torill Kove, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
In Search of Autumn
Nick Tosches spends a year in search of the mysterious origins of his Windows desktop image: Autumn and the Plot Against Me. It’s an interesting read for all of us would-be detectives.
Say What Again
I’m a typographic artwork fan, a Quintin Tarrentino movie fan, and I really like motion graphic compositing projects, so, when I saw Jarratt Moody’s time-based typography assignment (at SCAD) based on Samual L. Jackson’s “Say What Again” dialogue from Pulp Fiction, I figured I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this:
The basic idea of the project is to take a piece of audio from wherever (movie, song, poetry reading, answering machine) and then represent that audio on screen using only typography.
Jarratt chose a famous bit of dialogue from Pulp Fiction as his subject matter. (Okay, what dialogue from Pulp Fiction isn’t famous?) The resulting piece is full of whimsy and style. Jarratt does some great things with scale and simple but effective camera movements. Get those headphones on and prepare yourself for several lashings of Samuel L. Jackson’s naughty tongue.
Mind Blowing Video of Laser Guided Graffiti
Check out the Graffiti Research Lab’s amazing video of a laser guided graffiti projection system. The artist merely draws his design on a nearby building with a laser pointer and a high powered projector “paints” the image for all to see.
Queen Mary 2 Enters the Bay
The Queen Mary 2, sailed smoothly into the San Francisco Bay on February 4th. It is the largest ship ever to have entered the Bay and it cleared the Golden Gate Bridge with about 30 feet of room.
Having just visited San Francisco last month, the photos and videos make me smile. I wish I would have been there to get some photos of my own.
Happy Valentines Day
A special valentines day cartoon I came across today that is sure to put a smile on your face: Ah, L’Amour by Don Hertzfeldt.
“Ah, L’Amour” (1995) was produced during Don’s freshman year at UC Santa Barbara for a beginning production class, and was never intended to be screened publicly. The two minute 16mm short was somehow completed in just a few weeks despite Don having had little experience working with film; made most noticeable by the visible fingerprints all over the camera lens. By no small miracle, Don’s shaky guitar soundtrack — recorded solo in his dorm room on a broken down boom-box — somehow stayed in sync.”
From Bitterfilms.com
The movie initially saw limited action at film festivals because Don was embarassed by it. He was also afraid of being pelted with rocks by angry women, until screenings revealed that women usually cheered very loudly for the cartoon girls, and always applauded much louder than the men.
A few of the “evil women” in the film are crude caricatures of some of Don’s ex-girlfriends – drawn not so much out of bitterness but from the fact that he was running out of different hair styles to think up. No one could tell that Don drew caricatures because you can barely tell that Don drew people.
Luckily, the incredibly grungy look of the movie plays into its frustrated energy, so it appears as if it was made to look bad on purpose. Don usually stays very quiet whenever this is brought up.
“Ah, L’Amour” became a wildly popular cult film that gave Don the shot in the arm to begin pre-production on Genre. “L’Amour” was still playing the midnight movie circuit in 1998 when it was awarded the World Animation Celebration – HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize Award for the “World’s Funniest Cartoon” – and it continued to rerun at animation festivals for several years after.
Midnight audiences began a tradition of chanting along in loud unison to the cartoon’s dialogue captions – all the men chanting aloud the man’s lines, and the women chanting along with the women’s. It’s very spooky.
Our studio name, Bitter Films, comes from this film’s opening caption, “A Bitter Film by Don Hertzfeldt.