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.