I Just Spent $77.00 On This Book

I've always been a big fan of Hoogerbrugge. His clean drawings, surrealistic style, and eyecatching animations has always been entertaining and inspiring. His sort of stuff is one of the many things I dream of doing but probably never will. But given the chance to read about it, and I'll drop the bucks. My ebay auctions have been going well lately, so it's not even like I'm spending real money--it all just gets sucked out of my Paypal account.

Hoogerbrugge just came out with a book of drawings, cartoons, and essays--there's even a chapter where he explains (Scott McCloud-style, through comics) how he made his animations, so maybe I will learn how to do it! There's also a dvd of animations included, which is a big bonus. Looking forward to getting my package from the Netherlands.

This Might Make Me Like Politics

I'm not much of a political person; I never really was, and then went to a politically-charged school that really turned me off to the whole process. But this might make me get out there and vote for Obama.

Superheroes, animation, hot girl, catchy theme song, AND it's given me some ideas to use in my own videos. Well done, Barely Political!

Tomb Raider Animated

I've always loved Tomb Raider. My type of game; lots of exploring, lots of puzzles, a little fighting that's not too difficult, all in all a nice mix. Now Turner Broadcasting has commissioned a series of animated shorts called "Re/Visited", where different people interpret the whole Lara Croft mythos. The first one is masterminded by Peter Cheung, the guy behind the groundbreaking Aeon Flux series. Pretty cool, eh? One feature I really love is how the opening for the show displays the pencil tests and animatics for the animation; very inspiring.

The videos are premiered on the Gametap site, but you can also view them on YouTube (and save them if you use something like the fabulous Video Downloader for Firefox. Then use iSquint, and you can watch them on your iPod or iPhone.)

Shades of Grey

Good lord, how much do I like this animation short? It has so many great attributes. 1) It's entitled "3X Super Robot Heartbreak". Coolest name evah. 2) Amazing use of limited colour--mostly just a few shades of grey. 3) Kickin' music. 4) Giant robots. 5) Subtle, slick, creative animation effects 6) Nice, crisp story.

All made by the fine folks at Black Brow, who have a higher-quality version of the flick on their own site, as well as some other offerings which I shall peruse when I get some time tomorrow (hopefully). Oh, and the creators' blogs (linked off the above site) look promising as well--very cool guys.

Ba Da Bup Bup Ba DAHHH!

If you were watching HBO in the early Eighties, this program intro will be ingrained deep in your memory. It always promised excitement, entertainment, and the then-revolutionary idea of seeing recent Hollywood films from the comfort of your own home.

Even if you weren't watching HBO in the early Eighties, you might find this little documentary to be rather interesting. It shows how the above intro was created, and shows how much more complicated and expensive it was to produce a short clip that today could be done on a home computer in a few weeks with software off the shelf. Here we have miniatures, acetate-based optical effects, motorized tracking cameras, fiber optics (!), an airbrushed mural, actual construction of a simple three-d logo shape, and what now looks like the most primitive computer ever produced. I found it fascinating, and somewhat inspiring. (And you gotta love the horrendous lyrics for the song they used for the documentary--although I still love the uberdramatic music used in the intro itself.)

Call For Animators

Respondez-vous, mein comrades!

I need one more creative personage to join me on this mighty quest. This article gave me an interesting idea. I love the idea of collaboration; it inspires me much more than just doing crap by myself. And I always loved that game where you fold a piece of paper in thirds and one person draws the head, the next person draws the body, and the last person draws the legs (known formally as "The Exquisite Corpse", although for some reason, we didn't use that name when we were eight). And I've always been amazed by the Zoom Quilt, the way that different people worked on the same project without seeing what the other folks were doing.

Anyway, working on the premise of that first article, I thought up an interesting potential project. My friend Jackson has agreed to write a piece of music that's 1:30. Then I'll take that music, and animate my interpretation of the first thirty seconds. Then I'll send the final frame of my animation (or maybe a second's worth?) to the next person (who will be the world-famous animator and meme cretor extraordinaire Nick Faber), along with the full copy of Jackson's music. Faber Fabe will animate the next 30 seconds and pass it on, and the third person would do the same, returning it to me to assemble the pieces into one amusing pastiche for release on the worldwide media giant that is The Wuh-Wuh-Wuh.

And the name I have chosen for this project?
MONOTUNALITY + TRINIMATION = QUADLABORATION
(and maybe just "Quadlab" for short.)

Let the trumpets sound and the angels cheer.

So anyway, I'm looking for a third animator to complete our Quadlab team. Lemme know if you think you have what it takes to be the final component in our triumvirate of power, glory, and animation. You can use any method of animation you want: hand-drawn, Flash, stopmotion, rotoscoped, whatevvah. The only requirements are a promise to actually do it, and a desire to be part of something fun. RSVP to ME ASAP and we'll C-H-A-T. I really wanna make this happen.

Jumping

It's always particularly amazing when you find great things that have been around for years, but have just not been within your sight. Today I discovered a wonderful short film by anime/manga pioneer Osama Tezuka, the creator of such timeless Japanese classics as "Astro Boy" and inspiration to generations of artists. This short is not done in the traditional anime style, so even if you don't particularly enjoy the big eyes and stylized action of typical Japanese animation, you might enjoy this. I find it to be a captivating unification of style, persepective, and discovery. Enjoy Osamu Tezuka's "Jumping".

StopMotion StreetFighter

Corey Brown will like this. Nick Faber will as well. Other folks might too.

Nazibot

This is a pretty amazing little thirteen-minute cgi film from Marco Spitoni at Cee-Gee Net. The plot is described thusly: "An epic battle as WWII Nazi Germany unleashes a 100 foot tall robot on the US." Sweet. The attention to details is fabulous, the rendering is supreme, and the storyline is thrilling and entertaining.

It's a 161MB download, but well, well worth it. This sort of thing could be the future of entertainment; I'd rather pay for a dvd of something like this, with notes and storyboards and tales of how it was made, than go to a brick-and-mortar theater to see the crap Hollywood has been throwing out week after week. And an independent producer/director, with the publicity of the internet, could make a much better margin of profit than the bloated movie machine of Hollywood.

A mirrored link is here.

Letters And Space

Led by a post on a drawing blog I frequent, I came across a chain of intriguing animated typography videos as I wandered through YouTube. I love type (although I don't really know enough about it; I know what I like) and I love animation and video, so these are really interesting to me.

Pulp Fiction dialogue - very, very nice. Great timing, great colour, great choice of movement. Led me to...
Fight Club dialogue - fun to watch, marred by several misspellings and incorrect transcription. Led me to...
Tramp - again, nice colour choices, type combined with graphic forms to follow a jazzy blues song. Led me to...
The Lions Roar - probably my favourite of the bunch. Great rich colours, gritty textures, and a great blend of type and graphics. Led me to...
ABC Movie of the Week - included for amusement's sake. Ya gotta love the Sixties. Reminds me of other great tv idents of the era. In the 1970s, you really knew you had to stay tuned when CBS played this.

Chris Ware

I don't really know Chris Ware. I've seen his books at the comic store, but have never picked one up. I'm attracted by the crisp, sparse-but-potentially-detailed art style, and the amazing use of colour, but the subject matter doesn't really grab me. I think I'm going to grab something of his at this week's huge Chapel Hill Comics sale, though. (Any suggestions?) I love the way he uses clean lines and simple vector-inspired shapes to create an attractive image, as well as his clever compositions that invite you to just stare and ponder and investigate. So much comic art these days is all flash and no substance, comic books full of complicated-looking drawings that both overwhelm and dull the eye, resulting in a quick read that leave you feeling you wasted your $2.95 (or more!) on a five-minute experience that you quickly forget. Chris Ware's drawings make you want to look at them for a long time and appreciate their structure.

Anyway, all of this rambling was inspired by the animation Ware did for an episode of This American Life on Showtime. Very nice.

I think I might try to do some stuff in this style. I really like it, and it might be cool to try and do some lucha-style comic strip with a clean vector look.

Seriously, any suggestions for a first buy? I know that Jimmy Corrigan is his most famous thing, along with the Acme Novelty stuff, but I also know he uses a number of different styles, and it's the clean-line vector-y almost isometric look from this animation that I really like. What to get?

Eh, It's Just Puppets...

My pal Nick Faber reads this blog, and he's also starting to get into stop-motion animation. I just tripped over this great resource, and instead of just emailing him, I figured I'd put it up here so that a) he could read it, b) I could remember where it was, and c) others with like mind might enjoy it. So anyway, Nick check this out.

Found via the fine folks at Ward-O-Matic.

Making Fiends

This animated series is fabulous. Nice dark colours, interesting textures, great writing, amusing theme song, good vs evil, it's got it all! I'm trying to decide if I should go ahead and buy the dvd versions, to support this fine work AND see the making of featurette. Oops, I just did. Yayyyyy!

I want to make an animated series as cool as this. Maybe I will. This one is very inspiring to me.

C'est Animation Excellente

This guy has some great videos on YouTube; old animated commercials from Europe and Africa from the 1950s. My favourites so far are this fanciful tour of the Orangina factory, and this rollicking commercial for Azur Gasoline.

Another Trove Of Information

I've got a number of drawing and animation resources bookmarked, and I'm trying to include them here on The Transmutation Effect for others to enjoy and learn from. The Temple of The Seven Golden Camels is, first of all, a really cool name for a blog. However, that alone would not merit inclusion here. The contents of said blog, however, are fabulous. The masthead describes The Temple as being "everything I know about the art of storyboarding", but really, there's so much more here. I'm particularly drawn to an insightful article about using colour to distinguish figures and draw the eye to the focus of a scene. Great reading; highly recommended.

The Motherlode

This is the motherlode of animation information. The International Animated Film Society is building a webpage of information that is unparalleled. If all they had online were scans of Norman Rockwell's Famous Artists Course, well, it would still be the best web resource ever. But they have so much more. John Kricfalusi is joining up with this site to produce the $100,000 Animation Drawing Course, featuring scans of classic Preston Blair instruction books. The course is worth $100,000, but it is in fact free. And Kricfalusi will critique your work online. Jesus.

That's not all. The site also features art from classic Golden Books (I'm looking at you now, Jackson!), layouts and model sheets (some of my favourite things), classic newspaper cartoons and comics, interviews and biographies, downloadable classic cartoons (I'm getting Chiquita Banana right now), and tons more.

Run, don't walk.

Mashin' It With Grandma Flava

This is an excellent mashup of Public Enemy and Herb Alpert, with an excellent video. Grandma bakes a cake, punctuated by fly b&w graphics.

Pretty much everything the Evolution Control Committee does is great, though. I first learned of them through the amazing Rocked By Rape, and was hooked. Download their mp3s, and buy their albums. I did.

Anamination Is Cool

Beavis and Butthead were never a favourite of mine, but some of it grows on you, much though you try to resist. I find myself doing Cornholio impressions on occasion. ANYWAY, this episode is about animation, which is an interest of mine, and it amused me.

CageMatch 10-28-06

So this week we had the special Halloween CageMatch video that I had been working on all month. Some of you may know the background behind this, but for those of you in the dark (heh)...

A little over a month ago, PT Scarborough told me he wanted to form a CageMatch team...a zombie CageMatch team. I said "great." This is exactly the kind of stuff I want in CageMatch; teams with a theme are so much fun to design videos and plotlines for. Witness the videos for such teams as SUMO, CCCP, and The Children of the Atom. A team of zombies? I'm all for it. I went ahead and scheduled PT for October 28th, figuring it would make a good Halloween show. As it turns out, the champions coming into the 28th were The Darkness, who do their show in masks and with the lights turned off, so I couldn't have asked for a better scenario.

I started preparing for the Night Of The Living Improv video a month ago. Jackson Hall introduced me to linocutting, and I thought it would be perfect for a zombie video. I got a linoleum block that was about 6" x 9" and carved the background image of the hill, moon, tree, and text over the course of three hours. (One funny note: after 2 1/2 hours of carving, on the first test print, I noticed I had misspelled a word--oops!) I loved the unevenness of the print; it had the perfect spooky look. I then worked off a Jacksonian sketch of a zombie and carved individual body parts: head, torso, arm, straight leg, and bent leg. All of this was block-printed on Bristol paper with black ink and then scanned into the computer. The background was placed over some spooky clouds made in Photoshop, and the moon was layered with an inverted copy of itself to get a...well, "moon look". Then came the hard part. The individual zombie parts were pulled into Flash and puppet-animated to make them walk. This was the first time I had ever tried my hand at character animation, and I was pretty amazed it turned out decently. (It helps that I was animating zombies, who walk jerkily anyway.)

I used some great Nigel Simmons music from the "Calling All Fiends" online Halloween album, as well as a techno cover of Corey Hart's "Sunglasses At Night" done by Tiga Zyntherius, which worked perfectly for the end.

The video can be viewed here.
Stills from the video can be viewed here.
Photos from the show itself can be viewed here.

I may do a "how this was made" tutorial-type thing on this video, if there's any interest.

Many thanks to Jackson, for helping me with the linocutting, and to PT for putting on the funniest show of the year. PT did an amazing job of directing and inspiring his troupe of zombies and zombie-handlers.

IT'S A CAROLINA HURRICANES GOAL!!!

Hilarious.

Whether you like it, or you don't like it, learn to love it, 'cause it's the best thing going today.

(Courtesy of stylin' and profilin' Larry Weaver.)