Categories
Art

Addicted to Oil

Good Magazine produced this politically charged, entertaining, and interesting youtube video about the state of the world, our demands for oil, and the dramatic increases to the cost of living in a world thirsty for energy.

If we’re addicted to oil, our twelve-step program should begin with admitting that we have a problem. As the price of oil creeps higher, finding new energy sources is more important than ever. But the search for alternatives, combined with environmental disruptions, is putting new pressures on other essentials like food. There are some things that are going well in the world. Right now, the economy is not one of them.


[Oil Addiction – YouTube]

Categories
Art Music

I Met the Walrus

Do you STILL love the Beatles? Then you will love this interview with John Lennon (that you haven’t heard before).

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.


[I Met the Walrus – YouTube]

(Via Waxy)

Categories
animation

Big Buck Bunny

I’ve played around in the open source 3D modelling software Blender a little bit. It may not be as fancy as the retail software on the market today, but if you compare it with versions of Maya or MAX from just a few years ago, it blows them out of the water.

A team of creative folks used the free software to make a short animated cartoon, Big Buck Bunny. They were funded by Blender foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community.

Big Buck Bunny Movie Poster

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so it’s free to watch and distribute so long as the credits are attached. Theoretically you could even download the source files, remix the movie and then sell it for a profit. Here is the original movie via YouTube:

Watch Big Buck Bunny now on YouTube or one of the many other official viewing options.

Categories
entertainment

If the Simpsons were Star Wars

Clever illustration and animation guy Rich Cando created this Simpsons/Star Wars mash-up that I think you’ll enjoy. Accept for maybe a touch of tweaking in the animation itself, I don’t think Groening and crew could have done it much better themselves.

Simpsons as the Star Wars Characters

Categories
animation

Platform

Platform

Just for fun, the motion graphics fans out there might enjoy the stop action magic of Platform from motiongrapher.com.

“Smith & Foulkes used a Canon Digital SLR camera linked up to a laptop allowing them to capture frames and play them back checking the shots as they went along. By shooting digitally Smith & Foulkes ended up with a much larger image size to work with when compared with the normal 35mm motion picture frame. These frames were then taken into After Effects and Photoshop for a clean-up where people and rigs from shots were removed. A final grade was then added in Flame.”