Inspirations

Hey there guys,

it's late and I'm just sitting around getting inspired with my roommates, so I thought it would be a cool time to post some links of stuff that I have either grown up with or have discovered recently. I won't go all out in one post, so I'll try and just do this in segments.

This is one of my most favorite animated films ever made: Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards"

This film was made with very limited resources, a really rag-tag group of animators (some of which had only just started their career in animation), and with so many short cuts taken via different techniques and animation processes that these set-backs became the aesthetic of the film. I can't say enough about this, it stood for everything that Disney refused to be. There's all sort of suggestive themes and harsh language (never getting weird with it, mind you), and the music is wonderfully funky. Someone has done the world justice by uploading the entire thing onto youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgol5_00prc


(ps. there are a couple of scenes where an army animated via live-action rotoscope fights an army of traditionally animated characters. This is the only time other than Bakshi's animated LOTR film that anything like this has ever been done. ycklutcilyfckyfclu!!!)
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Ridley Scott films! I don't think I've ever seen a movie by this director I haven't completely enjoyed. The attention to detail in the overall design and tone of his films is what makes them so great. Here are my two favorites:

Blade Runner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPcZHjKJBnE
The story alone, being drawn from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", is so great. It may not be the first time they combined film noir with science fiction, but it is something that propelled the idea into a lot of people's minds. Harrison Ford plays a cop-type character who's job is to hunt down renegade androids living as humans on Earth. As much as that description might sound like a chunkhead's ideal storyline, it is taken on in a very subtle and meaningful way. The atmosphere is so dark that you literally do not see a sky until they end of the film (referring to a scene where a bird flies away, not the crappy theatrical version ending. I don't mean to get all angry nerd-guy on this, but the only version you need to watch is the director's cut.)

and Legend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxViR7eCuM
I saw this movie when I was little, and even though it's meant to be a fantasy film, it scared the cannolis out of me. This movie has some of the best make-up and costume design I have ever seen, coupled with a great attention to crazy voice acting. The main character is played by a teenage Tom Cruise (meh) who sets out to rescue his lady friend from Satan. Yes, Satan. Technically he's called the "Lord of Darkness", but come on:

That's Tim Curry, by the way. He's somewhere under the layers and layers of latex and red make-up. So anyways, if anything, this movie is an awesome experience, whether you can stand the corny storyline or not. (weird fact, the original score for this movie was completed by Jerry Goldsmith, who really hit the nail on the head in every moment of the film He even considered it his best work. However, during the first screening of the film, R. Scott hated the reactions he was getting. Some people showed up completely stoned, expecting a kind of lush, fantastical trip. Which it totally is! Ridley immediately took it away from theaters, and approached Tangerine Dream about composing the score for him. They finished the entire thing within 3 weeks, giving the movie a much more progressive, haunting atmosphere. Both versions of the movie are open for purchase, and both are equally memorable.)

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One of the many claymations I grew up with was Aardman Animation's "Wallace and Gromit" series. I've already talked about how their animated logo was one of my favorite things to watch when I was little (again http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISaQVAYzxIs). The world of Wallace and Gromit is so wonderfully quaint. I mean it kind of has to be, with claymation you are making every single set and so the universe is only as big as you can imply it to be. However, with Aardman, they always seem to play off of how small they can make this little town of people, most of the time only showing the main characters & where they live/work. The animation has always been top of the line, along with the audio work. This is one of those companies I always keep a hopeful eye on, always scanning their job listings. Anyways, one of the scenes that I always remember is the triumphant plane segment, where they pretty much defy physics and animate Gromit making a daring escape in his bike/plane transformer thing. Not only do these movies look great, but they are so clever with all the little inventions and goofy mess-ups that they get involved in. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9QeosTh7w

-also, with the sheep part of the scene there has got to be some kind of reference to early film chase scene. Maybe the keystone cops or Buster Keaton or something

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On sort of a smaller scale, this is a music video someone edited together for "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books. For some reason, this is something that has always stuck with me. It has given a bit of inspiration to both music and visual work that I've produced in the past year. It's a really great marriage of audio/video, using imagery from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and other bits of Nasa Footage to back the really airy and subtle music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-oNlYp6AeU

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This is an older BBC animation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute". I loved everything about this the first time I saw it: the colors, the design, the music, everything except maybe the goofy story/singing dialogue part (but that's an opera, duhhh). The initial scene is one that has been stuck in my mind for a long time, specifically that so much is communicated with no dialogue in this totally abstract world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Wp3p3did4

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Here is a really great film called "Baraka" that was one of the first really visual-based documentaries I ever saw. This is one of those movies that I watch and get really pumped to go capture anything with a camera. The whole film was completed in14 months, spanning 24 countries, on 6 different continents. I don't know if I could encapsulate this craziness well with words, so I'll just post the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tJjZpwUZ8

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I'll end on this for tonight... my teacher recently edited this video together (hopefully starting a series of them) that goes through a highlighted timeline of early film. I will admit that I have yet to check out a lot of these things, but this video alone makes me want to devote a day to investigating some of these movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHXKzT_LB0

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Hopefully, if you've made it this far, there was something cool in here for ya! I'll try and compile some more links/info of cool projects in the near future. In the mean time, animation has been occurring almost every day. Some of it turns out really cool, some of it is shot and looks poopy, but overall this has turned out to be one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on- which it should! It's thesis! Have a good night and do cool things!!

(pps. meet Bodhmall, another of Fionn's caretakers)

super proud of this model. those eyes are nearly the size of ants. took so long to get them to look not horrifying haha

Time Paradox

I made one-

Thought the science world should know...

Finished Prologue!!

Beginning to notice all of my posts have titles with exclamation points. Whatever, I'm excited all the time! Anyways, YAY I finished the paper animation! I think this will be all that I reveal of the episode until it is totally completed. I decided to post it as sort of a self-contained promotional thing for the project.

When edited into the actual episode, there will be narration to give it a bit more clarity. I know it's not the most cohesive thing right now, but I promise it will make sense in context.

Everything in this was done with layers of cut out paper. I would have liked to use a multi-plane set up with sheets of glass and stuff to give it more depth. Alas, we work with what we can. I can safely say that this is the fastest animation I've made ever. I was able to print/cut everything out, animate, composite with some slight ae alterations, and organize sound all in 1 week. So glad I could kick this out quickly and get back to focusing on the claymation stuff. I'm not too sure when everything needs to be done, but I know it's quickly approaching. My hope is that I'll have a hodge-podge of different clips that I can just edit down into an interesting episode using the video portion to string it all together. That's not a part I'm too worried about either. Back when it was just video, we were kicking out episodes over a weekend's time.

I'm particularly excited about those birds. To get that weird video-ish effect I printed out an image of a big flock of birds flying away, and picked out 5 different birds that were in different flying positions. Then I ordered them 1-5 and switched out the different birds for every 2 frames as they were moving across the screen. Stumbling across this idea makes me REALLY want to explore it. I think I might try to find more animals to animate this way and make a kind of Eadweard Muybridge style collection of movements.

Anyways, I can't think of too much else to write about this little guy. The music ended up working out really well. I only had to transition it to other sections of the recording a couple of times, like when the battle scene starts, and near the end when the woman is in the woods. Otherwise, there were a lot of awesome unintentional music cues, stuff like the band of warriors popping on screen in-sync with those little harp strokes. I saw it when I played it back the first time with this music and nearly exploded from happy. Pretty much all of the sound came from Freesound.org. I can't express how great this site is, and after this project is done I intend to upload my library of recorded ambient noises to it for public domain use. It's the least I could do to give back to a community of people who just love to go out and record whatever random noises they think of for anyone to use. So cool.

So yeah! Hopefully you guys enjoy this stuff as much as I do, I intend on returning to this style when I get the time. Meanwhile, it's 1:33 am and I still have a paper to write for tomorrow. So I'll end it there and stop my yappin'.

(ps. sorry mom, I know I said I'd have this uploaded so you could see before it was really late at night, oooooops.)

(pps. my friend kelly made this a while back, and I feel that it belongs here)

Prologue Stuff

I'm working on a paper cut-out prologue section of the episode:

Don't really know what to say about it. It's a thing. It will be about the relationship of Fionn's mother and father, and the war in which his father is killed by Goll. The transition from this to the claymation will be when Fionn's mother brings him to the forest to be brought up by Liath and Bodhmall. It won't take up too much time; I'm shooting for around 30 seconds.

this is a superfun superbowl sunday YeEeEeAaAh!