Thursday, December 29, 2011

Sharing Animation - Orgesticulanismus (Mathieu Labaye, 2008)


For this week's sharing animation I'm here to share with you one of the most amazing animations I've ever seen. This is a very well done animation with a very deep and honest meening and inspiration.

The author is the belgian Mathieu Labaye and his beautiful piece has the name of Orgesticulanismus.

The animation was done in memory of Labaye's father, who suffered of multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheel chair since he was 40 years old. As I see it, the animation is really a shout of defiance against his father's inability. It's definitely a great use of the art of movement to cheat the prison of movement restraints. It's a beautiful way to set him free.

The animation starts with a speech made by Mathieu's father, talking about his inability with his own photos fading in the background. Then there are some very mathematic schemes of movements, showing the most banal of day to day tasks (wich is very well achieved because not even those very common things can be done by a disabled person, showing the grade of dependence).
Then he just "set him free" in a wild dance with all the movements a man can and can't do.
In the final part the liberty is still being explored, the movement still free. Labaye created a space for reflection.

In his father's words, the only way to survive is re-creating an inner space that sets him free. And this is the way his son Mathieu visualised it.




Thanks again for watching the sharing animation post, and keep sharing and commenting!

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


See you next week for another awesome awesome awesome animation!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

New Animag!

The December/January issue of Animation Magazine arrived this week in my house! I love receiving it! And this month there was a bonus! A 2012 Calendar with a lot of animation!!! =)

Here's a picture of it.


Awesome right???

This month's issue talks about the great feature Tintin (wich I have not yet seen!) with interviews with both Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Also about Happy Feet 2, the now very famous Czech rotoscoped film Alois Nebel, the new Alvin and the Chipmunks, the spanish Arrugas, the also new Muppets just to talk about the big great huge known stuff, but there's a lot of other cool stuff in this issue! Oh... and a bunch of "for your consideration" adds for the best animation Oscars run for features animated films. The cover story is Tintin.


I just love this Magazine!!

See you next time!

Monday, December 19, 2011

Sharing Animation - Grasshoppers (Bruno Bozzetto, 1990)


For this week's sharing animation I'm here presenting another animation that has highly influenced me before.

This is a funny little piece that tells the story of the world (more the world wars) in this  sort of comedy parade. For me it's quite impressive how Bruno Bozzetto's small and simple drawings has so much to tell and are so expressive in their movements.

The name of the animation is Grasshoppers and it was nominated for Oscar in 1991 for the best animated short's category.

This extensive animator has done many other shorts, tv shows and also some feature films! He has more than 50 years of animation works, and certainly a full bag of work that many have enjoyed.
HERE you can find his official website.

So here it is:





Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


See you next week for another awesome animation!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Sharing Animation - The Man Who Planted Trees (Frédéric Back, 1987)

Be very welcome once more with this week's sharing animation post! Today's animation is a bit bigger, but definitely worth watching! Is one of the most beautiful pieces I have ever seen!

The name of the author is Frédéric Back and the name of the animation I'm sharing with you today is "The Man Who Planted Trees".

HERE is a link to Frédéric Back website, and HERE a more direct link for this particular animation.

It's a beautiful story about a man and his willpower. He is a live example how every single one of us can make a huge difference in the world with nothing but our will.

Frédéric Back is really, as said in Animation Now! book, a master drawer with great intentions. Here it is, the masterpiece.





Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


See you next week with another awesome animation!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Tales From the Toon Trenches - Michael Mallory - The Case of the Copycat Concerto


Animation Magazine's author Michael Mallory has a column called Tales From the Toon Trenches where he writes about all sort of cool issues about people and events that happened in the past in the world of animation. Since I first subscribed to the Animag daily newsletter I always loved to read it! So today I come to share one of the Tales that I enjoyed the most, about a famous Cat and an even more famous Bunny doing the same thing at the same time! So read this post on their webpage!

Click HERE to read it.

And here are the two pieces it talks about!

The Cat Concerto (MGM)
It was produced by Fred Quimby and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, with musical supervision by Scott Bradley, and animation by Kenneth Muse, Ed Barge and Irven Spence. (wikipedia)





Rabbit Rhapsody (Warner Bros.)
Directed by Friz Freleng.

You can watch it HERE (youtube) because I couldn't find it to embed anywhere. And it's in hungarian, but don't worry, it doesn't matter for the understanding of it.

I finish my post once more advising you all to subscribe to Animag's Newsletter! It's pretty cool if only for the amazing Tales From the Toon Trenches!

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sharing Animation - Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit, 2000)


For this week's Sharing Animation I'll post here a beautiful short from the very talented Michael Dudok de Wit (Link to wikipedia)!
Dudok de Wit's quality of work is always supreme, and his beatiful work with Ink is always a thrill to watch!

This short animation talks about the deep bond between a father and a daughter. She loses him and all her life she misses him. It's name is, of course, Father and Daughter.
It was the second animation created by Dudok de Wit to win Cartoon d'Or award for best european animated short of the year. (The first one will also be shared here in the future, but let's save some sweet for later!!). It also won the 2001 Oscar for best animated short film and several other awards.

HERE you can go to Dudok de Wit's official website.
And here is his piece of art, Father and Daughter:




Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


See you next week for another awesome piece of A(rt)nimation! =)

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Walt Disney Studio Awards page

This week I bumped into this web page that contains some information about the Walt Disney Studio films for 2011 Awards! So there's some great stuff in there, starting with Concept Art for Cars 2, some Making of Pictures of the new Winnie the Pooh, some info about the new Pixar short La Luna, and some more about The Muppets, Gnomeo & Juliet and Pirates of the Caribbean!

The page is not huge but there's still some cool things to see!


See you next time!

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Blur Studio Cinematics

This guys have some great pieces of Cinematics or their page! I always loved Cinematics! Many times they are even better than the game itself!

Very well done 3D animation! Check it out!

http://vz3.blur.com/work/cinematics

See you next time!

Friday, December 2, 2011

Animation Magazine Issue Online


In my last post I forgot to tell that the December Oscar Preview Issue of Animation Magazine can be downloaded for free in their website! If you go to www.animationmagazine.net you can easily find it to download.

Cool isn't it?

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Grand Official Opening (December 1, 2011)

So here it is! My Blog ready to be thrown in the mouth of the people (Portuguese joke =P)

It took me a while to accomplish this (at least today's whole day! (12/01/2011)) but I'm ready to try and atract people to be tuned to my blog!

So be most welcome to everything in this Blog and feel free to comment, feedback, like and dislike anything here! Your words are of great importance to me and the development of this little side-project of mine.

Be sure you check out everything in here (read author notes in the side bar)!

My Animation Work with all my animations to date
My short explanation for why my passion for animation
The sharing animation page where you can found every week a new animation I select and post here
The book resource page
and the Animation conversations where everyone is welcome to talk about anything at all related with animation and comment. If you would like me to post about something related to animation so it can be an actual issue here, post a comment in one of my posts that I'll do my best to do so, someday I'm thinking on creating a e-mail if necessary for this reason. And you just want to share something with me or anyone that reads it, post a comment about it!

Well... I guess that's it! Hope you enjoy!

Animation is Awesome! Enjoy it!

(Just a little something I made with an animated piece I had of mine)

Animation Conversations - First


For this first post about anything related to animation I would like to start talking about Animation Magazine. I always was fond of those Magazines about everything in the world. People find a hobby or their job or whatever and read magazines about it! I used to think, how great it is a group of people determined to talk about the think you want to read about the most! And so I was thrilled when I found out there was such a magazine about my greatest passion! So hurray for Animation Magazine just for existing!

I'm certain that many of the subjects that I'll post here about animation will be taken out of the animation magazine issues or their website.

I then subscribed to the magazine and every month (more or less, december didn't have an issue for the annual subscription). So since July I've been receiving it! I also subscribed to their daily newsletter.

About the magazine I can tell you that my unfortunate first impression was that it is surprizingly small. It's a (roughly) 40 page magazine. And of course, there are some contents that don't interest me. But anyway, it is a pretty cool magazine that talks about a lot of animated stuff! And the daily newsletter definetely is worth subscribing!

The link for animationmagazine.net is in my sidebar in the "Awesome Animation Links".

Definetely worth it to check it out! In fact the last news I can see there right now is that the 'Oscar Animated Short Race' is now down to 10 animated shorts! You can read about it HERE.

Here is some photos of the issues I already have at home with me =)

Again, feel free to comment anything you read in this Blog. So what do you think of Animation Magazine??

The June/July Issue

The September Issue

The October Issue

The November Issue
See you next time!

Sharing Animation - Thought of You (Ryan Woodward, 2010)


As for the very first animation I want to share in my blog, certainly many of you already know it, but here it is one animation that for me is one of the bests, no doubts.

Ryan Woodward is one awesome artist and certainly a very good animator! His drawing are just awesome and his animations even better! He worked a lot for films as a storyboard artist, concept artist, EFX Animator, character animator, character developer, and many cool stuff!

He has worked in many huge featured films like Space Jam, The Iron Giant, Spider-man 2 and 3, Where The Wild Things Are, Ironman 2, Cowboys and Aliens, and many more!

To go to his website click HERE, and he has another website, his "fine-art" side as he called it, HERE.

And here is this awesome piece of art that certainly have influenced me before more than once!



And here is the link for the making of and his documentary about it:

http://conteanimated.com/the-animation/the-documentary/

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!


Greets for all the animators and animation lovers out there, and see you next week for another awesome animation!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

My Animations - Paper Cut Animation

This one was another try, now out of the workshop, with the paper cut thing. So this time I tried to have a story to tell, so I created something allusive to a character.

This character have the power of animation inside himself, so he moves, everthing else around him doesn't. It's like... He has this magic inside him, that makes it possible for him to move. He has a power to give that magic to other objects, so they can move too, but when he does he notices that he loses part of that inner power out of him. I like to imagine him as what's behind all the animations in the world. There's something invisible and magical that gives away their movement so things that animators create are able to move. So for each animation ever created, there was a little guy like this one, that gave away his power to make the illusion of life possible. The miracle of birth for animations! =P hahaha yeah you know, I just had to make a little story, so... =)

My Animations - Clay Workshop


Yet another weekend workshop, this time working with modelling clay. This time, we were to make something like a videoclip animation. So we chose a song, figured the beats we wanted to emphasize, and went to the animation!

This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Firstly because the modelling clay was always getting really stiff all the time, making it hard to model. And then, since we were making a more organic animation, we had to constantly squash it and take it out with some vigor, which made our hands really ache after a while. Thank goodness we had an oven to put the clay inside and make it soft =P

I guess because of all that, it wasn't a much productive weekend. Again, in my Vimeo page, it is credited as it should.

My Animations - Sand Workshop


This one was another weekend workshop, now experiencing animation with sand. I never actually liked sand animation, in fact, there is only one or maybe two sand animations to date that I saw and can say that I enjoy. So if there is anyone out there who know of an astonishing sand animation, please post a comment with the name or the link to it. I would very much appreciate it.

So my animation had a little narrative. A guy is killed, and is at the Limbo, inside a canoe in the river. He touches it and the Limbo itself appear like a mirage, being cuted by the canoe... haha

I guess it's hard to understand without the explanation, but well, we were more concerned with the animation technique then with the narrative. Animated in pairs again, and in my vimeo page, credited as it should.

My Animations - Paper Cut Workshop


These animations were created in a Workshop of paper cut animation. The workshop was a weekend long (16h, counting lunch breaks).

This was my first experience with Stop Motion animation (as you can imagine, noticing the finger appearance =P).
We were suposed to start with a very simple shape and animate it, something like "learn the basics first" =P and then we were adding more pieces to it to make a "character" with several pieces to mind how to move with them, squash and stretch, follow through, etc. This exercise was made in pairs, my piece was the cheese-like one in the first, and the fish-like one in the second video. In my vimeo, the other animated piece is credited as it should. So here they are.

Again, black background!



My Animations - Quick Try


This one was a quick try to study an effect to use in other animation of mine (that is still in progression). So I grabbed a few frames from my last animation, inverted the colors, added a piece of music (just to give some fun to it) and photoshoped the hell out of it.
It's a reference study from Norman Mclaren's "Pas de Deux" piece.

My Animations - Doll From the Past


This piece is part of a bigger story. In this exercise we were given a exerpt of a book, with no knowledge of what came before or what was going to happen after that exerpt. That was just a piece for inspiration.

So we had to write down another narrative from that. Mine were a story about a dwarf that was a slave to this girl. She was something like a princess, ignored by her parents, and the dwarf was her entertainment and company. But he hated it. This princess had a kitty doll that was with her all the time. So she grew up, and married some guy and had to leave home. The shot I made was the girl bagging her stuff to leave, when she finds her old kitty doll and have a moment of nostalgia to quickly forget it. All in the point of view of the dwarf, now old and tired. There's more to it in the story, but it doesn't make any sense telling it here. =P

This was my first try animating in full 24 frames per second. Also I had, once again, to photoshop the background frame by frame so she wouldn't be transparent. I had a digital colored version of the background, but since I redesigned it for the actual animation, I didn't paint it again. So here is the animation.



And here is the coloured background along with other backgrounds sketches.




My Animations - Music Abstraction

This exercise was the first one I did with sound! We were to choose a music and make an abstract animation minding the beats, rithm and different instruments. I chose to animate it in Flash and Ryan Woodward's "Thought of You" animation was a HUGE inspiration for this work.

The professor said we should hear the song without any videoclips, just the music, so we could "set our mind free" and make it really abstract with our meaning for it.

The original song can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5P_mVQNnbE

In the animation each piece is one instrument, blowing themselfs up and throwing some gases! =P This was fun to animate and the gases were animated frame by frame and added everytime they were needed.

Here my love for black backgrounds starts to show =P

My animations - Little Rubber


This was my first animation where I actually had a character to animate! I created the character, with Model Sheet and all, designed the background, created the story and the storyboard and then animated it.
Since I didn't know how to make the rubber actually erase something from the background (since the letters were drawn in the actual Background) I had to photoshop frame by frame when the rubber erased a letter. That's why I didn't do it when she is in front of them and is kinda transparent, didn't have the time to photoshop frame by frame the whole animation.

I remember being very proud of it when I delivered the exercise, but still, nowadays so many thing I could have done better! I guess this will always happen, since I plan to be always improving!





And yes, in the end there is something writen in the paper along with the book's side. Lame as it is, it says: "I love to animate". Give me a break, my life passion was just being discovered! =P

My Animations - Poem Interpretation

In this exercise we were given a type of Haiku poem so we could interpret it and write some sequential images and animate it.

My poem said:

Along in the knife handle
Yesterday's paths
Flames, Bed.

So as you can see, it was quite an wide subject. I thought it was a little boring exercise really, but I did my best anyway. This is one animation that has some parts that I really don't like, now that I look at it again. Mainly the face thing.

The beginning is blank, don't give up on it right away!

My Animations - Jump


This two pieces were my first try on A4 pages with a light table!
It's something like body mechanics studies and our first try to animate something that's actually real, with continuity in body shapes and sizes and have joints and all. In this fase I was still a very very green animator. Even now, when I feel I have a world to discover animation wise, I look at this and see the lack of lots and lots of the animation priciples. But still, here they are, part of my evolution.
The first try was just the most simple jump, and the second we were to try and give some personality to the character.







My Animations - Domino Loop

This one was one of my first animations! We were to make a animated loop in 10x6cm pieces of paper (more or less 3,9x2,4 inches). We started making 10 frame loops, and then I made this one.
(Right mouse click, "Turn Loop ON")



Feel free to go to my vimeo and watch the rest of the 10-frame loops.