Roz Chast

She's a famous cartoonist, who has made a great career off of telling her personal stories and memories through cartoons. Her work shows, and she explains how there is no right way to draw or make a cartoon. I appreciated her artistry and found her story inspirational.

At Home with Roz Chast from NewYorker on Vimeo.

hey a little late because of the snow but here is my blog post i know last class we focused more on the effects for real shots but i really like my internet cartoons




this is an interview with the guys that make, well made homestar runner i don't think they have updated the cite in 5 or so years but they just started out making things as a hobby and made my favorite web series. I'm betting you guys al know about homestar runner but i drove back to campus witha kid who has never heard of it so.... if you've never seen it check it out.

Doc Ellis and The No Hitter

It's becoming clearer as time goes on that After Effects is a program that you can basically do anything with. There are simply are no restrictions to what you can do with it. I've been interested to see what kind of animation you can do by importing Photoshop images into AE and playing around. One video that inspired me to start this is Doc Ellis and The No Hitter. Shown to me by a friend, it's a hilarious account of a professional baseball player pitching a no hitter while on the drug LSD.

I think this animation is absolutely hysterical. The use of very simple effects, great sound, and a rare radio interview really adds up to a fantastic animation. The style of using these frozen stills instead of fluid characters is perfect for this story. When I rewatched this a week ago, I realized that this can all be done using the Adobe suite. By importing Photoshop files and animating them with AE, this style is easy to achieve. The mix of black and white to color is most apparent in my favorite scene when they show the rookie "Dave Cash." Or "I'm high as a Georgie Pine!" I would love to find an audio file from an interview so I can animate the visuals and bring to life someone's story. Great stuff.

Happy Halloween!

While searching for a Halloween related video, I found Cirque du Freak's title sequence. And since it is Halloween and we are working on our own title sequences, I thought this was very appropriate. And plus the creativity and motion graphics are very impressive.



Here is an interview with the Motiongrapher Brandon Lori. To read the complete interview, click here! (I highly suggest it)

"Specifically, for Cirque du Freak, what was the most challenging aspect of distilling the film’s long-form narrative into the economy of time provided by a main title?"

"It is quite a challenge to condense the film’s long-form narrative into a title sequence. I normally do not over think too much in creating a complex narrative for the opening unless it is needed. The idea of a main title sequence is to set up the tone and mood for the audience to discover the story as the movie unfolds. The opening sequence needs to be metaphorical in content and impressionistic in tone. Unless there is a very specific prologue that the filmmaker feels strongly needs to be explained, I usually will try not to be too literal and keep it simple.

We don’t want to reveal too much about the plot of the film in the title sequence. As for Cirque Du Freak, it is a graphic opening. The idea is to introduce six freak show characters and bring them all together through the journey of two puppets. I wanted to let the credits play an important role in the sequence. They become the main actors throughout the sequence then the story becomes a backdrop. I think title design is about the titles and other elements are secondary."

"Can you explain the title’s typographic significance, and how you decided to have the letterforms serve a dual purpose in providing information, while also becoming interactive devices for the characters?"

"The typography is inspired by some older reference in graphic design history. I am particularly interested in Dada artists such as Filippo Marinetti in the way they use letters to literally illustrate the content. It becomes a figurative poem. And concrete poetry—the idea of seeing letters as actual objects, as well as Bradbury Thompson’s work in the 50’s and 60’s. All those are the original source of inspiration on what we did for the title.

I also wanted to invent a new way of seeing how the credits behave. If you see the credits as actors on stage instead of just titles in the foreground, then we can imagine them to do anything that you want them to do as long as you direct them. They can dance and they can interact with the characters. In this case, they are truly the actor on stage with the puppets."

Creative Credits:

Project: “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” main title sequence

Client: Universal Pictures
Design/Animation: yU+Co., Hollywood, CA

Creative Director: Garson Yu

Art Director: Etsuko Uji

Designer: Edwin Baker

2D Animator: Wayland Via

2D Animator: Allen Yeung

2D Animator: Jill Dadducci

2D Animator: Chris Coogan

3D Artist: Pota Tseng

3D Artist: Stephen Delalla