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

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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

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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

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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.