Three Blind Mice (1945)

George Dunning, like his contemporaries John Hubley and Norman McLaren, can best be described as an experimentalist, having used every medium to make animated films, including cut-outs, painting on glass, and direct painting onto film as well as more orthodox methods such as cel and paper. But he hahs been marked him as an individual talent for is use of articulated, painted, metal cut-outs.
The first films from the NFB animation unit were cut-outs, because of the equipment limitations they faced (all they had was a 35mm title stand with a vertically mounted camera). The first cut-outs were jointed or unjointed and made out of cardboard and soft metal sheets.

Dunning simplified the process and the method of making the joints. He used black thread between the shoulders and the bodies to provide greater flexibility.He needed two assistants, the animators Grant Munro and Robert Verrall, to complete this film.
Three Blind Mice tells of horrific factory accidents that befell three mice that work there. It's an educative and bizarre film because this short, using simple cut-out animation and the song "Three--- Blind--- Mice----", illustrates why industrial safety rules must be observed.
The nursery rhyme favorites prove no less foolish in the factory than when they provoked reprisal from the farmer's wife. They disobey all the safety rules with dire results.

Teeth Tunnel

You can read Tom Neely's comics on his blog.

Spook Sport (1940)

Spook Sport is an expressionistic interpretation of Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.

In the 1940's, Mary Ellen Bute hired Norman McLaren, who didn't live in Canada yet, to draw directly on film strips the characters of ghosts, bats and other figures and to synchronize them with Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre. Some original paintings of McLaren would be reused in Bute's later films, including Tarantella (1941), Color Rhapsodie (1951) and Polka Graph (1952), where they seem less at home stylistically than in their original context. The final result is a mix of conventional cel animation and pen drawings, drawn directly on 35 mm film stock.

Although the animation moves in time to the music throughout the film, there are two particular moments that feature specific gestures synchronized to the music: when a xylophone plays a prominent theme in the music and when the timpani plays a motif later in the piece. In the first, the animation features the ghosts dancing over an xylophone made of bones; in the second, bone mallets play drums in time to the music.

This film is a splendid example of animation which responds to preexistent music both in terms of the narrative and in terms of actual sound.

The music is programmatic in nature. Although this is an abstract film, it tells a discernable story and the characters are always recognizable. Thus you feel more comfortable with the visual images.

You can buy Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition and The Film Work of Norman McLaren.

Cap'n Bush

by Miguel Valenzuela

Le Vampire (1945)

The Vampire is a pseudodocumentary, in fact, it's largely fantastical in elements. This film has stuff that speaks sub textually about Nazi Germany and the like. It certainly covers a lot of the different types of horrors in the world and it's quite original, too. The Vampire it is full of rhythm and precision.
The bats are being macro analyzed and they are personifying human emotion. After a brief overview of the general weirdness of the animal kingdom, Jean Painlevé talks as some sea creature creeps along the floor of the ocean like something out of a German expressionist film.



Then The Vampire gets a little into Murnau's classic Nosferatu, which eventually leads to a discussion about what vampire bats are like, illustrated with a live guinea pig. Duke Ellington's music scores it to bring us back to the sort of New Orleans voodoo tradition of vampires.
And thus what should be a documentary about parasites and bloodsuckers, becomes a subtle critique of the Nazi party.
Painlevé's exploration of a twilight realm of bats is very poetic. The approach is quite interesting along with being somewhat self-conscious aware. Painlevé preoccupies himself with juxtaposing things to create quite odd effects. The film is full of lush imagery and imagination.
Painlevé sees in the shapes and behaviour of the creatures he is observing, his own especial analogies and associations: the terrors of human fantasy are
set beside the terrors of creation.
You can buy Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s.

Profession Clone

Translation: I'm a doctor cloning little kids; good cloning is what everybody needs!

by Andrei Bakhurin.

Hunger (1974)

The film Hunger inspired a generation of computer animators in Canada. This short is created by Peter Foldes under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada. Hunger includes striking computer-generated interpolations of key poses drawn by hand and painstakingly digitized into the computer software.
NRC (National Research Council of Canada) scientists Nestor Burtnyk had programmed a complete key frame animation package that allowed the creation of animated sequences by providing only the key frames. The National Film Board in Montreal was contacted and thus a project to allow artists to experiment with computer animation was launched.

The first experimental film involving freehand drawings, called Metadata, was made by artist and animator Peter Foldes. This led to a more substantial collaboration on a 10-minute feature called Hunger/La Faim about world hunger and about rich and poor countries. The film took a year and a half to be created.
It became the first computer-animated movie to be nominated for an Academy Award as best short for "its trailblazing progress in the development of software and techniques for computer assisted key framing for character animation". It received other honours, including the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and other international film awards.



This films is a satire of self-indulgence in a hungry world. Rapidly dissolving, reshaping images, made with the aid of a computer, create a stark contrast between abundance and want. A man eats, at first sparingly but soon, his appetite grows to gluttony, greed and gratification of every desire. The nightmare that finally haunts him is the one that hangs over our desparate world.
Hunger remains a landmark of early computer animation.
You can buy Best of the Best - Strange Tales of the Imagination.

All America City

by Joseph Tripi

SELECT AWARDS & EXHIBITIONS


• 11/2006 Parsons FEAST Group Exhibition New York, NY

• 11/2006 SVA BFA Photography Mentors Program New York, NY
One on one mentorship with Elisabeth Biondi- Visuals Editor of The New Yorker

nd
• 10/2006 SVA BFA Photography Gallery – 2 Floor New York, NY
Solo exhibition of Rustbelt Revival series.

• 09/2006 1635 Wharton St. Philadelphia, PA
Solo exhibition of Rustbelt Revival series.

• 09/2006-05/2007 SVA Special Photography Award New York, NY
Scholarship based upon photographic merit and GPA.

Collision (2005)

Collision seems to be an abstract reflection on the clash of cultures which forcibly merges American quilts and Islamic patterns into beautiful kaleidoscopic scenes. I'm not sure this film is an original depiction of aesthetics into politics or an abstract satire based on the geometry of flags. Why couldn't it simply be a film about RGB, the three video color channels red, green and blue?
For an American audience, particularly, the sound cues must really help identify which culture the shapes and colors represent. Many Americans will only interpret this short as a disturbing yet potent piece of abstract political filmmaking. Personally I enjoy Max Hattler's film for its aesthetic quality.

The colours work well as do the sounds effects. The transitional movements into different shapes remind me of Oscar Fischinger's works. I can also see motifs of Islamic art in the patterns. The sound might be a collision but the video ends with the ambiguous sound of fireworks, which can either be destructive or celebratory. In the end the colors smash together into a manic color wheel of harmony. Thus this work can be interpreted in a radical number of ways.

The Process

"The is a journey and exploration through a personal 'pleroma', an imaginary landscape populated by strange, wondrous creatures and archetypal characters. Throughout the creation of this story, readers will find that the art will vary radically from chapter to chapter. This relates to another stop along the way; that of the journey of the artist. By exploring this personal world, I also hope to expand and develop my own visual idiom by experimenting with new ways of making art and storytelling. Even this introduction is by no means permanent. I will be updating it and finetuning it as the story develops. Everything here is in flux and part of an exploration and investigation into life, creativity and spirituality."

You can continue to read The Process by Joe Infurnari.

The Music Box (1932)

The Music Box was directed by James Parrott, produced by Hal Roach and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and it's one of the longer shorts for its time. 

The film is a partial remake of their 1927 silent short Hats Off, which was filmed at the same location and is today considered a lost film. Hats Off was itself remade in the same location in a film called It's Your Move starring Edgar Kennedy in 1945. But the inspiration to build a comedy around those steps apparently came to producer Hal Roach even before Hats Off. 

Although The Music Box won the first Academy Award for Live Action Short Film (Comedy) in 1932. This little classic is generally regarded as the Stan&Ollie's best film. 

The Laurel & Hardy Moving Co. have a challenging job: hauling a player piano up a monumental flight of stairs to Prof. von Schwarzenhoffen's house. Their task is complicated not only by a sassy nursemaid and the impatient Prof. von Schwarzenhoffen himself, but also by the force of gravity, which repeatedly pulls the piano back down to the bottom of the stairs. 

What could have been one joke repeated over and over to the point of monotony, became, instead, a comic fugue with innovative variations. Stan and Ollie labor with a mighty effort but obtain minimal results: the beauty lies in watching the team work out one hilarious routine after another. 

This film is slapstick of a very high level, born of the utmost frustration. 

You can buy Laurel & Hardy (Sons of the Desert/The Music Box/Another Fine Mess/Busy Bodies/County Hospital).

Nature 05

Sebastien Chort. After 4 years working for Blur Studio ( 3 years as Supervisor), he got hired by Dreamworks for a Lighting position. He started working on Bee Movie and then Kung Fu Panda.

One EskimO - Hometown (2007)

One eskimO are a four piece indie band from London, consisting of Kristian Leontiou (vocals), Adam Falkner (drums), Martin Waugh (guitar), Jamie Sefton (bass and horns). The band have since released the heartwarming 'Hometime' (early December 2007, U.K.). The video to Hometime is animated by Smuglling Peanuts and is currently circulating through the underground, appearing on MTV TWO's 120 Minutes session and online. The band's animated video has been nominated for the Public Choice award at the 2008 British Animation Awards.

The little eskimo spent most of the time wondering and thinking up stories and singing along to all the tunes that lived in his head. You see the eskimo loved nothing more than just to sing at home in his ark. It was here in his beautiful ark that he would figure out how to join the stories with the songs that floated around in his head.
Enchanted by the beautiful sound, three very curious animals decided to be brave and follow the noise.
This musical video is very sensitive, delicate and well drawn.
The humans beings are dead, sad and blighted creatures. How can't you think about your life?

La Piovra (Octopus)

Armin Barducci. He's the penciler of Aleph, Il Giocatore. His comics have been issued in various anthologies.

Second Growth

Bill Cone works as a Production Designer at a computer animation studio.

Hourly Comics

John Campbell. You can read Hourly Comics.

Allegretto (1936)

Allegretto develops itself as an invigorating contrast between overlapping, expanding concentric circles and flocks of angular, foreground shapes that sail across the screen in time to Rainger's jazzy score.
There's a series of white and pale green lozenges, irregularly distributed across a larger rhomboid shape composed of rectangles divided into red and deep green at each of whose tip hovers a scattering of white diamonds. Diamond and oval shapes in primary colors perform a sensual, upbeat ballet to the music of composer Ralph Rainger. The geometric dance is set against a background of expanding circles that suggest radio waves. Allegretto presents an intricate layering of a number of recurring motives.



This was the first film Oskar Fischinger made after he emigrated from Berlin to Hollywood in order to escape the increasingly difficult political situation in Germany. He made the film for Paramount as a kind of interlude in a longer musical film but the collaboration collapsed completely and it was never used.
He found that Paramount had changed the film project from Technicolor to black-and-white. Also, Paramount printed the black-and-white version intercut with various live action images, so it was no longer totally abstract.
Several years later, with the help of Hilla von Rebay, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Guggenheim Foundation) allowed him to buy his short film Allegretto back from Paramount, so he was able to complete it in color as he had originally intended. Fischinger then redid and re-painted the cells and made a color version to his satisfaction. The layers of cels allowed Fischinger to develop rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints of forms, while the colors change from frame to frame to create lush hues on divisionist principles, achieving particularly luminous and chromatic hues that could not be produced by normal methods of animation photography (William Moritz). Fischinger was forced to finance the distribution of this film himself and was able to make only a few copies but the film was shown at museums and centers of advanced art all over the world. This became one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music's history and one of Fischinger's most popular films.
You can buy these: The importance of being Fischinger and Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (DVD).

Robot Girl

by McBess.

Manhatta (1921)

Manhatta is the result of a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand (neither of the two had previous filmmaking experience and no connections to the film industry). It is a cinematic prose poem exalting the energetic and modern pulse of New York City.
This film is a rhythmic series of images, interspersed with verse excerpted from Whitman, fashioning an expression of the city over the course of a day. Their urban portrait begins at dawn as scores of people arrive in the city for a day of work. The ten minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River.
It consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose narrative in which the primary objective is to explore the relationship between photography and film.

Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York's photographic nature. Strand and Sheeler exhibited Manhatta as both projected film as well as prints made from the film strips that were used like photographic negatives. They created a sense of life.
Manhatta can be viewed as a representation of New York City through the eyes of a still photographer (Sheeler) : camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions. For the most part, the camera stays stationary to capture the images of the extraordinary cityscape. Sheeler and Strand aimed their camera from great heights in the city’s office towers. The city’s architecture repeatedly minimizes its inhabitants. Even the construction of these mighty edifices is not a celebration of human greatness. Manhatta is an abstract and often disturbing glimpse across a city that seems too large for its people.

Untitled

Kyle Cassidy

The Peculiar Adventures of Hector (2007)

LARSOA has teamed up with Texaco for the launch of ‘Hector’, a road safety character brought to life with the help of triple Oscar winners, Aardman Animations. ‘The Peculiar Adventures of Hector’ DVD has been offered free to customers when they make a fuel purchase at any of Texaco’s (the UK’s largest branded network of independently-owned service stations) 1,100 retail sites from the start of November.


The five animations, along with ‘bloopers’ and ‘the making of Hector’ are available as free downloads at www.hectorshome.com with games and interactive activities. In the site, children can also explore and engage in fun activities based around the themes of road safety.
This cartoon enters the imaginative world of Hector as he embarks across a range of road safety lessons with the help of a colourful cast of animal friends. Offering creative titles such as Hector and the Hairy, Scary Tarantula’s Tentacle, which tells children the importance of using a seatbelt, the films are designed to educate children through entertainment.

Inkspinster 6

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 5, click here.

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Alice in Wonderland is a 1903 silent film directed by Cecil Hepworth and starring May Clark in this more twisted version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Parts of the movie are lost; there is only one known copy of this film remaining so the British Film Institute are unable to restore the missing parts.
Alice in Wonderland was made just five years after Dodgson's death. Barely nine minutes long, this movie necessarily shows only a few fragments of the novel. Hepworth was insistent that the images stay faithful to the drawings of Sir John Tenniel, the original illustrator of Lewis Carroll's story, so it's strange that the central character looks nothing at all like Tenniel's Alice.

Hepworth has been a vitally important figure in Britain's early cinema. Alice in Wonderland was the longest film yet produced in Britain, originally running about 12 minutes.
The film was made on the small wooden stage in the garden of the villa housing Hepworth's company, with exteriors shot in the lavish gardens of Mount Felix. There were no professional actors at the studio, so all of the staff pitched in and played parts.
Some of the special effects are achieved through simple jump cuts, much less flamboyant than what Georges Melies was doing in France at this time. Like in Melies' film, in this film, too, there are linking shots through dissolves. The film required an unusual amount of planning for its day. Alice in Wonderland was an extremely ambitious undertaking for its time and it achieves nearly all of what it set out to accomplish.

Maybe 03

By Maura Cluthe .

Shaun the Sheep (2007)

Shaun the Sheep is a British show from Aardman Animations ('Wallace & Gromit') about a Sheep named Shaun. The character of Shawn the Sheep made his TV debut on Christmas Eve 1996 in Nick Park's Academy Award-winning short film A Close Shave where one of Wallace's contraptions sheared off all of Shaun's wool. Shaun later appeared in the 2002 series Cracking Contraptions episode, Shopper 13, ostensibly to rescue a wayward wheel of cheese.

The spin off series, Shaun the Sheep, consist of fourty episodes, each seven minutes long.

In this series, Shaun has many adventures with his barnyard compatriots and the rest of his flock. He is a sheep who doesn't follow the flock. The series is hilarious, adorable and far too good for the children it is clearly aimed at. Inquisitive, imaginative and mischievous, Shawn's independent nature can lead him into tricky situations. He is still young and quite naïve and his curiosity and inexperience can prove a recipe for trouble.
Every episode is a combination of slapstick and classic silent comedy in Aardman’s recognisable animation style. There is no spoken dialogue, even by human characters. In this way the series is reminiscent of early silent comedy films.

You can buy Shaun the Sheep - The Box Set and Shaun The Sheep - Saturday Night Shaun.

Self Portrait

Ratingher directes Donna Bavosa Produzioni. His comics have been published on magazines Petrolio, Fandango and iPunk.

Street Fight (2005)

Street Fight is an Academy Award-nominated documentary by filmmaker Marshall Curry. This documentary follows the 2002 mayoral campaign in Newark, New Jersey in which Cory Booker attempted to unseat longtime mayor Sharpe James. It provides a fascinating in-depth look behind the scenes of campaigns and elections and shows a series of outrageous scenes.

The documentaries can be a force for good in the world. At their best, they expose people to new issues, struggles, characters and lifestyles. They challenge us and help us to understand each other.
Street Fight is a film about race and politics whose goal is to attract an audience that does not necessarily care about or does not know that they care about, race and politics.
This film will seduce you, using humor, irony and drama to lure you out of your comfort zones. Street Fight's subject matter is something you haven't seen before.

You can buy Street Fight: A Film by Marshall Curry.

Snowbound

Lisa M. Robinson. Awards include a Fulbright Grant, as well as “Curator’s Choice” at the Houston Center of Photography Membership Exhibition and the “Top 50 Photographers” chosen by Critical Mass. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work, and was recently selected as the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.
Snowbound has been exhibited internationally in Argentina, Syria, Lithuania, Denmark, Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia. Lisa M. Robinson was recently nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant.

He has issued Snowbound.

Measles (2007)

Measles won the Public Choice award at the British Animation Awards 2008. It's animated by Sweetworld TV, directed by Lisle Turner and written by Robin Ince and Neil Redmond.
Usually I don't enjoy commercial films but it is worthywhile watching this short. It's a funny cartoon with an important message: every day someone dies. Did you ever ask yourselves how many lives can be spared? Amnecy International estimates that in 2010 more people are going to be killed by armed conflict than by diseases!

The visual style is impressive: the contrast between the coloured germs and the black and white scenes give the germs more humanity than mankind. In the animation and the filmmaking there are references to Lyonel Kouro's F.A.E.L.L.

Inkspinster 5

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 4, click here.

The Hearts of Age (1934)

This is Orson Welles' first film. This film was co-directed by Welles with William Vance and also stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself.
This silent film is a series of images loosely tied together and is arguably influenced by surrealism. The film begins with a rapid-fire montage sequence of a ringing bell, shot at odd angles and shown in both positive and negative.

The Hearts of Age reveals both a keen eye for composition and montage and substantial familiarity with film art.
The final effect is adequately frightening and disconcerting.
You can buy Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s.

Ann Archer

David Edward Byrd has created posters for Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Who & their rock opera Tommy, Traffic, Iron Butterfly, Ravi Shankar and the Grateful Dead.

Komposition in blau (1935)

Colorful geometric figures are set in rhythmic motion. Choreographic cubes, cylinders and columns participate in an exuberant ballet that recalls the patterns created by Busby Berkeley. Within a deep blue environment, one red cube slowly drifts on a reflecting floor. Suddenly there are multiple red cubes drifting and dancing in various formations.

In Komposition in Blau there is a continuing interest in eastern mysticism and western hermetic thought. Fischinger focused the romantic drama in his compositions on mystical, contemplative and speculative-scientific icons, filling his films with non-objective figurations.
Fischinger used tight synchronization between his visual and musical soundtracks as a helpful analogy for audiences who were still somewhat astonished by abstract art. His films became widely misinterpreted as illustrations of music.
Komposition in Blau won a prize in Venice and brought him international fame.
You can buy these: The importance of being Fischinger and Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (DVD).

Kingpong

by James Barr. His projects: The Monkey Nuts, Marrs Bar and Piggy Bank.

Cold Mountain (2003)

Directed by Anthony Minghella, this Civil War saga addresses romance, friendship and the ravages of war. Based on the Charles Frazier novel, this is a tale of hope and redemption. Cold Mountain captures the horrors of war for both those fighting it and for those left behind.
It tells the story of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman (Jude Law) who struggles on a perilous journey to get back home to Cold Mountain, N.C. as well as to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the woman he left behind before going off to fight in the Civil War. We watch as the characters begin to unravel their internal tortures and their need to subdue their isolation, to face their regrets and hope for the future. We can also observe the stages of emotional changes in the characters.
The symbolisms, throughout the film, are plentiful and brilliantly ascribed, allowing the audience to connect the dots to the destiny of the couple. Even crows, clearly suggesting doom and destruction, never fail to demonstrate the dark instincts that trouble a man's soul.

On the way home, Imman meets a long line of interesting and colorful characters, while back at home, Ada is learning the ropes of managing her deceased father's farm with Ruby (Renee Zellweger), a scrappy drifter who assists and teaches Ada along the way.
Cold Mountain is beautifully crafted, assembled and absolutely mesmerizing in all aspects of filmmaking techniques and style and the mountains of the movie title are so amazingly and magnificently captured at different camera angles, from scene to scene.
The film was considered a contender for the Best Picture Academy Award for the year 2003, but failed to garner a nomination, although it did earn the nomination for Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes. Despite not being nominated for the Best Picture award, the film did manage to pick up seven nominations, and one win for Zellweger as Best Supporting Actress.
If you watch this movie, you'll watch cinema in its purest form!
You can buy Cold Mountain (Two-Disc Collector's Edition).

Scan 1 and Scan 2

© Dietmar Gottschall

Triangle (1994)

Triangle is a a very conceptual and exotic kind of short animated film in which Erica Russell combined Charlie Hart's African and Brazilian sound track with western drawing. The artist uses pencil, brush painting, chalk, cut paper and air-brush. The drawing is influenced by African art, too.
The passions of young lovers and another woman are expressed throught paint and dance. The triangle shape appears and wrap itself around the female's body and dances with the male. It makes powerful use of music and artwork styles that range from classical drawing to pure abstraction.


The human figures are highly stylised and beautifully simplified. The entire film is based on the stream of movement, derived from three human figures against neutral backgrounds. There's a complex inter-relationships between the geometrical patterns on the screen, and the symmetries of colours Rusell uses.
For its abstract exploration of colour and rhythm, Triangle established Russel's reputation as a natural successor to Len Lye. Russell transforms color, movement and music into a pure sensory experience: the swirling and transforming images of Triangle provided the most compelling images in its rhythmic flow depicting a love triangle.
This animated film was nominated for an Oscar in 1995. In 1996 it received the British Animation Award for Best Film under 15 minutes and also a special award for her contributions to the Craft of Animation.

Inkspinster 4

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 3, click here.

Sortie D'Usine (1895)

According to many critics and film buffs, the first viewing of Sortie d' Usine takes it rightful place as the biggest shock in movie history: the audience was caught completely off guard and were absolutely dumbstruck. They didn't think that the picture would move!
The first film audiences did not demand to be told stories but found infinite fascination in the mere recording and reproduction of the movement of animate and inanimate objects.

I doubt a modern audience could fully understand the beauty of Leaving the Lumière Factory: what fascinated audiences wasn't the depiction of riveting events but what went on behind the scene.
You'll find yourselves flying into the screen, pulled by the movement of the doors of factory. Two doorways open themselves slightly. And at each moment we cannot be certain what will happen next but we're involved in a process of a spatial change, the opening of the doors.
You can buy The Lumiere Brothers' First Films.

Chinese Insect

Donald Silverstein has worked as illustrator for advertising agencies and publishing companies. He has won awards for advertising illustrations and book illustration. His works has been exhibited at The Detroit Institure of Art as well as galleries in Tokyo and in Paris.

Trembled Blossom

During the past edition of NY fashion week, Prada presented an incredibile short-film, Trembled Blossoms, during a wonderful party to introduce their new collection. This animated movie captures the essence of Prada's Spring/Summer 2008 Collection.
An army of CGI operatives were enlisted to show Prada's alien morphing from a Lalique-like blossom, through a pastel coloured meadow and into a splendid, seductive glade, where she meets Pan. The fashion element is subtle yet cleverly handled. Directed by the performance artist James Luna, animated by Sight Effects and based on James Jean's Nouveau-esque wallpaper seen in the ad campaign, the film is an ambitious narrative fantasy depicting a nude alien's journey through a magical, illustrated forest.

She begins as a sort of pale neuter alien wearing nothing but PRADA heels and then a mysterious character emerges from the trees and clothes her in the stand-out red and blue check sheath dress from the S/S '08 collection. Next, Pan shows her how tropical fish can be transformed into multi-coloured PRADA handbags in the shimmering pool at the heart of the wood. Clothes and accessories that appear by magic!
Illustrator James Jean has posted some of the concept artwork that he created for Trembled Blossom.

Protectobot

by Paper Resistance. His works have been published in many magazines. He's one of the editors of Inguine Mahgazine.

Vormittagsspuk (1928)

Ghost Before Breakfast was produced for the International Music Festival at Baden-Baden with a score by Paul Hindemith. The film came out in 1927-1928, so it was conducted from a rolling score. But the Nazi regime saw this film as a form of degenerative art, so it destroyed the sound version.
Hats flying, guys with suits climbing ladders, etc. It's a very rhythmical story of the rebellion of everyday objects against daily routine.

Ghost Before Breakfast is different from previous films by Richter. For the first time, he makes a narrative film characterized by a subtly absurd humour, instead of attempting to make music through images. However, there is a great rhythm to this film: cut outs and the repetition of actions give to this film order and chaos.
This short is also considered a lesson in stop-motion cinema for its many interesting special effects and inventive visual tricks, although the animation of the hats did not succeed.

Untitled, from the series Withinnan, 2007

by Michael Kwiecinski

Coldcut - Just For the Kick (2006)

Lucy Izzard won the BBC's New Talent New Animation competition in 2005 with her Tea Total. This short film was screened at Antenna in London and attracted the attention of UK audio visual legends Coldcut, who asked Lucy to make a video for them.

She didn't have a huge amount of time to get it done, so she enlisted two fellow animators, Matt Latchford and Lucy Sullivan, from her Illustration/Animation course at London’s Kingston University. They formed an art collective together under the name Smuggling Peanuts.


It took the trio two weeks to come up with all the ideas in the video and then three weeks of hard work completing the entirely hand drawn animation on laptops in each other’s flats.

Coldcut - Just For the Kick is a pop video in which there is a clear key element: the quest of young people for popularity. You can find many references to the 70's and 80's generation. Their desire to be photographed, to be watched while they "exhibit" themselves is evident. There's also a sense of anger and alienation in this video. Can people survive this kind of life?

Inkspinster 3

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 2, click here.

Autism Is a World (2004)

Autism Is a World, a co-production of CNN Productions and State of the Art Inc., is a candid and compelling look into the mind of Sue Rubin, a 26-year-old Los Angeles woman living with autism. The film has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
Gerardine Wurzburg chose to make this film to bring people into the world of autism. Autism is a world so difficult to explain to someone who is not autistic.

This short film is written by Sue Rubin herself. At the age of thirteen, she learned to express herself through a computer keyboard, otherwise known as facilitated communication, revealing that she was in fact highly intelligent. She went on to study history, specializing in Latin American History at Whittier College and to write speeches about her life with autism.
Autism Is a World explores Sue's world, her writings and the remarkable friendships she created while in college.
As the film moves to its conclusion, it comes to a wrenching emotional climax. Sue shares her final thoughts as the film concludes. Her words are simple: “The last thing I want to clarify is that no matter how much social interaction one has, one will never be free of autism. The tendencies to be and act in certain ways may subside but I will always be autistic.”

Because, because...

Stefan Leyh .

Selected Exhibitions
2008 »relocated #3«, Filipp Rosbach, Leipzig
2007 »Unter Löwen«, Sächsische Staatskanzlei, Dresden
2006 »im nu«, Dresden
»Grand Ouvert«, Filipp Rosbach, Leipzig
»Il mondo reale«, Laden für Nichts, Leipzig
2005 »624 miles«, Oslo
»Spuk«, Kustodie Leipzig
2003-2007 Jahresausstellungen der HfBK Dresden

It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House (1979)

Paul Fierlinger has been a professional independent animator since 1958, when he made his first TV commercial in Prague. Since then he has produced roughly 1000 films of varying lengths, including the Teeny Little Super Guy series for Sesame Street. He received an Oscar nomination in 1979 for his short, It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House.



This animated film is based on a novella by Harry Allard.



The wolf in this tale is a fully humanized character. He has made some grave mistakes in his life that have put him on the wrong side of the law. An old man advertises for a companion to take care of his animals and is answered by a fuzzy stranger named Cuthbert Devine. The wolf behaves well and becomes a trusted friend. Then comes the revelation of the wolf's criminal past through an article in the newspaper. The wolf is devastated.
It's a nice tale about racial and unfair prejudice. The story is humorous but I find the message about the redemption through good works a bit too do goody.

Reclaim Public Space

Pietari Posti

Russian Ark (Русский ковчег, 2002)

Russian Ark opens with a black screen and the voice of an unnamed man explaining that he's just regaining consciousness after some mysterious accident. Unseen by the audience and voiced by the director, he wanders through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three-hundred-year history. He is accompanied by a companion, "the European", who represents the nineteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers and at other times, they go completely unnoticed.

The film contains Aleksander Sokurov's visual meditations on the history of the Russian people and the lives of their descendants today, an amazing voyage through war, revolution and social upheaval, which has left in its wake all the landmarks of a great culture. Like the biblical Ark, the Hermitage (Winter Palace) has steered a difficult course through the adverse currents of time and tide. A treasure-house of life and art, it is also a testament to the buoyancy of the human spirit.
The Hermitage is to be seen in a new and revealing light in a forthcoming film. In the popular imagination the Hermitage is a living entity, a fabric that breathes Russian history and culture. Generations of the Romanov family actually lived, loved and, in some cases, died in a place they called 'home' for all its rare splendour.
The film was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The information was not recorded and compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes. Four attempts were made to complete the shot; the first three had to be interrupted due to technical faults, but the fourth attempt was completed successfully.
Russian Art is a purely cinematic movie which allows us to take a trip throughout the museum and throughout the history of Russia's last three hundred years.
You can buy Russian Ark: The Masterworks Edition.

(b)ananartista è un pinguino

(B)ananartista Is A Penguin is by (b)ananartista (orgasmo sbuff) , an Italian multimedia artist, painter, illustrator, videomarker, performer, poet, songwriter, musician, sculptor, shaman, designer and living museum.

Rainbow Dance (1936)

After A Colour Box, Len Lye made another abstract advertisement, Rainbow Dance, for the Post Office Savings Bank with this surreal, innovative film.
Due to the pressures of working within a documentary environment, Lye incorporate more concrete images in this and in the next films but the commercial messages continue to be always subsidiary to Lye's experiments with music, colour and movement and are added at the conclusion as an apparent after-thought.
Rainbow Dance employs shot footage and overlays it with a number of abstract colour effects.
The main image is a silhouetted figure in the film, enacted by dancer Rupert Doone. Light transformed the surrounding mise-en-scène into a colourful, shifting landscape, aided by the use of deregistration effects and stencil patterns to produce the colour echoes that appear throughout the film.

In Rainbow Dance, Lye experimented with the new colour separation processes such as Technicolor: he used a black and white footage coloured by manipulating the three red, green and blue matrices of the Gasparcolor 3-colour separation system, as had Oskar Fischinger in his 1930 advertising film, Circles. After this process, the animated film looked like a cubist painting or a collage by Matisse. Lye manipulated the celluloid through different levels of exposure. When shooting the original footage, he then used black and white sets, which allowed him to adjust the colours later in a controlled way.
Abstract and semi-abstract shapes surrounding the figure, constantly moving and changing, create a a mass of complex and jumbled movements.
The advanced effects, visual motifs and music that Lye used on this short film can be seen as a precursor to today's music videos and as the first experiment towards a new kind of cinematic reality.
You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films and the vhs Rhythms.

Inkspinster 2

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 1, click here.

Im Anfang war der Blick (2002)

When a writer investigates Austria through the image presented by postcards, the landscapes around Erzberg and Salzburg province become something between a dream and a nightmare. And the words on the back of the cards seep into the scene as whispers. These are terrible and painful texts, written by unknown hands over the course of time.

The result of five years of work is a 45-minute art movie about Austrian landscapes.
The camera acts as a winking eye spying into a poet’s workroom. Books are stacked to the ceiling and the poet moves agilely between typewriters and shelves, leafs through books or, like Alice, enters a looking-glass. Bodo Hell cuts a restless figure, a man of the word setting off on a journey into the images. In a rhythmic montage, innumerable postcard motifs rain down upon the viewer, which the protagonist then enters as if they were real landscapes.

Bady Minch's cinematic narrative of a poet’s search for images provides the framework for a critical reconquest of an idyllic Alpine landscape. Using breathtaking montage work and elaborate film technology, she penetrates deep into the sultry colour of the postcards without succumbing to their camped-up charms. Single frame shots, dissolves and language employed as a musical element in a fast-paced composition of words and images are combined to create a film which goes against conventions and expectations. For In The Beginning Was The Eye, Bady Minck used also single frame techniques, time-lapse and slow motion.
This is a film about story-telling and remembering, the volatility of language and images.

Im Rausch der Tiefe

Frank Kunert


Award

2006		Silbermedaille beim "3rd Biennial Dimensional Salon", New York
2004		Förderpreis Kunst & Museum Hollfeld
2000/1998/1997		jeweils Bronze Award bei der "3-Dimensional Illustrators Awards Show", New York
1998		2. Platz bei der Wahl des Publikumspreises beim "Berliner Karikaturensommer"
1994		Bronze-Auszeichnung beim Wettbewerb zum "Kodak Panther Work Book"

Fehérlófia (1981)

Can a film be experimental, pop-art, fairy-talish and mainstream at the same time?
Son of the White Mare is all these things and it was also voted as one of the 50 greatest pieces of animation by a group of LA film critics.
A great deal of Jankovics' works are base on folklore and mythology. The plot has been mixed together from folktales of middle and eastern Europe. The respect for folk traditions makes a surprisingly coherent and unbelievably powerful whole. The film uses an original story developed from a collage of common fairy tale themes to create an exciting adventure filled with trials, courage and romance.

Following the demise of his equestrian mother, the son of the White Mare embarks upon a magical journey through far away lands. Witness him befriend his faithful servants Stonecrumbler, Treeripper and Ironmolder, deliver a well-deserved beating to a diabolical little goblin and take a ride on the wings of a mother griffin.
The design is radical and subversive but always functional. Jankovics makes the movement a primary aspect of the design. Every element is synthesized into a cohesive whole: a total composition in motion, which allows the filmaker to approach the idea of animation as a visual equivalent to music, with references to melody, rhythm and harmony working in a non-literal evocation of ideas and feelings.
The folk art is filtered through the sensibility of psychedelic poster design and combined with art deco and art nouveau.

The Evergreen Mon

Florian Satzinger is a production designer, character designer and writer ("Toby Skybuckle - Adventurer By Mistake"; "Adrian's Tower"; "2Q3 - The Creating Dragons Formula"; "The Recalibrated Fantastic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn") at S&H FEATURES.

Hardwood (2004)

The Academy Award nominated Hardwood is a personal journey by director Hubert Davis, the son of former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis, who explores how his father's decisions affected his life and those of his extended family. Mel Davis, now a coach for young basketball players in Vancouver, recalls falling in love at first sight with Hubert's mother, a white woman, at a time when racism seemed to make their union impossible. Despite their emotional bond, still resonating over 20 years later, Mel chose to marry a black woman, with whom he also had a son.


Elegantly structured into three chapters entitled "love," "recollection" and "redemption," Hubert Davis uses personal interviews, archival footage and home movies to delve into his father's past in the hope of finding a new direction for his own. He unites both sides of his family, speaking movingly about the complex web of love, betrayal and family ties that bind them all. This is a very touching and emotional story of mending relationships and unconditional family love.
Hardwood is about the healing power of redemption and the bonds between fathers and sons. This film is a heart-wrenching look at the socioal and emotional impact of fatherless families and the absentee African - American father.
This film is also important for African - American studies, multicultural studies, psychology and sociology.

Blood Oranges

by Kathryn Parker Almanas.

Seelische Konstruktionen (1927)

In the early 1930s, German and Austrian emigrants influenced the American film scene. One of the most important of avant-garde artists was the animator and painter Oskar Fischinger: one of the greatest artists of the XX century.
His films and paintings have long enjoyed the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of artists and continuing anonymously to serve as models for computer graphics and MTV video-clips.

Spiritual Constructions opens with two silhouetted male figures drinking together at a table. Over the course of the next few minutes, they change rapidly into all manners of shapes, objects and creatures.
The final result is a surreal and nightmarish imagery: a wonderfully witty exploration of a vast interior landscape.
You can buy these: The importance of being Fischinger and Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (DVD).

Inkspinster 1

Elisabetta Decontardi (Deco). Her strip "Inkspinster" is published weekly on: Inkspinster and La Striscia.
In 2003, it the first collection of Inkspinster was released by Lilliput.
Deco has received awards in illustrations, satire and comics contests. She collaborates with comic-related sites, webzines, magazines and free-press newspapers.

L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat shows a steam train arriving at a station and moving towards the camera.
It has passed into film folklore for the incident that occurred at its world premiere, when the audience, unfamiliar with the cinema thought the train was really coming right at them and panicked!

This short film is generally considered to be the "first motion picture" in modern history because the illusion of reality was achieved without much difficulty and the dramatic resources of depth of field are exploited. The train thrusts itself towards the camera creating a dynamic close-up.
The development of mass spectatorship was the main factor in the growing popularity of film. This not only allowed for the development of a profitable business but also moved the centre of attention from the artistic value of the film as conceived by the director to the need to fulfil the spectator's expectations.
You can buy The Lumiere Brothers' First Films.

A Standardized Way Of Expressing Emotional Connection

Amir Fallah founded Beautiful/Decay as a black and white, hand-photocopied “zine” while still in high school. Along with business partners Fubz and Ben Osher, Fallah has transformed B/D into an internationally distributed publication with a circulation of over 40,000 readers in less than ten years. As the Creative Director of B/D, Amir has molded the magazine into one of today's most well-respected and reputable independent publications.

Tim Tom (2003)

Romain Segaud codirected his first film, Tim Tom, with Christel Pougeoise, as graduating project at SupInfoCom.
Tim and Tom are two little men (whose faces are in fact notepads!) trying to keep in touch with each other. But the Creator, a giant omnipotent hand, tries very hard to interfere with this. To succeed in their quest, they must face more severe perils!
The plot is clever, full of intentional references to animation. Tim Tom is, in fact, a homage to the cartoon film, with touches from the Thaumatrope, the studio Aardman and the influences of Tex Avery. Segaud's inspiration for the film came also from Georges Méliès, Norman McLaren George Pal and Ian Svankmayer.


This short film boasts excellent timing and character animation. The characters designs are very simple and the animation is simply perfect. The film is funny but also complex because it exhibits multiple layers of meaning: it manages to mimic a stop motion/puppet like feel and to explore the boundless world of 3d animation.
This is a high class and self-referential movie, where the heading titles are strictly correlated with the ending. An exceptional aesthetic and a technical quality gives originality to this 3d short film, which won the Grand prix des Imagina Awards 2003.

Zero or One

Andrea Scopetta. He created, in 2001, together with Alessandro Rak, the animation studio Rak&Scop. They created Ark (Grifo Edizioni), Petrolio (Lavieri) and Zero Or One(Lavieri). Scopetta also drew Fujiko o Margot (Lupin III Millennium, Kappa Edizioni )

Anemic Cinema (1926)

Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make Anemic Cinema and to go into the art business (Calvin Tomkins). The film was shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. Various versions were made in 1920, 1923 and eventually in 1926.
This is the only film directed by French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose name is associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. As with similar avantgarde works made by Man Ray, Hans Richter or Fernand Léger, there's no plot, only moving shapes and objects, in an attempt to deny the vision of art as contemplation and ecstasy. This characteristically dada film by Marcel Duchamp consists of a series of visual and verbal puns with nonsense phrases inscribed around rotating spiral patterns, creating an almost hypnotic effect; an exploration of wordplay intermixed with optical illusions.

A spiral design spins dizzily. It's replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself.
The spinning wheel is a recurring theme/movement in Duchamp's works: Bicycle Wheel (1913), Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and his Rotorelief (1935).
Duchamp explains that he enjoyed watching the wheel spinning. Thus, we can guess this short film is a moment of ectasy or spiritual meditation.

Downtown 20

Francesca Galliani. Her last exhibitions:
Luxardo Gallery, Roma
Up to the sky 2, photo festival, Milano
LEVI'S Project - Triennale, Milano
Il Torchio contemporary art gallery, Milano
Duplex Art Gallery, Genova

Night on Bald Mountain (1933)

In 1933, Alexandre Alexeieff invented the pinscreen method of animation, a tecnique which consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own hole.
After two years of work, Alexeïeff, with the help of his wife Claire Parker, completed Night on Bald Mountain. This short animation is based on Noch' na lïsoy gore (Night on Bald Mountain), a fantasy for orchestra composed by Modest Mussorgsky and arranged by Rimsky Korsakoff. The piece is performed by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Coates.
Another inspiration for this work was the pointillism of Seurat. Alexeieff, in his work, combinined sensibilities at once surrealist and classical, ancient and modern.

Night on Bald Mountain has much affinity to Walt Disney's evocation of the same Moussorgsky work in Fantasia (1940). While Disney's Fantasia used cell animation in a direct and explicit way, the power of Alexeieff's work derives from the extraordinary versatility that he and Claire Parker brought to their unusual medium. Their technique is most closely akin to the music that they visualize in their manipulation of time and space through shadowy referents. The description of both sight and sound is dark and lyric. There are unexpected harmonies between visual and musical images and the tonalities are always elastic and balanced. Animation and music become metaphorical equivalents to one another. Through a suite of immaginative pictures and metamorphosis, they narrate a tragicomic story of life and death.
Unfortunately, the distributors objected that the only way to make a profit was to produce a dozen films every year. Alexeieff and Parker, therefore, left art and cinema to turn to advertising.
You can buy the dvd Animation Works of Alexander Alexeieff and the book Alexeieff.

Lackadaisy

Tracy J. Butler. You can read his webcomics Lackadaisy

My Architect (2003)

In A Son's Journey, Nathaniel Kahn examines the life and career of his father, Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), whose work included the Salk Institute and the Parliament and Capitol Buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before dying of a heart attack in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974, unidentified (it took three days before someone claimed his body) and broke despite having been one of the century's most influential architects.
Louis I. Kahn's obituary listed his survivors as a wife and daughter. But the list was incomplete because Louis I. Kahn also led three different personal lives, with three different families, fathering a daughter with his wife, and a child each by two other lovers.

The film was made by Louis Kahn's illegitimate son Nathaniel Kahn and features interviews with many giants of modern architecture.Throughout the film, Kahn visits all of his father's buildings. Thus, he pursues the object he wanted: by describing the obstacles and influences that shaped his father, he gains knowledge of a lost father.
Why should people watch this documentary? Because My Architect offers a fascinating insight into Kahn’s architecture and then into him as a man. Louis I. Kahn was a man obsessed by his work. His life was neither private nor public, but transcendent. He was a visionary man, whose aesthetics forced him beyond the dichotomy of public and private. And although Louis I. Kahn was already dead at the time of making the film, he is very much a presence in the film because his son was able to use documentary footage of his father from a series of films from the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a very satisfying, very informative documentary experience.
My Architect was nominated for the 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
You can buy My Architect: A Son's Journey.

Scrap Metal

by Chris Jordan.
His books: In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster; Intolerable Beauty catalog (self-published).

Awards
2007 Green Leaf Award, Natural World Museum and United Nations Environment Programme; awarded at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.
2006 Lannan Foundation Grant to support production of In Katrina's Wake, Portraits of Loss From An Unnatural Disaster
2006 Fellowship Award recipient, Society For Contemporary Photography, Kansas City MO; juried by Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Books)
2006 Best of Show award, "Artists Responding to Violence Against the Earth," Museum of Cultural Arts, Houston
2005 Finalist, Santa Fe Prize for Photography
2004 First Place Winner, Gary Horowitz Award, 2004 Allegany Arts Council Wills Creek Survey, juried by Elizabeth Thomas, Carnegie Museum of Art
2004 Photo Espana Descubrimientos 04, Honorable Mention runner up to festival prize, Madrid, Spain
2004 Finalist, Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, Center for Documentary Studies, juried by Maria Morris Hambourg

Gopher Broke (2004)

Jeff Fowler shows us how important it is to keep simplicity in mind. This 3d animation reminds me of the old Warner Bros cartoon. The animation is well done and the gags come rapidly throughout the film's 4 min. running time. Gopher Broke is a very entertaining 'toon!
I enjoy this film’s visual style: everything has a dusty, worn down and weathered feeling. Even the vegetables have been handled in a way that makes them almost unnaturally colorful and appealing because they must have a hypnotic effect on the Gopher.


The entire story is built around one particular gopher’s scheme to rob the passing farm traffic of their vegetable harvests, hoping to get a free lunch. He finds himself on a road where trucks are hauling produce to market. He hits on the idea of shaking some of the produce loose for himself but other animals always beat him to the booty. Thus, the action continues to build as the Gopher’s frustration intensifies, leading to a climatic ending and surprise confrontation.
Gopher Broke was playing as part of the Sundance Film Festival 2006 and was also nominated for the 2004 animated short film Academy Award.

Exit Interviews

Chip Zdarsky has illustrated for Popimage.com, Eye Magazine, Law of Inertia and All-Star Magazine while producing his ongoing comic-book, Prison Funnies.

Un Homme de tetes (1898)

The earliest of Melies's early films were only one to three minutes long each & made every effort to make their entire point in the shortest amount of time possible.
Widely regarded as a miniature masterpiece of the silent era, Un homme de têtes is a short comic film which bubbles with wit and energy; this short demonstrats already Georges Méliès’ extraordinary talent as both a performer and filmmaker.
The skill of Méliès’ performance and technical wizardry are pure cinematic magic.

Less than two minutes long, in Un Homme de tetes Georges Melies appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.

Jamon

by Luis Belmonte Diaz

Drink (2001)

made his directorial debut in the stylistic MTV animated series “Down-town”. He went on to direct several seasons of the popular series “Daria”. Currently, Smith is working full time on independent films. In 2000, the New York-based Smith made his filmmaking debut with the animated short, Drink, which drew worldwide acclaim and was subsequently featured in more than 70 international film festivals.




You might be interested in Patrick Smith's Small Configuration 2 .
You can buy: Liquid Tales, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. I, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. II, Spike and Mike's Cutting Edge Classics.

Pulci 2

Pulci is by Claudio Cardinali. If you want to read Pulci 1, click here.

Cassette Memories (2003)

Aki Onda has performed with multiple cassette walkmans and electronics, using field-recording sounds that he has recorded himself as a diary for more than a decade. He released the first album of the series, Cassette Memories in 2003, under the title Ancient & Modern, followed by the second album, Bon Voyage!
Cassette Memories is a music performance, or a ritual, that conjures up the general essence of memory as Onda playes his own personal memories. He uses old tube guitar and bass amps to deliver the desired warmness and depth of cassettes.
These cassette diaries are only memories of sound, dreamscapes, freed from all meaning and even from Onda's own subjectivity. The artist conducts his attention to the origin of the sounds. It is an event that is partly visible but seen mostly in one's imagination. I think Onda openly acknowledges his debt to visionaries of the medium such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

Cassette Memories has been realized as a site-specific performance because Aki Onda found that his music is stronger when he performs in a space which has its own memories: memories awake memories. Inside this memorial space, he burns candlelight as a symbol of reminiscence.
This project began with Aki Onda's travel: he got into the habit of making cassette recordings of sounds and ambiences he heard wherever he went. He used a little hand-held device to do it. It became so important that he turned it into a project and gave it a name: Cassette Memories.
Thus, Onda, who forged the music from the sounds of everyday life, began to record those sounds around him that caught his attention. He captured all those songs that contained an eerily familiar quality, altough they're divorced from any specific moment in time. Onda mixed the etereal element to obtain an eternal deja-vu; a moment in which all sound seems to flash back in a single spectacle. And naturally, one day, he noticed his collection of cassettes was beginning to take up too much shelf space!

The Labours of Hercules

Leonie Purchas.

Selected by the Magenta Foundation 2007
Winner of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for photography
Selected for the Joop Swart World Press Masterclass 2006
Awarded 15 month scholarship from Fabrica, Italy, to collaborate on the ‘Les Yeux Ouvert’ exhibition at The Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Winner of the Jerwood Photography Award Selected as one of the Photo District News 30 emerging photographers
Winner of the Tom Webster Award
Winner of the Ian Parry Memorial Scholarship
Winner of the Metro Bursary Award

A Colour Box (1935)

A dizzying parade of dancing lines, squiggles, dots and arabesques is set to a joyful Cuban soundtrack. A Colour Box is probably one of the most innovative uses of film in the history of advertising and a tribute to the instincts of the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson. In order to turn an abstract film into a GPO advertisement, Grierson came up with the idea of inscribing a few words at the end of the film to promote the use of the postal service.
Len Lye originally planned a self-sufficient abstract film. When John Grierson watched A Colour Box, he was so impressed by it that he suggested adding some words extolling the value of the parcel post which are incorporated into the final minutes of the film. These words are somewhat incongruous in the context of the film but they are incorporated appropriately.

A Colour Box was created by the application of paint directly onto film stock itself, dispensing with the need for a camera. This was the first time Lye had painted directly onto film. He then used tools such as a camel-hair brush and a fine-toothed comb to build up colour textures upon the filmstrip. He presented a mass of complex and jumbled movements by painting directly onto celluloid, creating a sense of off-screen space. Lye used the soundtrack as a creative base by associating particular shapes with certain sounds, so that there is a loose relationship between sound and image.
This short film was also notable for being a colour film. Lye used the process of Dufaycolor at a time when colour film was still in an experimental phase.
A Colour Box so impressed the judges at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels that they invented a category for it and awarded it a medal of honour.

You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

Paris

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

Blueberry (2004)

Blueberry (Blueberry: L'expérience secrète) is a French movie adaptation of the popular Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry, illustrated by Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier. This adptation is very loosely based on the comic and adds mystical and shamanic elements not present in the source material of interest to the movie's director, Jan Kounen.
In the 1870's, U.S Marshal Mike S. Blueberry tries to stop Wally Blount, the man who killed his girlfriend from getting to a stockpile of gold hidden in Indian territory. On his way, he meets Prosit, a German villain on a persistent mission to find gold in the Superstition Mountains.
The film combines some action-packed western sequences with lots of druggy references as Blueberry follows his Indian brother Runi (Temuera Morrison) into the depths of his own unconscious while battling a hardened killer (Michael Madsen) and trying to woo love interest Juliette Lewis.

The movie features several elaborate psychedelic 3D computer graphics sequences as a means of portraying Blueberry's shamanic experiences from his point of view. Jan Kounen, the director of the film, drew upon his extensive first hand knowledge of ayahuasca rituals in order to design the visuals for these sequences, Kounen having undergone the ceremony at least a hundred times with a Shipibo native speaker in Peru. An authentic Shipibo ayahuasca guide appears in the film and performs a sacred chant. In the film, the exact nature of the entheogenic sacramental liquid which Blueberry (and his enemy, Blount) drink remains undisclosed. During the final visionary scene, however, a bowl of leaves is shown accompanied by a twisting vine which closely resembles the shape of Banisteriopsis caapi.
You can buy Blueberry, l'expérience secrète.

Senza Titolo (Without Title)

"Senza Titolo" (Without Title, 2008, 21 cm x 30 cm).

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, free lance journalist... Active for many years in the international underground scene. He has collaborated & he collaborates with many, many zines, magazines of contemporary art, literary and of comics in Italy and in the world...& on paper and on the web...
He has also worked with many bands of industrial, noise, experimental & electronic music. He has produced some booklets of illustrations and comics, too.

Dog Interface (2000)

The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time (TMGLMOAT) is a Radiohead DVD released on December 1, 2004. It is directed and edited by Chris Bran. The film contains all four episodes of TMGLMOAT and features new songs with numerous live videos. It also has animations and interviews with the band.
One of the episodes is The Dog Interface, a short film directed by the acclaimed Juan Pablo Etcheverry. It's pure poetry!

In a futuristic world, human society has been annihilated. People continue to live but they have mutated and even if their knowledge of science and techology continues to grow, they no longer comunicate with each other.
Their life is impersonal, without a soul. Everything, every human life can be "rehealed" artificiously. People don't need anything, they no longer need to be human.
Dog Interface is the most poetic cyberpunk tale I've ever watched!

Contraband Chapter 1

A near-future tale revealing an all-too-possibly-real world of underground video, violence and crime on cell phone networks, Contraband follows a young man's journey into a new "voyeur underground", where profit-hungry youths prowl streets secretly filming radical events with mobile devices to satisfy society's demand for sensational on-the-go content.
It's an Orwellian Graphic Novel: the use/misuse of camera phones, loss of privacy and the boom in the spy cam industry that this generates. It reveals how our life going to be in the next few years!

Contraband is a 144 page graphic novel written by Thomas Behe and illustrated by Phil Elliott. Published by SLG Publishing.

Canadian writer TJ Behe has twelve years experience developing wireless content for global entertainment companies including BBC, Playboy, MTV and T-Mobile.

UK Artist Phil Elliott ’s graphic novels include Illegal Alien (Dark Horse) and Tupelo (Slave Labor) and he has over 20 years experience working with publishers including Marvel, DC, Image and Fantagraphics.

Inker & Toner Ian Sharman and Cherie Donovan are active professionals in the UK comic scene currently developing sequential titles at Orangutan Comics.

Filmstudie (1926)

Hans Richter’s pioneering Dada work Filmstudie was an early attempt to combine Dadaist aesthetics and abstraction. Made in 1926 Richter’s film presents the viewer with a disorientating collage of uncanny false eyeballs, distorted faces and abstract forms (none of these themes is treated constantly). It's similar to Man Ray's work in its ballet of motion which combines a playful tension between figurative and abstract forms, both in negative and positive exposure.
Filmstudie is essentialy a transitional work of mixed styles. A number of devices drawing attention to the technical specificity of photography (multiple exposures and negative images) are also included and enter into a successful fusion with the remaining elements.


Dreamlike motifs of magical realisms correspond to the style of surrealist movement (especially in the use of surrealist motifs such as glass eyes, birds, and mask-like faces) which had recently achieved its breakthrough in France. But you can also find animated geometric surfaces and lines from Richter's first films and there are also signs of influence from Cinéma pur and reminiscences of Léger's Ballet Mechanique (1924). Photographs of light and shadow, circular motifs of varied shadings, point-style shapes, light reflections and photographs of a girl's head multiplied through prisms occur in a series in which the abstract forms seem in large part to be blurred and foggy.
Although Richter does not reach the formal subtlety of Eggeling or Ruttmann, his work still contributes substantially to the Absolute Film. He isolated certain parameters and he contributed to construct a basis for a cinematic art independent of the realism and concrete nature of the photographic image. This film also wellded the aesthetic thresholds between photography and animation, erasing some differences and accentuating others.

Nude A Poppin Horizon

by Brad Troemel

Hokusai - An Animated Sketchbook (1978)

This award winning short film was written, directed and animated by Tony White who is known for his versatility and range of styles, way back in 1978. His career includes twenty years at Animus Productions/Entertainments as president and founder, seven years at Richard Williams Animation Limited as personal assistant to Richard Williams on A Christmas Carol (Academy Award), five years at Halas and Batchelor as Head of Design, Director, Designer, Animator of numerous projects such as the animated tv series Jackson Five and Tomfoolery, various commercials and short films.

The film brings to life the worlds of Japanese ukiyo master, Katsushika Hokusai (best known for his iconic The Great Wave). Hokusai's work is so pervasive in Japanese culture that you can still see it influencing today's artists.
This short British film is a wonderful overview of the artist's life and work and also his philosophy about art. White has used 60 Hokusai prints to animate this wonderful tribute to the artist who called himself the old man mad about drawing.
It deservedly won the BAFTA award in 1979 in the Best Short Factual Film category.

Amsterdam

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

The Blood of Yingzhou District (潁州的孩子), 2006

Ruby Yang is a noted Chinese-American filmmaker whose work in documentary and dramatic film has earned her an Academy Award and numerous international awards. She lives and works in Beijing, directing documentaries and public service announcements for the China AIDS Media Project.
The Blood of Yingzhou District, which Yang directed as part of the project, won an Academy Award in February 2007.
The subject is AIDS in China, specifically in the province of Anhui. The victims are poor families. The adults donated blood in evidently unsanitary conditions: one individual, apparently connected to the blood drawing procedure, describes combining the donated blood of fifty individuals and then re-injecting a little bit of the mixture into the veins of the donors.

Yang enters the Yingzhou region and follows the plight of a number of these orphans, including a particularly unfortunate one, Gau Jun. The suffering of these orphans is all the more devastating for being largely unnecessary: the results of misinformation about the nature of the disease. Abandoned by his family, Gau Jun hasn't uttered a word since then and is now treated as a pariah by surrounding communities. The film reveals how the little boy is taken in by a loving, accepting family and given a second chance.
No-one knows how old Gao Jun is. Four? Older? Younger? Whatever his biological age, he has none of the verbal babble, or ready tears of a child his age. The film tracks this orphan for a year as his closest surviving kin -- his uncles -- weigh what to do with him. The older uncle’s dilemma: if he allows his children to play with Gao Jun, who is HIV-positive, they will be ostracized by terrified neighbors. The younger uncle’s dilemma: so long as Gao Jun remains in the house, the young man may not be able to find a wife.
Though the film is primarily concerned about the social conditions of these children, political issues are indirectly raised. One can't help but dismayed by China's social services. It is hard to believe that China's health system could be so primitive!
Yang reminds us that because of governmental irresponsibility, many other less fortunate children are left to fend for themselves. These children may never find adoptive parents and social acceptance.

Brace 3

Barbara Caveng. Since 1991, she participated as a free-lance artist in numerous art projects, concentrating on sculpture, installation and object art. Her installations have been recently shown in projects in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, in Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, the Gaus der Kunst in Munich, the Art Museum of Akurery, Iceland, the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Heidelberger Kunstverein.

In 2003, she was awarded the H. W. & J.Hector Award by Kunsthalle Mannheim for installation and in 2002 the Award of the city of Limburg for her work U MENJA EST METSCHTA – I HAVE A DREAM. In 2001, she was also awarded the cultural exchange scholarship for Moscow by the Senate of Berlin.

Tusalava (1928)

Tusalava (The Samoan word Tusalava means 'In the end, everything is just the same'), is a 9 minute black and white animation on the origin of life, based on Polinesian art. Len Lye had recently arrived in London from the South Pacific when he began this film in which he merges elements of European modern art with the primitive art which he had experienced in the South Sea Islands.
It was particulary influenced by the witchetty grub (Baldwin Spencer's and F.J. Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia has been the main source for Lye's ideas on witchetty grubs), a source of food for the Aboriginal people. The shapes inherent to much of Lye’s direct animation and paintings are derived from dots and indigenous tapa patterns. His enduring fascination for and extensive studies of Pacific imagery, rhythms, myths and legends was translated into many of his paintings, films and theories of art.
This short film was funded in part by the London Film Society and Lye laboured over it for two years. The Society couldn't afford an optical sound print so it showed the film in 1929 with live piano music written by the Australian Jack Ellitt.


Tusalava is now a silent film as its score has been lost, maybe forever, since Ellitt recently died in N.S.W. Tusalava had an almost minimal slowness, quite different from the pace of Lye's following films. There is a slow development and interaction of forms. Len Lye thought not of forms in themselves but of them as movements in time. He needed a new kind of imagination to seize this idea fully but the public regrets that the film was not amusing.
With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positives, the other negatives, the film evolves primaeval single-celled nuclear forms into living, rhythmic chains of existence and then, beyond, into creatures of tribal consciousness, both ancient and utterly contemporary. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis is achieved. This film captures the mutability of existence, the ambiguity between fertile penetration and aggression, absorption and synthesis.
It represents a self-shape annihilating an agonistic element. lt should be the first part of a trilogy, with the beginnings of organic life. The second part would have shown geology and the sea and the third would have dealt with humanised forms. For financial reasons, he was unable to process the second and third parts and it was not until six years later that he had the opportunity to launch another film. In the meantime, he pursued activities as a designer and painter.
You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

The Persepolis Mission Statement

by Mike Russell

Emak-Bakia (1926)

Emak-Bakia, ( the title comes from an old Basque expression that means don't bother me), subtitled a cinépoéme, features many filming techniques used by Man Ray, including rayographs, double exposures, soft focus and ambiguous features. The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso and some of Man Ray's mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
It was, originally, a silent film (note: the first screening was with a phonograph recording of a popular jazz tune, along with a live pianist and violinist who took over with tangos when the records were changed) but recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray's personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.

This short film involves a series of illusive, unrecognizable monochrome images juxtaposed with more naturalistic scenes. A light board appears from time to time carrying the news of the day. Then, an eye. A woman in a car drives along country roads. Farm animals. She descends from the car, again and again (the shot is repeated three times, the fourth time it fades and is replaced by a stepped superimposition of all four shots and as the film progresses the car theme becomes dominant). Images: dancing legs, seashore, swimming fish, geometric shapes, cut glass. A man removes his starched collar. It rotates. A girl has garishly painted eyes. No, she's only fooling. Those were her eyelids.
Individual images are striking for their humor and originality but Ray still apparently felt it necessary to impose a conventionally readable theme -the car ride -to hold the film together.
Some consider this a much less concise version of Le Retour de la raison. But here Ray is going for a surrealist approach, which doesn't work in a few important ways because this short film isn't abstract. Man Ray uses more concrete parts that fit with the more abstract things. There's also a huge disjunct between the fractured narrative and the exploration of spinning, warped lights and patterns.

I agree that this short film is in part a continuation of the technique introduced in Le Retour à la raison in that it, too, includes a series of rayographs. But this film, however, is more sophisticated in a technical sense than the first, employing rapid cutting, superimposition and slow motion to create a far more complex, though equally abstract film. In addition, Ray also incorporates a great deal more play with light in the film, even inserting non-objective reflections into the body of the film. In addition to these purely abstract images, Ray interposes realistic images of daily objects, people and landscapes.
The motion graphics elements of the film were achieved with Man Ray’s cadre of filming accessories: deforming mirrors, an electric turntable, an assortment of crystals and some special lamps (Self Portrait, 1963). These optical moments are interwoven with live action fragments that are both dreamy and graphic. The result is a highly visual study of motion, shape and light, that reveals a methodical experimentation with the possibilities of representing such phenomena.
The relationship between dreams and desire is also very interesting. Emak-Bakia has been interpreted, by the cinematography critic, as a woman dreaming about her own intimate desires, transposing her conscious sensual experiences into a chaotic, revolving morass of abstract thoughts. We see both of her worlds in this film: the physical world of corporeal pleasures and the inner world of her mind, which no man can ever hope to interpret.
You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 and Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century).

Company of American Girls

Melissa Ann Pinney.

Grants and Awards

2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award
2006 Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios
1999 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
1997 LaSalle National Bank, Chicago Marathon Project Commission
1992 Chicago Women in Philanthropy, Mac Arthur Foundation
1989 Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
1987 National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Regional Fellowship Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
Community Arts Assistance Program, Chicago
Changing Chicago Documentary Project, Chicago
1981 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1980 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1977 Artist in Residence, Evanston Arts Center, Evanston

L'Enfant de la haute (2001)

La storia di Mara (Mara's story )

Paolo Cossi. He has worked as a teacher in a comics school since 1997. He won the Jacovitti contest in 2002 and the Albertarelli Prize in 2004.

His works: Corona. l'uomo del bosco di Erto (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Tina modotti (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Mauro Corona. la montagna come la vita (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Il terremoto del Friuli (Becco giallo), Unabomber (Becco Giallo), La storia di Mara (Lavieri), 1918: DESTINI d'OTTOBRE. Britannici oltre il Piave (Dario De Bastiani Editore), Medz Yeghern, Il grande male (Hazard edizioni).

Terminus (2007)

Trevor Cawood was born in Regina. He began his career working as a visual-effects supervisor and commercial director. Terminus (2007) is his first film. This short is a dark comedy about the self-destructive nature of the human mind and the dangers of urban isolation. It employs a sharp deadpan sensibility and a stylized dystopic world to evoke our universal anxieties.
Soaked in Seventies concrete modernism and making brilliant use of computer generated graphics, Terminus brings urban angst vividly to life.

After inadvertently offending a strange entity that accosts him on his way to work, a 1970's businessman quickly finds himself in the midst of a bizarre predicament. A colossus made of concrete pilings follows a lonely man throughout the city tormenting him as he goes about his daily life on the subway, at the doctor's office and elsewhere. What follows is a rapid descent into madness, a journey both eerie and darkly humorous. All the while, a strong, foreboding sense of mental anxiety builds as the man is ultimately driven to extreme ends.
The exact nature of the businessman's tormentor is purposefully ambiguous, lending itself to a variety of interpretations. Is "Terminus" a surreal critique of human alienation in the modern urban environment or is the protagonist's struggle an internal one, his mysterious stalker a manifestation of his repressed subconscious mind? Either way, it's a deceptively simple story but the thought behind this short is very complex on every level.

Landscape 02

Rebekka Ehlers. In 2003 she received a scholarship from Fabrica, The Benetton Research and Communications Center, where she worked until starting out as a freelance photographer in 2005.

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926)

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was the first full-length animated film and despite being 75 years old, the silhouette animation looks clean, fresh and technically adroit.
Lotte Reiniger spent three years making this silent animated film based on the Arabian Nights legends. She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film.
A wicked sorcerer tricks Prince Achmed into riding a magical flying horse. The heroic prince is able to subdue the magical horse, which he uses to fly off to many adventures. While travelling, he falls in love with the beautiful Princess Peri Banu and must defeat an army of demons to win her heart.
Reiniger made the entire film frame-by-frame with elaborate paper cutouts under a camera. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. A modern, existential condition is visible in the construction of her silhouettes: fragmented pieces of paper bolted together at various joints, moving mechanically from frame to frame.

A study of natural movement is very important, so that the little figures appear to move just as men and women and animals do. The backgrounds for the characters are cut out with scissors as well and designed to give a unified style to the whole picture. They are cut from layers of transparent paper.
The color-tinted film uses a diverse cast of characters, animals and elaborate backgrounds that make an otherwise limited monochromatic experience come alive.
And the music adds narrative to the piece, with each character having their own theme.
Human gestures, in particular, are wonderfully underplayed, helping the film throughout, as well as rendering several scenes with an ethereal, erotic quality.
Lotte Reiniger brings a unique perspective to the look of traditional characters, as she uses intricate Eastern details to show off astoundingly delicate filigree cutting work and an amazing grasp of the way in which shapes work together and of optical illusions.
You can buy The Adventures of Prince Achmed dvd and the essay The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

E.S.U. 8

If you want to read E.S.U. 7, click here.