November 23, 2009

Tim Burton discusses his artwork

On view November 22, 2009-April 26, 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. For more information, please visit http://www.moma.org/timburton All images courtesy of Tim Burton and © 2009 Tim Burton Films.

November 22, 2009

Chalk Animation > Firekites music video

from Firekites' album 'The Bowery'. music video co-directed by Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber.

November 21, 2009

Andrea Dezsö > artist, animator

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http://a.parsons.edu/~dezsoa/index.html

Andrea Dezsö, a visual artist and writer was born in Transylvania, Romania and is ethnic Hungarian. Dezsö creates deeply personal narratives across a broad range of media including drawing, artist's books, cut paper, embroidery, sculpture, installation, animation and large-scale murals.

Factory Song is a 3 minute stop motion animation by Andrea Dezsö with original music by Jeremiah Lockwood. It was made with the support of a Six Points Fellowship in visual arts.


"The Demon Bridegroom and Other Stories" is a series of animated video shorts based on mystical Jewish folk stories from Parson's professorAndrea Dezsö's native Eastern Europe.


some familiar music, eh?

November 20, 2009

Digital Art Workshop Animations

Some of the Animations produced in the Digital Art Workshop:

Frog Prince

Icarus

Beauty and the Horse

November 12, 2009

Digital Art Workshop Show+Tell Event

Digital Art Workshop / Tales of Transformation / Show and Tell Event
Time : 4:30 - 5:30 PM
Date : Tuesday, November 17
Location : Tweed Museum of Art / Activity Gallery (downstairs) + Lecture Gallery (upstairs)
Open to : Digital Art Workshop students and their families

At the event, the groups will share their finished stories and talk about the process of creating the digital artwork and animations. There will be some hands-on animation activities and refreshments in the activity gallery starting at 4:30pm. The show and tell presentations and movie screenings will start at 5pm up in the lecture gallery.

November 5, 2009

Chilean Stop Motion animation

Drawings take a life of their own and assault the bedroom of a naive girl named Lucia. Lucía is an unsettling short film by Niles Atallah, Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León produced at Diluvio Lab...

Luis, is the second short in a series titled Lucia, Luis y el lobo by Chilean artists Niles Atallah, Cristobal Leon, and Joaquin Cociña. Luis was created using dirt, flowers, charcoal, found objects, and cardboard. It's sister video, Lucia, was also shot frame by frame with a digital photo camera.

November 3, 2009

Chronos > stop motion + clay animation


Yasemin Sayibas Akyuz shares the process of creating her stop motion animation on this blog:
Chronos

http://www.stopmotionmovie.com/

November 1, 2009

JibJab cutout animations + green screen

jibpic.jpg
JibJab has launched a new wave of Starring You videos.
http://sendables.jibjab.com/

These are animated templates that allow you to paste in pictures of yourself and your friends, and now you can post to your facebook wall. Amazingly fast, fun... and you could easily waste an evening with this amusement.


For more about their process, view JibJab animatic
http://vimeo.com/7278384

JibJab Blog
http://blog.jibjab.com/

October 25, 2009

Secret of Kells

Animation Nation


Here's a great resource, spend some time here:

http://animationnation.com/

Yellow Sticky Notes animation

October 20, 2009

Visual Plans for Transformation Tales

BeautyBeast_plan_72.jpg

FrogPrince_visualplan.jpg

Pinocchio_VisualPlan72.jpg

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ugly_pumpkin_72.jpg

werewolves.jpg

Icarus_vizplan.jpg

October 16, 2009

Mixed Media Animation of Tyger

Magical short by Guilherme Marcondes of Brazil, based on a William Blake poem. Tyger blends puppetry, illustration, photography and CGI.

October 15, 2009

Jack and the Beanstalk > visual inspiration

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Create a visual design plan to show your idea to the class, include influences by artists and animators, and a color palette to help establish visual unity for the project.

Jack and the Beanstalk > project idea

DIGITAL NARRATIVE > Media Art Lesson
Folk and fairy tales provide a rich starting point for a digital media project. Passed down from oral storytellers through literary traditions to new media, they are always altered by retelling to reflect the needs of the storyteller and the aesthetics of the time. Because the story is so well known, it can be altered significantly and still remain resonant and recognizable to the contemporary audience.

Step 1 > CHOOSE A TALE
Select a well-know folk tale or myth to retell using contemporary media. When choosing a story to translate into time and motion media, look for clear characters, action and settings. A story that involves transformation or metamorphosis can work well for animation. Dramatic characters and conflicts make for fun play-acting in video projects.

Step 2 > SEQUENCING
Break the story down into scenes that include specific characters engaged in key actions and settings. Identify all the characters, settings, props and dramatic moments in the storyline. Notice the arc of the story and the emotional mood of each scene. If you plan to create a very short work, simplify the narrative into as few words possible.

Step 3 > DEFINE UNITY
Define the ways that you will create visual unity throughout this media artwork. Choose a limited color palette for use on your project. Using line, texture, shape and color in a consistant style thoughout the piece will help create unity, even when a team of artists contributes to the whole. Identifying these stylistic elements is important in both individual and group projects. Visual qualities of characters and places need to be rendered in a consistant style for continuity.

Step 4 > CREATE SURPRISE
Explore the ways that you will create surprise within your unified project by storyboarding the scenes. Scale shifts, unusual shot angles, and dynamic motion can make your work come alive. Sketch out the key moments in the story, blocking in areas of dark and light, positive and negative space. When storyboarding a scene, consider a variety of compositional strategies. Avoid plunking the character in the middle of the frame. Experiement with asymmetrical composition, dramatic angles, perspective, close ups, mid-range, and overview shots in different scenes.

Step 5 > DIVIDING TASKS
Break down tasks for a team project, either one person per scene or one person per creative job. Assign a team leader, and/or designate portions of work to specific artists who have skills in those areas. Some love creating background art, others may enjoy character design, while another may excel with music and sound effects. Video projects may require a cast of actors and a director, camera crew, lighting, costume and prop makers. Animation is enhanced with narration and other voice work and sound effects. Make sure everyone knows their job and has time to prepare for it.

Step 6 > PRODUCTION
By doing the planning above, production should follow along more smoothly. Media projects can be notoriously time consuming. Keeping the story length very short from the start will help keep this in check. The team leader needs to keep track of progress on various scenes, checking that the elements that create unity and surprise are working across the board. Saving digital work frequently, naming and backing up files in a systematic way, will prevent the nightmare of lost hours of work!


Step 7 > EDITING

Editing down the video and sound can be the most labor intensive of all. Editing is also a very creative task, requiring a grasp of how all the pieces can come together as a whole. Editors make tough choices, cutting out pieces that run too long or too slow. The editor can use a fast rhythm to create emotional tension or slow-motion timing to give a scene a dreamlike quality. Guide your students to be selective when applying special effects and transitions to a project. These effects should fit with the stylistic unity of the work, when overused they can make the work very amateurish.


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