Lipsett Diaries Short Film

General Warning before watching the short: it has a very interesting style and gets very sad very quick.  That being said, this was a really cool short film to watch.  My friend in experimental film showed it to me and at first I was captured by the animation style.  By using abstract pencil and charcoal line to depict what was happening gave the film a dramatic and dark feeling to it from the start.  The voice over is also engaging and had me stop face booking and give my full attention to it.  I highly recommend letting it grab you for 15 minutes and listen to what it talks about.

(english version at https://www.nfb.ca/film/lipsett_diaries/)

Freddie Wong simple skit

While this video is simply a short comedy skit, it does feature some hints of motion graphics that I thought were good enough to post on this blog. Some examples of graphics added to this particular video are the lasers on the guns, the drone in the sky and the masks that each of the characters take off. The masks, while only being a short segment of the entire scene were interesting to me as they had to map the persons face to the mask mesh that was to be taken off. There is evidence of tracking in this video as well, the laser on the sniper rifle clearly was added during post production. They must have tracked the gun footage and then added that laser to the bottom of it. And obviously the end gunshots and city scape were both computer generated as the wizard city titles came into view. Overall a funny video, this shows that effects like gunshots and such don't need to be over the top to add to the existing footage and make a simple story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHQr0HCIN2w

The Art of Drowning

The Art of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds. 

This depressing yet beautiful poem written by Billy Collins has been read by many of us. "Many of us" tragically did not include me until today, but poetry and I rarely got along in elementary school you see. I'm slowly catching up. Anyways, I came across this poem after watching a short animated film by Diego Maclean:

This two minute film, like its source, is very strait forward. The poem and film both match a style of raw simplicity that I find really impressive. After looking more into it I found Diego Maclean's personal website which features an awesome opening reel.

http://www.diegomaclean.com/

Billy and Diego are both very talented artists and their collaboration worked seamlessly. Making animations that coincide with poetry seems like a great stimulus for a project idea. Sadly, animation is no quick process and I may have to wait until winter break to tackle something like this. Damn, this material has gotten me into a really sad yet realistic mindset. 

Timelapse

I'd like to share a video that features New York City when it was mostly without power. The guy who produced this went out on the streets and recorded timeless of the city without power. This was to show how ghost like and odd it was without power. You also have to respect the producer's framing with his time-lapse shots. You can tell they were very carefully chosen.

NYC Dark from Already Alive on Vimeo.