Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Mechner and Chahi on Inspiration
From a recent interview with legendary game designers Jordan Mechner (the original Prince of Persia) and Eric Chahi (Another World) on being an auteur in the modern game development environment. Jordan Mechner’s advice to the young designer:
A good friend in another field gave me this piece of advice recently. He said that most people approach things “1-2-3.”
One is the first inspiration, the vision, the excitement. One is gold. One is touched with magic; everyone wants a piece of it.
Two is all the reasons it won’t work, or won’t sell, or could get screwed up; all the difficulties – technical, financial, logistical – that need to be solved.
Three is doing it.
Most people get stuck on two. My friend’s advice was to go in a different order: “1-3-2”. Skip two and go straight to three. I’d never heard it phrased quite this way before, but looking back, the things I’ve done in my life that I’m most glad of, I did them 1-3-2. So that’s my advice too.
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BBC Winter Olympics animation by Studio AKA
[Video no longer available]
A very nice animated spot for the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics directed by Studio AKA’s Marc Craste, co-directed by Jon Klassen (aka Burst of Beaden, where you can read more about the video). I wish our tv spots looked more like this.
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Sylvain Chomet‘s The Illusionist
The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s first new animated film since The Triplets of Belleville (not counting the ill-fated Tales of Despereaux production) will finally be released soon, at least on the festival circuit. Hope it comes out in a wider release before too long!
(Via The Ghibli Blog)
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Animascope Automated Animation Process
A circa-1966 industry ad for Leon Maurer’s Animascope process for producing animation on the cheap: animation without drawing and with fewer pesky artists! Similar to but different than rotoscoping, this process used high-contrast photography and actors in contrasty costumes with their skin painted white and contour lines painted on. The performers would then be filmed dancing around under bright light on a black-lined stage, and the resulting photography could be composited onto traditional background plates. Weird, but sort of a primitive version of mocap, and done for the same economical reasons.
(Via Cartoon Brew – for more info on the process, a good place to start might be this comment left by Brew reader Kustom Kool)
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A Stylistically Interesting Medical Drawing from the Otis Archives
A stylistically interesting medical drawing from the excellent Otis Historical Archives of the Walter Reed hospital: “Drawing. Life cycle of Balantidiasis”, part of a small set of other cartoons available on their Flickr stream. Gotta watch out for those protozoa.
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Finally the One Thing the Four Contending Films
Finally, the one thing the four contending films listed above [Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Disney’s A Christmas Carol, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Up have in common is they all employ CGI, just like Avatar and many, many other films we could open this discussion to. I bring this up because it has pretty much been agreed upon around the Internet Avatar will be taking home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, which creates an interesting conundrum. Why is the CG in Avatar considered visual effects while the CG employed for a Pixar or DreamWorks film simply considered animation? If Avatar is up for Oscar’s Best Visual Effects award shouldn’t Up and Monsters vs. Aliens be as well? The fact they aren’t, but A Christmas Carol is, interests me. From a post by Brad Brevet on Rope of SIlicon on the graying divide between animation and visual effects, and the Academy Awards’ “animation ghetto”. Arbitrary definitions aside (the Oscar qualifications stipulate that a film must be “75% animated” to run in the animated feature category), it’s interesting to see folks try to distinguish between a “film” and a “cartoon” – is it the attempt at naturalism? The motive of the director (and subsequently how he himself submitted it for review)? The application of a specific technique like performance capture that makes CGI act more like makeup or costume?
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It Is the Thought and Circumstances Behind the
It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting.
Advice from Ollie Johnston, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men”. Excerpted from a longer list of more animation-specific advice, I think this one stands nicely on its own.
(Via Drawn)
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Visions of the Amen a Voice Responsive Kinetic
Visions of the Amen, a voice-responsive kinetic sculpture by artist Mitchell Chan (demonstrated in this video by soprano Ashleigh Semkiw). The software is written in Processing, the hardware is controlled by the ArtBus interface being developed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kind of like a real-world oscilloscope.
(Via Make)
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Artifical Auroras
There’s lots of conspiracy theory nutjobs talking about the HAARP research project lately (even Hugo Chavez is throwing his hat in), so the allegations of death-ray and mind control weapons tinges this science news a bit, but there’s something kind of beautiful about being able to generate your own version of the aurora borealis:
Artificial auroras can be created using an array of high-frequency transmitters. Researchers have previously done this by pumping a 3.6-megawatt beam of radio waves into the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere a few hundred kilometres above Earth’s surface. The beam was powerful enough to break electrons free of their parent atoms, creating an artificial aurora similar to that of the Northern Lights.
It’s certainly an unusual way to leave your mark on the world, and I presume it’s harmless, given that we’re being constantly bombarded by the same kind of energy raining down from space (right?). Just so long as they aren’t cutting their way into heaven a la Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass, I guess…
(Found in Nature, which cites research in Geophysical Research Letters, but I can’t find the cited article anywhere. Maybe it was pulled? Aha, a conspiracy!)
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The Vast Majority of Americans Already Believe
The vast majority of Americans already believe that money buys results in Congress. This Court’s decision will only make that worse. […] Who could doubt that this will further distract Members of Congress from what their constituents want? And who could believe it won’t make Americans even more cynical about what Congress does? […]
The institutional integrity of Congress is already at a historical low. Less than one quarter of Americans have faith in this institution. Three times that have faith in the Supreme Court. If there’s such a thing as political bankruptcy, then Congress is bankrupt. More Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the revolution than support our Congress today.
From Lawrence Lessig’s Huffington Post article on this week’s SCOTUS decision. I don’t entirely agree with his view that money didn’t buy this outcome (it could easily be argued that money bought the folks who appointed the current crop of justices, an indirect effect that could be applied to anyone involved anywhere in the political machine), but he’s right on the money (so to speak) about how all of this affects our confidence in our elected representatives’ ethics and motivation.