hey all!
just a note:
could you all email me to spacefishmemory@gmail.com instead?? just trying to organize my emails a bit better! thanks =D

Conceptual Beat Stuff

Right click and save as to d/l the inspiration images I've pulled up for this so far. Any questions or comments about what I was thinking or sources of the images, just go right ahead and ask.

Dance the End Credits away

Hell, as imagined by us, David Lynch style via Inland Empire. Probably not rated PG, likely has some flashing. Definitely has some log sawing.

Inspiration for our character

I really like de facial expressions on this character, and his design is very simple.

Presto chango

Felt like trying out a new template for the blog. As Angela mentioned, it was looking pretty bland. Once we have a clearer vision of our film, we'll hopefully have a matching look here. This one feels a bit more structure for the time being. Not sure about the colour though...

Quino

Quino is an argentian comic strip artist, who has always been my inspiration. You can see here what was running through my mind when I said the guy "dies unexpectedly"

Consider your audience!

Is this the same guy that... (Brian? Mark?) showed us in class?
I've been really good so far about refraining from spamming you guys with TED talks, but I love the way that this guy goes through understanding and expressing ideas through motion and logical solutions. He describes his work, at one point, as being 'as close as he can get to painting' and it made me happy.
The people who would watch a student animation would be people who have an appreciation of art, but not necessarily animators themselves. Maybe we can play off this somehow with the judgment device which reads memories? Anyway, it's nice to think of.

BY THE WAY...

WHERE IS EVERYONE!?!?!?!?

like.. the other half of our group???

The Pumpkin of Nyefar

As if you didn't see it coming eh? It's Mel with yet again another short! If you guys are regular brew readers, you might've seen this already. It was co-written by Maurice Noble, made in his memory, and is a pretty fun film.

(click here to view the film because Cartoon Brew's embed option is iffy)

If Story is king, then Character is pope

Re: our meeting today

I would very much appreciate if everyone in our group could fill out this simple, one page form and either post your response in the comments, send it to me via email to ambyuler AT gmail DOT com, or hand me a completed, printed version to me tomorrow during the day. I will be going through your responses and summarizing the information. The other handouts mentioned at the bottom of the page are waiting for you in your inbox. Let's iron out these major kinks and have something to show Tony on Thursday! READY SET GO!

post~

just letting you guys know that my blogger has changeD.
this is the new link, anD here's something cooooool
FOOD FIGHT

since we're kinda on the subject...

This is the original short that won the Oscar. Found footage of recordings of Irish kids from the 60s. You gotta love how they put the kid's personality in the bible characters while they're talking. ...at least I do. Note that they used an old crackled film overlay, which some crew of The Pearce Sisters wanted to use originally (but I'm really happy they didn't), but in this case, I think it works because of the whole found footage thing.

by "popular" demand...

It's called Closed Mondays (thanks Adam!) - and it's real Claymation (by Will Vinton, the California Raisins guy). It's old, it's rough, and hilarious. Kinda reminds me of The Critic because of the artsy fartsy element.

Duality according to Wassily

I was in the school library today and I found a fabulous book. Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He is a colour man, and in the book he discusses the relationships between forms and colour as well as the primal emotional responses humans have to the various combinations. It may be a tad early to nitpick on colour, but I've picked a few passages which are full of good expressive language I feel may help us set a tone or mood.

The first bit explains his theory on reasoning behind our first and lasting impressions.


To let the eye stray over a palette, splashed with many colours, produces a dual result. In the first place one receives a purely physical impression, one of pleasure and contentment at the varied and beautiful colours. The eye is either warmed or else soothed and cooled. But these physical sensations can only be of short duration. They are merely superficial and leave no lasting impression, for the soul is unaffected. But although the effect of the colours is forgotten when the eye is turned away, the superficial impression of varied colour may be the starting point of a whole chain of related sensations.
On the average man only the impressions caused by very familiar objects, will be purely superficial. A first encounter with any new phenomenon exercises immediately an impression on the soul. This is the experience of the child discovering the world, to whom every object is new. He sees a light, wishes to take hold of it, burns his finger and feels henceforward a proper respect for flame. But later he learns that light has a friendly as well as an unfriendly side, that it drives away the darkness, makes the day longer, is essential to warm, cooking, play-acting. From the mass of these discoveries is composed a knowledge of light, which is indelibly fixed in his mind. The strong, intensive interest disappears and the various properties of flame are balanced against each other. In this way the whole world becomes gradually disenchanted. It is realized that trees give shade, that horses run fast and motor-cars still faster, that dogs bite, that the figure seen in a mirror is not a real human being.
As the man develops, the circle of these experiences caused by different beings and objects, grows even wider. They acquire an inner meaning and eventually a spiritual harmony. It is the same with colour, which makes only a momentary and superficial impression on a soul but slightly developed in sensitiveness. [...] And so we come to the second main result of looking at colours: their psychic effect. They produce a spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance.


He goes on to discuss the connection between taste and sight, and "scented colours".

A second section I liked, which the previous is really just a precursor for, talks about earthly and heavenly colour.


Yellow, if steadily gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence, and reveals in the colour an insistent, aggressive character. The intensification of the yellow increases the painful shrillness of its note.
Yellow is the typically earthly colour. It can never have profound meaning. An intermixture of blue makes it a sickly colour. It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy.
The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator, (2) of turning in upon its own centre. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper.
Blue is the typical heavenly colour. The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises towards white, a movement little suited to it, its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant. In music a light blue is like a flute, a dark blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all--an organ.


I can write up more of this if people are interested. My imagination is running wild! In fact, it is supposed to be asleep right now. This old Kandinsky fellow is whispering sweet nothings in my ear!

inspirashun

Saw it again this week @ the Aardman event and remembered how much I liked it! I know the animation is limited, but I still think it's great inspiration. The Pearce Sisters:




And another nice looking piece of very stylized animation (featured on Cartoon Brew just a few days ago). This one was produced a bit closer to home. RBC's Blue Water Project ad:

Stillborn babies and quantum physics

I feel like an instructor with handouts, but I want to start off by sharing someone else's copyright protected materials with you!
There's a great excerpt from The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje (editor of The Godfather I-III and Apocalypse Now, and author of The English Patient, respectively). It's invaluable food for thought for what we are getting ourselves into right now, so I've typed up three pages of the book here to share with you all -hopefully somebody reads!!



M: There's a great game--I forget whether we've talked about it--Negative Twenty Questions?

O: No, we haven't talked about it.

M: It was invented by John Wheeler, a quantum physicist who was a young graduate student of Niels Bohr's in the 1930s. Wheeler is the man who invented the term "black hole". He's an extremely articulate proponent of the best of twentieth-century physics. Still alive, and I believe still teaching, writing.
Anyway, he thought up a parlour game that reflects the way the world is constructed at a quantum level. It involves, say, four people: Michael, Anthony, Walter, and Aggie. From the point of view of one of those people, Michael, the game that's being played is the normal Twenty Questions--Ordinary Twenty Questions, I guess you'd call it. So Michael leaves the room, under the illusion that the other three players are going to look around and collectively decide on the chosen object to be guessed by him--say, the alarm clock. Michael expects that when they've made their decision they will ask him to come back in and try to guess the object in fewer than twenty questions.
Under normal circumstances, the game is a mixture of perspicacity and luck: No, it's not bigger than a breadbox. No, you can't eat it....Those kinds of things.
But in Wheeler's version of the game, when Michael leaves the room, the three remaining players don't communicate with one another at all. Instead, each of them silently decides on an object. Then they call Michael back in.
So, there's a disparity between what Michael believes and what the underlying truth is: Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking. The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun comes in.
Michael asks Walter: Is the object bigger than a breadbox? Walter--who has picked the alarm clock--says, No. Now, Anthony has chosen the sofa, which is bigger than a breadbox. And since Michael is going to ask him the next question, Anthony must quickly look around the room and come up with something else--a coffee cup!--which is smaller than a breadbox. So when Michael asks Anthony, If I emptied out my pockets could I put their contents in this object? Anthony says, Yes.
Now Aggie's choice may have been the small pumpkin carved for Halloween, which could also contain Michael's keys and coins, so when Michael says, Is it edible? Aggie says, Yes. That's a problem for Walter and Anthony, who have chosen inedible objects: they now have to change their selection to something edible, hollow, and smaller than a breadbox.
So a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens. To end successfully, the game must produce, in fewer than twenty questions, an object that satisfies all of the logical requirements: smaller than a breadbox, edible, hollow, et cetera. Two things can happen: Success--this vortex can give birth to an answer that will seem to be inevitable in retrospect: Of course! It's the ----! And the game ends with Michael still believing he has just played Ordinary Twenty Questions. In fact, no one chose the ---- to start with, and Anthony, Walter, and Aggie have been sweating it out, doing these hidden mental gymnastics, always one step ahead of failure.
Which is the other possible result: Failure--the game can break down catastrophically. By question 15, let's say, the questions asked have generated logical requirements so complex that nothing in the room can satisfy them. And when Michael asks Anthony the sixteenth question, Anthony breaks down and has to confess that he doesn't know, and Michael is finally let in on the secret: The game was Negative Twenty Questions all along. Wheeler suggests that the nature of perception and reality, at the quantum level, and perhaps above, is somehow similar to this game.
When I read about this, it reminded me acutely of filmmaking. There is an agreed-upon game, which is the screenplay, but in the process of making the film, there are so many variables that everyone has a slightly different interpretation of the screenplay. The cameraman develops an opinion, then is told that Clark Gable has been cast in that part. He thinks, Gable? Huh, I didn't think it would be Gable. If it's Gable, I'm going to have to replan. Then the art director does something to the set, and the actor says, This is my apartment? All right, if this is my apartment, then I'm a slightly different person from who I thought I was: I will change my performance. The camera operator following him thinks, Why is he doing that? Oh, it's because... All right, I'll have to widen out because he's doing these unpredictable things. And then the editor does something unexpected with those images and this gives the director an idea about the script, so he changes a line. And so the costumer sees that and decides the actor can't wear dungarees. And so it goes, with everyone continuously modifying their preconceptions. A film can succeed in the end, spiralling in on itself to a final result that looks as if it has been predicted long in advance in every detail. But in fact it grew out of a mad scramble as everyone involved took advantage of all the various decisions everyone else had been making.
On the other hand, the film can break down, too. Some inconsistency--emotional or logical--can pose a question that nothing in the "room"--that is to say, the film--can answer. The most obvious of these failures is the miscasting of a lead character: his presence in the film poses a question that's inconsistent with everything else. But films can ultimately fail for much more subtle reasons--death by a thousand cuts: the interference of the studio, bad weather, what the grip had for breakfast that crucial morning, the fact that the producer is going through a bad divorce, et cetera. All these things are in complex ways encoded into the body of a film. Sometimes for good, and the film is enriched by the process. Sometimes it's not: then it's aborted, abandoned during production; or stillborn, finished but never released; or released, fatally handicapped, to dismal reviews and no business.
This comparison of filmmaking and Wheeler's game goes some distance, I think, to answering the perennial question: What were they thinking when they made that film? How did anyone ever think that could work?
Nobody sets out to make an unreleasable film. But the game of the film can pose questions that its creators can't finally answer, and the film falls apart as a result.



Anyway, I thought it was great.

HURRAH

hurrah for perpetual pictures! =D

thank you melanie for taking the initiative!

let's make this happen!

[and perhaps tweak the design of this weak page]

but of course decorate it with all our inspirations and love! =D

and here's something for y'all to watch if you haven't already. it's old, and it's flash, but it's just sooooooo effing hilarious and well done! =D

flash bunny