I happened across the 2007 Adobe Design Achievement Award Winners page today, and enjoyed watching some quite amazing works of animation and other design arts by students and folks not older than myself. Being in my position and seeing things like that makes you think. There are a multitude of people out in there in the big wide world who are orders of magnitude more dedicated, focused, and hardworking than yourself, and who for those or other reasons are able to create work that is seemingly incomprehensibly better than anything you yourself are capable of creating. I suppose that is a good starting point, and certainly better than living in a state of ignorant denial about how great your work is.
Not everyone can be a genius, because then no one would.
Regarding my previous post, which is by far the most “rant-ish” and emotionally charged post on this blog so far, it turns out that brutalizing Maya into doing your bidding is a challenging and time-intensive occupation. Sortof like this graph:
1 CommentSuzie Templeton is the brilliant and amazing animator responsible for the animation Dog, which I previously mentioned. Recently, while revamping my old posts to get videos that were embedded in them working with my newly redesigned theme and newly added implementation of the JW FLV PLayer ( which now, thanks to Flash 9, can play back MPEG4-AVC mp4 video files ), I came across some new work by this animator, whose work I absolutely adore.Her new 30 minute work, Peter and the Wolf, has magically been uploaded to the common viewing ground of Youtube, although it is also available for sale. It is about 30 minutes long and has been uploaded in 3 parts, which I will embed here.
[edit - 2009-01-31: youtube embeds of Peter and the Wolf Removed, due to them no longer existing on YouTube]
By some strange circumstance, I also came across the short film Sweet Salt by Katerina Athanasopoulou, which Suzie Templeton did set design on. It was constructed primarily in After Effects, and the screenshots of it look relatively amazing. ( also available on google photos ).
Tír na nÓg: The Land of Eternal Youth or the Land of the Ever-YoungNote: In order to play this, you may need to update to Flash Player 9, which supports h.264/aac muxed in the popular mpeg4 container format.
Realized by Fursy Teyssier at the Emile Cohl school. ( via dekku.blogspot.com )While I’m at it…Fallen Art is Tomek Baginski’s 2nd short work of 3D animation, after Cathedral. It is really quite amazing in its organic detail and ambiance. You don’t see 3D work as good as this very often. Below are embedded Stage6 (requires stage6 plugin, but is very high quality) and Daily Motion copies of it. You can also buy a dvd.
I was just looking at some videos on MeFeedia.com, and came across this amazing 3D animated short called 458nm.
“It’s midnight. A smattering of moonlight falls upon the forest floor. Two mechanical snails move slowly through the darkness. They confront one another and briefly take the measure each other’s powers before uniting in love play. With mounting ecstasy, their transparent bodies begin to glow, but just before climax a dark shadow looms over them…” (from the twitchfilm.net review).
458nm can be viewed on the No Fat Clips blog.
The Cags is a short 3D film from Russia, available as a DivX download, and quite amazing to watch.
The Movers and Shakers of 3D animation of 2005 also has some other interesting works, including the previously mentioned 90 degrees.
Peter Rose is an experimental media artist currently a professor of media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Recently I and my fellow students of media at the Evergreen State College had the good fortune of receiving a couple of great presentations about his work and philosophy and creative processes that he gave here.
The reason I am writing about him here, is to key anyone who might be interested in to the fact that a collection of his works regarding language, the VOX 13 series, are online in full quality full length form at UbuWeb.
Taken in the aggregate, Vox 13 offers a grand circumnavigation of the subject of language. By turns it is a reflexive riff on reading, a hyperdimensional performance piece about gesture, a horror story told by a computer, an opera about the voice, a documentary on the transience of language, a metanarrative about the elements of story, an Edenic parable, a kinetic koan, an arch ideological satire, a joke about semiotics, a materialist metaphor, and a performance piece about communication. The opus considers what it means to read, what it means to listen, when it is that we speak, how words acquire meaning, what it means to write, who we listen to, how we listen, what speaks, other ways we can speak, what the voice is, where language can be found, what words do to time, what holds stories together, and how light shapes language. There are reflections on time and language and there are explorations of the places where speech and power seem to intersect. I offer a nod to Tom Phillips’ “A Humument,”, the Firesign Theatre, the Four Horseman, Sid Caesar, early Woody Allen, Julian Jaynes, the Sackners, W. H. Hudson, sehtraB dnaloR, and Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in one of his more jovial moments, announced that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Much of this work is a voluble illustration of that dictum.
- Peter Rose
Here is one work of particular interest for me, The Darkening.
I stumbled accross this (somewhat aged) interview with Todd Vaziri, a lead compositor in Van Helsing, at ILM. It might be interesting for some to see how After Effects is used in a larger professional production workflow on a big effects-heavy film production.
The Interview
(via vfxtalk.com)
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