Accordion Book

This book was made in combination with a video I made for class. Both follow two teams (the main team and the competing team) performing in a Scavenger Hunt with the main goal of retrieving a note that leads to a prize.

A 1998 German thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer, and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni.

The film begins with Lola receiving a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He works as a low-level courier for Ronnie, a local crime boss. Manni was supposed to bring 100,000 deutschmarks (the profits from some the ostensibly illicit sale of diamonds) to his boss. Lola fails to pick him up after the exchange due to her scooter being stolen that morning, so he had to take the subway. He panics when he sees some police officers on the subway and gets off of the train, accidentally leaving the bag with the 100,000 marks behind. The bag is picked up by a homeless person.

Manni has to deliver the 100,000 marks in 20 minutes or face punishment or get killed by his boss. Manni reveals to Lola that he plans to rob a nearby supermarket to get the money. Lola urges him to wait and tells him she will get him the money. Lola slams down her phone and starts to think about who can possibly help her. She decides to ask her father.

When I saw a clip of this movie in class I had never seen a movie like this before. It was very graphic, had a lot of points of views, camera angles, symbolism and animation no less. I thought it was interesting how the movie shows how every little aspect of your life matters and affects time. For example, when Lola ran into people in her first run we would see aspects from those peoples lives flash as she passed. She may have only been a blip their life but her running into them affected each person some how and affected how their day went. It makes people think what if this did not happen then that would not of happened and so on and so forth. It really makes a person think.

Graphic Novel

A line of twisted teddy bears created by Applehead Factory in 2003. The bears are supposed to represent old teddy bears that have been abandoned by their owners and become warped and rotted over time. There are two series of bears, as well as a set of miniature versions called "morgue minis". There is an animated short produced by Dave School and also a series of graphic novels published by Ape Entertainment that depict the "after lives" of the bears.

Credits:
Story- Jim Hankins
Art-Chris "Patch" Ell
Designed-Coyote Freeman
Color-Joe Diddmenico and Chris "Patch" Ell
Additional Design- Ryan Casey
Based on the charcaters by- Joe Diddmenico & Phil Nannay

Rita Mortis

"Filled with all this anger inside, I swing at what's in my way."

Rita Mortis is an angry white teddy bear with dark red eyes and wears a plaid jumper, wristbands and a pair of black boots. She has two facial piercings and three on each ear, as well as a tattoo of the Teddy Scares icon on her left upper arm. Rita was always known to stand out from the crowd. Her parents ignored her unruly behavior, thinking it was just a phase. Her death was a relief for those who could no longer deal with the troubled youth. Her family sighed, spit on her grave, and walked away. It was the most attention they had ever given her.

Abnormal Cyrus

"I've got my eye on you."

Abnormal Cyrus is a strange grey teddy bear with one green eye in the middle of his face, much like a cyclops monster. He wears a black and white striped shirt with olive green overalls.Cyrus was tormented as a child. He spent his days drawing pictures of people with no heads. Monday morning, his body was found hanging from his favorite tree. It was obvious that things would turn out this way. Always alone, rejected by society.

Redmond Gore

"I have no identity, just my axe."

Redmond Gore is a homicidal black teddy bear with a brown burlap sack over his head and a blue blood stained jumpsuit, bearing a close resemblance to Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th.Last week, Redmond's body was found lying near a dumpster with an axe by his side. No one is really sure how he died. Some say the cause of death was murder; murder of the mind. The doll comes equipped with a bear-sized plastic axe to hack something to pieces. Redmond was included in the first series of Morgue Minis.

Hester Golem

"I'm infested with slimy bugs that rummage through my body."

Hester Golem is a bizarre blue teddy bear missing an eye on the right side of his face and missing his flesh on the left, partially exposing his skull. He is dressed in a tattered dark green jacket and brown pants. There is a hole in his chest held together loosely with thread, which is full of rubber toy roaches. Hester was known to wander through abandoned houses. His remains were found at the bottom of a cardboard box with a worn edge. He leaves behind no family, but a lifetime full of nightmares.

Edwin Morose

"You stole my heart, so I carry yours as a souvenir."

Edwin Morose is a depressed red teddy bear with white eyes. He is dressed in a grey sweater with a red broken heart design on the front of it.

Edwin started his life as a love token. He served most his days on red satin sheets with the sweet smells of perfume and a daily hug from his beautiful owner. Then the day came when loyal Edwin was thrown into the trash. He cried himself asleep every night surrounded by the comfort of dried up roses, torn up memories and old love letters. He comes with a bouquet of bear sized wilted blue roses and a bag that contains his patched up broken heart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_scares

The reason I posted this graphic novel is because I was given a free edition by the Artist of the novel Chris "Patch" Ell, during the two days at the beginning of the semester that we did the workshops. He was one of several guest Illustrators who came to the Artist Trading Cards workshop. The actual series is only a mini series that is 4 editions long. I thought it was cool to meet him beacuse my sister likes the Teddy scares product.

People of the City Experimental Video

My evolution was the age of people in comparison with the city around them. I take the person and building as a whole as they age and also take parts of them like their eyes and mouths. The video's audio is not that great but it really loud so don't put the volume too high :)

Martin Scorsese

From the violent realism of MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, and RAGING BULL to the poignant romance of ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANY MORE, the black comedy of AFTER HOURS, and the burning controversy of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Martin Scorsese’s uniquely versatile vision has made him one of the cinema’s most acclaimed directors.

Martin Scorsese was born in Flushing, New York in 1942. A quiet child with a strong case of asthma, Scorsese spent much of his young life alone— in the movie theater or watching movies on television. After attending high school in the Bronx he spent a year in the seminary before enrolling at New York University. The early 1960s was a time of renewed interest in American film, and he found himself drawn to NYU’s film school, where the emerging French and Italian New Wave and independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes had a profound influence on him.

Soon after graduating he became a film instructor at NYU and made commercials in both England and the United States. He also finished his first full-length feature in 1968, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR? He followed this with a number of hard-hitting films throughout the 1970s. His style combined a rough and gritty attention to the everyday life of the urban jungle with a monumental visual sensibility. In one of his most famous films, TAXI DRIVER (1976), Scorsese focused on the particulars of an individual and his obsessions. Starring Robert DeNiro (with whom Scorsese has had one of the most celebrated collaborative relationships in American cinema), TAXI DRIVER elevates the obscure specifics of a disturbed life with the greatest drama.

With two later films, RAGING BULL (1980) and THE KING OF COMEDY (1983) (both starring De Niro), Scorsese focused on a theme that has permeated nearly every one of his movies—the plight of the desperate and out-of-control individual. Often unsympathetic, his characters display a crazed violence that mimics the repressive social structures in which they live. With the protagonist in RAGING BULL we find a fighter possessed with anger both in and out of the ring, while in THE KING OF COMEDY we find one overwhelmed by the impossibility of breaking into the entertainment industry. Both are telling social commentaries and engaging films.

Emotionally precise and visually overpowering, Scorsese creates lush landscapes in which every detail seems to pulse with energy. In his 1988 masterpiece THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Scorsese used this elevation of the particular to present both Jesus and everything around him with a fullness required by such a loaded topic. The controversial nature of the film and the stunning visual reality it created stirred up Hollywood and met with strong reactions from the general public.

In 1995's CASINO, Scorsese brought together much of the stylistic and theoretical content of his earlier works. The engaging world and controlling power structure of the Mafia (a source repeatedly tread by Scorsese) is brought to life in the loud and visually stunning world of the casino. In tone, style, and content, Scorsese is constantly pushing the boarders of the film, seeing how much we can come to feel about the most foreign and familiar characters. For many, Martin Scorsese is the most important living American filmmaker—one whose relentless search for the furthest emotional reaches of his genre have led him to the center of the American psyche.

The Quay Brothers--The Calligrapher

They reside and work in England where they moved in 1969 after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, to study at the Royal College of Art [1] There, they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only print was irreparably damaged.[citation needed] They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. The trio formed Koninck Studios in 1980, which is currently based in Southwark, south London.

The Quays' works (1979-present) show a wide range of often esoteric influences, starting with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and continuing with the writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser and Michel de Ghelderode, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Richard Teschner and composers Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška and Leszek Jankowski, the last of whom has created many original scores for their work. Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style and preoccupations had been fully formed.[2]

Most of their films feature dolls, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is Street of Crocodiles, based on the short novel of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time[3], and critic Jonathan Romney included it on his list of the ten best films in any medium (for Sight and Sound's 2002 critics' poll).[4] They have made two feature-length live action films: Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life and The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes. They also directed an animated sequence in the film Frida.

With very few exceptions, their films have no meaningful spoken dialogue—most have no spoken content at all, while some, like The Comb (1990) include multilingual background gibberish that is not supposed to be coherently understood. Accordingly, their films are highly reliant on their music scores, many of which have been written especially for them by the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. In 2000, they contributed a short film to the BBC's Sound On Film series in which they visualised a 20-minute piece by the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Whenever possible, the Quays prefer to work with pre-recorded music, though Gary Tarn's score for The Phantom Museum had to be added afterwards when it proved impossible to licence music by the Czech composer Zdeněk Liška.

Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Music: Teiji Ito. B&W. "This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." - Maya Deren on ''Meshes of the Afternoon''

Honestly I found this video very bizarre. I thought it was interesting to show her out of body experience and most of the film is the progression of a nightmare. The whole key thing makes me think that he wants to escape from something, the knife makes me think that it is bad enough for her to consider suicide and then the appearance of the man made me realize that she wanted to escape from her life as a wife and that she wanted something more. I thought it was interesting how her dream combined with her real life and caused her death in the end.

Harry Smith and Early Abstractions

Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith's grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry's parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life.

Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.

It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the "Art in Cinema" screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement.

Early Abstractions is comprised of six films that vary in length from 2 to 5-1/2 minutes. The works were produced over a 7-year period from 1946 to 1952. As Jonas Mekas of Anthology Film Archives has said, "You can watch them for pure color enjoyment; you can watch them for motion—Harry Smith's films never stop moving; or you can watch them for hidden symbolic meanings, alchemic signs. There are more levels in Harry Smith's work than in any other film animator I know." Inspired by Native American cultures, jazz, the Kabbala, and surrealism, Smith assembled his own cinematic universe of shape, color, light, and time.

I can see how this film is heavily influenced by the Native American culture. Even though the film is very abstract in the way that it only uses shapes but not actual objects there is some symbolism in this. For instance the most common shpae throughout this clip is a circle. Which I take to be the sun as it sets and rises since the Native American culture depended on the sun's heat for crops. The clip is very colorful like nature and patterned like Native American art. But if I didnt know the information behind the film I would have no idea what it is about because it is very abstract in the use of color and shapes and movements.

My Flipbook

In my flipbook I combined digital photography and drawing. I took pictures of the background before hand, which was a corner of a room that has a bulletin board and window sill. Before hand I knew that was going to draw a cartoon figure escape from his paper so I tacked up paper and string on the board. As the cartoon man escapes he is watched by two other cartoons. He climbs out of his papaer, walks along the top of the bulletin board, climbed down a string and swung to the window sill. The idea was inspired by a video clip I saw an other uarts student made where he had a morphing cartoon travel from a cup along with my first video clip I put on the blog.

Stop Motion

Directed by Gina Niespodziani. Filmed from October 2006 - April 2007, this video contains more than 2,400 unique Lite Brite images animated together by the Niespodziani Siblings. "Moviekiss" was remixed by Ben H. Allen (Gnarls Barkley) and written by Y O U (Rolling Stone's Top 25 Bands on MySpace.)

I thought the Light Bright toy was amazing when I was little and this video made me wish I had one again. I wish I had thought to do this but I wouldn't have done in it in such extreme detail. This animation was amazing, everything in the animation went along wit the background music. The creator also creatively interpreted the music and did not do it directly by the words. I really hope this was not made out of boredom because talent like this would be wasted.

My Zoetrope

In my Zoetrope there is a cartoon of a cow getting abducted by aliens. I came up with the cartoon when I was stuck on what to do in my dorm. Then I noticed my roommate's Boston album which has a flying saucer on it. I really love the cartoon but the structure of the zoetrope is sort of lopsided so the video did not turn out that well. Half because of the structure the other half is due to the video quality.

Ancient Animation

Oldest Animation Discovered In Iran

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
By: Ryan Ball

Long considered a modern invention, animation has apparently been lying about its age. A 5,200-year-old bowl found in Iran’s Burnt City in the 1970s features a series of five images that researchers have only recently identified as being sequential, much like those in a zoetrope. Giving the bowl a spin, one would see a goat leaping to snatch leaves from a tree, as seen in the video clip below.

The remarkable piece of pottery was unearthed from a burial site by Italian archaeologists, who hadn’t noticed the special relationship between the images that adorned the circumference. That discovery was made years later by Iranian archaeologist Dr. Mansur Sadjadi, who was later hired to direct the excavation of The Burnt City, located 57 kilometers from the city of Zabol in the southeastern Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan.

While no one questions the early instance of animation, researchers have been at odds over the significance of the earthenware bowl’s artwork. It was originally thought to depict the goat eating from the Assyrian Tree of Life, but archaeologists now assert that it predates the Assyrian civilization by a thousand years.

Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO) and director Mohsen Ramezani have created an 11-minute documentary on the discovery. A ceremony celebrating the film’s completion was held on Sunday in Iran.

http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/8045

Well, I was suppose to do research about the oldest animators and I decided to take that to the extreme. Turns out the oldest animation was not as recent as we thought. I mean the person who created this bowl was a genius. It took thousands of years before this concept was discovered again. I just thought this discovery was really amazing.

Flipbooks

Flipbook Animation
By Gary Ferrington


Example of a Very Complicated and Long Flipbook.
Posted May 20, 2008 by youtube account Mytoons.

A flipbook is a simple form of animation consisting of a sequence of drawings, or photographs, that when "flipped" through by the viewer appear to create the illusion of motion.

This illusion is an optical phenomenon known as the persistence of vision. It is the result of the eye’s retina retaining an image for about 1/12 of a second. When successive images are shown at a faster rate, the eye will blend them together with the retina retaining one image as the second is superimposed over it. This creates the illusion of movement and is the fundamental principle involved in film and television recording and reproduction. Sound movies have been traditionally projected at 24 frames per second or faster making the illusion of movement very smooth.

Early photographic pioneers such as Edward Muybridge and Thomas Edison explored moving images using the flipbook concept. Still photographic images were mounted on stiff paper and when either flipped through by hand or later in a hand cranked arcade machine. The Kinetoscope and Mutoscope used the flipbook concept and became popular pre-movie entertainment media for many.

Filpbooks were popularized in the early 1900's by the Crackerjack company that gave them as in-box prizes. In the 1920's they were used to teach dance steps - an early form of the "educational movie".

Flipbooks have been an important tool for the teaching of animation and remain so today. An idea for animation can be quickly tested using the flipbook technique.

Flipbooks stories are never very long and usually have a single objective that can best be put across short animated movies. Flipbooks are a true form of microcinema.

The following links cover the history flipbooks, techniques, and examples.

Drawings That Move-Flip Books. Flipbooks show how drawings can be made that seem to move. It is also a way to practice animation drawing.This site provides a nice overview of how to produce flipbooks.

FlipCapsule. Produces commercial flipbooks for promotional purposes. Images are captured from video and turned into flipbooks for advertising, sporting events, trade show handouts, and other events.

Flipbooks. This site sells flip books but also provides the opportunity to explore a number of sample animations designed by animator Patrick Jenkins. The samples illustrate how flipbooks can be an expressive form of communication.

Flipbooks - the Ancestors of Micromovies. "In the 19th century, before the cinema culture had established its position, there were various flipbooks, notepads bound together and flipped through to view a short string of moving pictures: animations of sort."

Flipbooks: Handheld Animations. Provides background information about flipbooks and gives instructions on how to make them using digital images.

Flippies is a company that makes flipbooks for creative premiums, event handouts, sports promotions and trade show giveaways. This site provides some examples of how flipbooks can be used for commercial purposes.

Filptomania. This company designs and produces flipbooks. The site has a variety of flipbooks presented as quicktime movies. Give them a try!

History of Filpbooks. The site provides a comprehensive history of the flip book.

Post-It Theater. These movies are all hand-drawn on Post-it® brand notes and scanned. No computer simulated the action.

Windows to the Universe Flip Books. This flip book series was produced to celebrate Sun-Earth Day (April 27-28, 2001). They were developed in partnership with Dr. Janet Kozyra at the University of Michigan, Space Physics Research Lab. Simply print the pages for a flipbooks, cut out each, arrange them in order and staple.

Other:

American Museum of the Moving Image. Select item - Shutters, Sprockets, and Tubes. This consists of six animated interactive tutorials that explain the science and technology behind movies and television. The tutorial on The Illusion of Motion facilitates an understanding of the concept of persistence of vision and how we see moving images.

http://www.proscenia.net/pronews/randomlinks/filpbooks.html

When I was little I thought the only purpose of Post Its were to make Flip books. I would always draw little cartoons in the corner of the Post Its and make my own little stick figure flip books. Most of the time it was a basketball player dribbling the ball. I still think flip books are awesome and even with all this computer based art, they are still entertaining to watch and make.

BEST CARTOON EVER!!!!

Looney Toons--Enough said. The current youth of America is being robbed of this classic cartoon because it is barely shown on TV anymore and its a shame. I have never met anyone who hates Looney Toons because they are classics.

Optical toy

Thaumatrope

John Ayrton Paris, 1825

History:

The invention of the thaumatrope, whose name means "turning marvel" or "wonder turner," has often been credited to the astronomer Sir John Herschel. However, it was a well-known London physicist, Dr. John A. Paris, who made this toy popular. Thaumatropes were the first of many optical toys, simple devices that continued to provide animated entertainment until the development of modern cinema.

How it works:

A thaumatrope is a small disc, held on opposite sides of its circumference by pieces of string. An image is drawn on each side of the disc, and is selected in such a way that when the disc is spun, the two images appear to become superimposed. To spin the disc, one string is held in a hand, and the disc is rotated to wind the string. Then, both strings are held, and the disc is allowed to rotate. Gently stretching the strings will ensure that they continue to unwind and rewind. This motion causes the disc to rotate, first in one direction and then in the opposite. The faster the disc rotates, the greater the clarity of the illusion.

Although the thaumatrope does not produce animated scenes, it relies on the same persistence of vision principle that other optical toys use to create illusions of motion. Persistence of vision is the eye's ability to retain an image for roughly 1/20 of a second after the object is gone. In this case, the eye continues to see the two images on either side of the thaumatrope shortly after each has disappeared. As the thaumatrope spins, the series of quick flashes is interpreted as one continuous image.

One example of a thaumatrope has a tree with bare branches on one side, and on the other, its leaves. When spun, the tree appears to be full of leaves. Another example has a bird on one side, and a cage on the other. When spun, the bird appears to be in its cage. The bird-cage pair of images were used on the first thaumatrope, and is the most common one seen on thaumatropes today.

What became of it:

Most pairs of thaumatrope images were pictures that did not imply motion, such as running animals or dancing people. A thaumatrope could only take two images and merge them, essentially creating one still image from two. The phenakistoscope was a great improvement on the thaumatrope, creating one moving image from several stills, and became the first optical toy to create a true illusion of motion.

http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit06.htm

I chose this optical toy because I remember I had a friend who actually had one and I thought it was so cool. I was so entertained by it and never knew the name of the actual toy or how old it was. Now because of this assignment i know.

Eyes

Afghan Girl
-Featured on the June 1985 over of National Geographic
-Photographed by Steve McCurry
-Excerpt of article by Cathy Newman about cover: "The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name."

I first saw this cover when I was in the sixth grade, in my World History class. It has always stuck with me ever since. Like the quote says above, there is something about that girl's eyes that cut right through a person. She is so beautiful, but should not look as aged as she is. Since she was born in Afghanistan her entire life has been enveloped in war. Her eyes show her endless pain and anger. She makes a person realize how lucky they are but at the same time makes a person feel guilty for the life she will never receive.

Amazing Animation

Muto a wall painted animation by Blu
-An Ambiguous animation painted on public walls in Buenos Aires and Baden
-Animation and editing by Blu and produced by Mercurio film
-Posted May 09, 2008 on their youtube channel notblu and website blublu.org

A friend of my mine showed me a video done by these people before and I though it was amazing. The Content of the animation is really strange but its impossible to look away. I love how the animation actually travels along many surfaces and looks so three dimensional. It is fascinating to watch how the animation evolves into so many characters. Each character is interconnected throughout the animation and its captivating to watch.