Land

"Land", a short animated film created by Masanobu Hiraoka, is a two and a half minute feature that uses colors and sound to create a lasting impression. The film has no clear narrative from what I've seen but it makes up for it with bizarre effects that are absolutely mesmerizing. There is so much going on on the screen and it executes it very smoothly with a catchy soundtrack that matches the movements. There's so much animation jam packed into two and a half minutes that it definitely makes this a short worth checking out. You can check it out by clicking on the link below:

https://vimeo.com/74114715 

      

Boxed in by Curves

So a little while back one of my favourite online animators posted this image to his twitter.

He's a huge fan of 90's "He-Man" style traditional hand drawn cell animation, and he feels as though a lot of cartoons nowadays are getting less stylistically diverse.

When the cartoon "Adventure Time" first aired on cartoon network I remeber thinking it was like nothing I'd ever seen before. The style was a lot cuter and curvier than a lot of cartoons at the time and it seemed as it's creators had put a great amount of detail into the characters and world of the show. The aesthetic matched the show's pleasantly strange world and for the most part I thought that AT would be one of those cartoons that usher in a new wave of creative aueterism.

However as the years have gone by it seems as though a lot of the new cartoons on cartoon network haven't really branched away from the curvey cute adventure time style. Content wise I think that many of these shows are really well crafted, but I can't help feeling as though a lot of character artists are stuck in a sort of creative rut.

Take a look at the difference between pilot episode for one of Cartoon networks newer series "Steven Universe" and it's release version.

The pilot had a darker more muted color pallet that I thought looked really cool and would have worked well for the show. The final version isn't by any means bad but it seems a lot more kid friendly than the pilot version.
I really miss the stylistic diversity of a lot of early 2000's shows.

Symphonie Diagonale

The film begins with: "Made in 1924 by Viking Eggeling, SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE is the best abstract film yet conceived. It is an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium."

Symphonie Diagonale is widely considered to be a one of the best early short animation films, leaving an imprint of the history of film. Done in the the style of art deco, Swedish director and famous Dadaist, Viking Eggeling explored motion using scroll drawings.

Since animation at the time was not in the mainstream of art, Eggeling originally framed his idea for the film on long scrolls of paper. He would paint sequential images on the scrolls as if he were painting the film itself. This abstract way of making film was closely tied to music, in new form that Eggeling called "Visual Music."

Visual music was borrowed from numerous times, especially from Bauhaus design students who embraced it as a new temporal design method. Often using jazz, this new form changed the minds of many well known German animators.

Abstract Graphics

Being a huge fan of abstraction and the surreal, I recently came across this amazing video while surfing on ILoveMotion.com The artist is Onar Senturk, an award winning title sequence designer and director from Turkey. This piece, "Triangle", was made for the release of Robert Knoke's art book. It received a half of a million views and was granted an award from Vimeo.

Music Visualizer

Hey all. For my name animation, I'm working with audio quite a bit. One of the elements of my piece is EQ bars that are set to the bass, mid and treble frequencies in the track I'm working with. So, I thought I'd explore some other examples of music visualizers that used expressions similarly to the methods we learned in class. This one is really intricate and visually breathtaking, while at the same time you can still understand HOW it was made. The artist is Matthias Müller. He used 3ds max, After Effects, Krakatoa and fumefx.