april 15th 2008

"Spirited Away" the making of...
it tells about the main character, how she is based on a friend of the director's daughter. many characters were based on people the director knew in real life.
the strange town is also based on a real place.
the animation dept is large. each image is drawn by hand. even with the advent of digital animation. they create storyboards and have meetings to discuss them. taking real life examples and detailing every movement. they videotape how animals move in order to better animate it.
key animation is next to detereming basic motion. then in-betweens cleans it all up and fills in the gaps.

the director is getting old and is delegating more tasks.

4/8/2008

John Canemaker "The Moon and the Son".
It is animation spliced with real footage and animation. It tells a story of a son discussing his fathers anger. But he does have happy memories. He says how his father helped him make his first movie.
The father was unhappy and miserable with himself. It tells an animated anecdote of a particular night. Arson how his father was arrested They use real newspaper clipping mixed with "crayon" animation. His father goes on trial. He is fond guilty. and sent ot Attica. Guilty of Arson.
The family was shunned from church. The mother got a job at a midnight shift working at a maternity ward. Fathr released after 5 years. An animated jail bird asks his father to explain his life...
The father tells his life story. Born in Pennslyvania family goes back to Italy, calabria. after great earthquake. only 3rd grade education, aided his grandfather, a shepard. his grandfather dies. he grows up in calabria, joins mafia. father went to jail along with his mother. returns to America in 1925, he was 18. he pushed cart for the mob... he moved upstate new york. worked as a bootlegger, got arrested. shoots a man and goes to jail again. goes back to working on rail road, meets and falls in love. he was 34, she was 36.. john born in 1943. father was drafter into the army in WWII. fought in D-Day. gets 2 purple hearts. returns home, wife and 2 kids. works a laborer in elmira new york. buys small hotel... w/ mafia loan. falls into debt, mafia burns down hotel. 5 years in prison, gets out become matience man in hospital.
son discusses the tension, father discusses how he always kept his sons fed, deep italian food. father would insult his son.
like the father, the son goes to manhattan at 18.
father returns to calabria and donates bells to church.
the animation ends like it began.
this animation was my favortie. i loved the real photos mixed with the animation. the animation began with crayon then evolved as the timeline progressed.

April Fools!

Bill Plympton "The Fan and the Flower". open of a house, discusses a ceiling fan. it was lonesome, awww. a bird tempts it with friendship but flies away. the old lady buys a potted plant. it falls in love, showing off his blade and showed off his light beam. very sensual. the plant played hard to get. but she could not resist his big blades, so she opened her flower for him. sadly the relationship never reached a physical level. the plant shows off her flowers and he sent breezes. the old lady, became senile and forgot to water the plant. and the fan got dusty. the plant eventually dies and the fan spins uber fast. and the fan flies through the ceiling. but his death gave the plant water... the girl plant worked the poor man fan to death... typical. and the plant evidently was pregnant and had a fan flower.
i liked the animation. it was black and white with a very distinct style. it looked hand drawn and i enjoyed that. it had character. only the flower had colors. the simple colors worked amazingly well.

The second animation we viewed was Adam Phillips called "Bitey" and the story "Little Foot". bitey runs thorugh a field of grass roaring. lots of camera movement, closeup angles and pans of a water fall scene. with a moving leaf? a child bitey fall down a hill chasing the leaf thing. now i guess bitety is throwing rocks and sees a spider, fercious looking. he pokes at it with a stick. bitey the kinda unicorn hairy thing. now the little hair ball is back and hears noises. and he sees a farting bird. he sees bitey coming and he runs, but now very well. bitey jumps over over him and stops him and little hairy guy attacks him and rips his face. but big hairy guy comes to save its kid.
bitey throws grass at him and laughs. so hairy guy hurls a rock, to no avail but little hairy knocks bitey out. it ends with creepy looking things.

this animation was okay. i felt that it lacked soul or character. it was funny though, but i felt that it had nothing special. it looked amazing and very well done, clearly he has talent. but it seemed to me, to lack "soul".

march 25th 2008, blog entry

Alex Budowsky: Bathtime in Clerkenwell (2003): the animation is a music video. its about birds, from a coo coo clock who attack a man when he wakes up every morning. its a very distinct animations style. in that everything is black against a white background. the birds attack him in the bath (hence the title) then it goes into a production line sequence. and the birds continure their assualt as the man bathes. the also attack the guys parents. there is a wizard bird there too. and it ends in color with a bird having watched it all on t.v. then he goes to bed. first of all, the song irratated me to no end. i thought it looked cool but really much too long. i was bored after a while.





Last Time in Clerkenwell (2007): its now the bird in bed. it is all slightly more abstract. still the black against white. its a bird society on a production line. then a train. traveling around the world and the moon and space. its all abstract with no true story line. i guess it is just suppose to look cool. i think it looks cool, but there is no need on earth for this to be almost 4 minutes long. it should only be used for a 30 sec commercial style. if i never hear that song again, i will be a happy man. im sure someone out there likes it, but personally, i was underwhelmed. i appreciate the effort and work, but i strongly disliked it.

2/19/2008

Today we viewed Jan Svankmajer's "Dimensions of Dialogue from 1982" which uses stop motion animation. It begins with oddly enough, opening credits with natural sound of people talking. Then there is a vegetable man and a clock man ad the "clock" man cuts up the food/vegeie man. And then he walks away But he encoutners office supply man. And offie supply man crushes poor clock man. he barfs him out as a new creation. Then office supply gets eaten by the former vegetable man. who in turn barfs out the new office supply man. Then veggie and clock meet yet again and eat eachother. and veggie ma is turned into sand man.
office supply then turns clock man into shrapenel man. sand man then eats office supply and turns him into refuse man. then someone else eats someone and barfs them out into clay man. this repeats itself again. so now we have 3 clay men. who keep barfing out more clay men.
part 2- we have a clay man and a clay woman. they love eachother, its cute. they kiss and literally, suck face. the rub each other in intimate places. and begin to make hot clay love. he doesnt last very long though, but long enough to create a clay baby blob. which they smack around. they throw it at each other and and then fight.
all in all it was interesting. the music soundtrack played an important part. it was all very surreal. it was okay, honestly, it didn't grab my attention much. i thought it was neat but nothing to write home about.

The second piece we viewed was oculart. it was a duck bouncing off a duck while a woman watched. it was very strange and surreal. different pieces moved like the umbrella. i did not understand what exactly it was trying to say about anything. it looked cool and i got a spooky vibe, but other than that nothing overwhelming. it looked nifty but left a bitter after taste in my mouth.

The 3rd piece we viewed were the title credits of Lemony Snicket. The end credits. It was a surreal portrait of an ocean with three children stranded at sea in a boat. then lemony lifted them up and threw the boat into the sky. the children rode bikes through a graveyard. all the while lemoy snicket's profile would appear and his eye. the animation was all dark colors. the children looked somewhat like paperdolls. it was similar to that other animation we saw, the german one. they put alot of effort into the end credits, which is a shame, because no one ever watches them (excluding this class). it was all rather dark and moody. it seemed to re tell the movie.
seemingly all surreal work is dark and moody.

week 4 (2/12/2008)

Today we viewed Walt Disney's "The Old Mill" (1937). The animation opens with a ws of a spider-web, intact, and slowly zooms into an old mill. It has gentle serene music playing as it shows ducks, and love birds all enjoying the old mill in peace. It goes up the mill to introduce an owl and sleeping bats. The bats awake and fly out of the mill. You then see frogs with very expressive eyes croaking in harmony with the crickets. Then a storm batters the old mill and the music becomes menacing and evil. The owl gets soaked, the mother bird almost gets crushed and mayhem generally ensues. The storm passes the bats return and the camera zooms out and the final shot is off a broken spiders web.
This movie was brilliantly animated and the music added much to its atmosphere. The whole animation exuded an atmosphere which took the viewer to a cartoon world, which was clearly cartoon, but felt of so realistic.

Blog 3 (radiohead)

This weeks animation "Low Morale: Creep" by munkee hub(2006). It was a flash animation set to an acoustic version of the Radiohead song "Creep". The basic story outline is that there was a egg head shaped man who was mouthing the words to the song. He starts out alone with a plant withering and dying next to him. Slowly an office setting begins to be born around him. Eventually it fills wit desks, cabinets and co-workers. There is also a city scape outside the window. All the while he is singing along. Eventually he throws himself out the window and lands in a dumpster. The dumpster dissolves and fades away and he is left alone.
All in all i really enjoyed this one. The colors were all very drab and very grey. A great deal of looping as far as objects and motions of characters go. All the transitions were very smoothly done. The lip synching was perfect. And the animation fit the general mood set by the song.