The Gothia Gazette is reporting that The Mysterious Geographic Adventures of Jasper Morello, nominated for Best Animated Sort in the Academy Awards, will be screening on SBS on this Friday 10th March at 8.00pm. The DVD of Jasper Morello, including a ‘making of’ featurette and other award winning films by director Anthony Lucas will be in shops on March 15th. Don’t miss it!
animation
The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello
Another winner in the recent Australian Film Institute Awards was The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, which picked up Best Short Animation, and Oustanding Achievement in Craft in a Non-Feature, Production Design, for the director, Anthony Lucas. It caught my attention not only because it looks cool, but because it’s another example of the exciting work going on with shadow puppetry and new technologies that I mentioned in a couple of previous posts.
Back in October, Ward was really enthusiastic about seeing Jasper at the Ottawa Animation Festival:
Omigosh, I absolutely LOVED the next film… Is it stop-motion? CG? It’s a little bit of both and it looks entirely amazing. Harking back to the very first animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Jasper is done in silhouette, like an elaborate shadow puppet play.
You can get a feel for film by looking at their wallpaper downloads. There is an interesting mix of silhouette and photographic detail. And I like the whimsy of the imagined world and the gazette; some of it is quite pointed. Too bad Jasper not going to be screened here in Canberra.
Anthony Lucas is from 3D Films, which specializes in clay and stop-motion animation for TV commercials, station IDs and special effects. It’s an interesting site to take a wander through. There are some precursors to Jasper. For instance, there are stills and making details of the SBS Station IDs that were done with silhouettes and organic materials to give them a handmade look, as well as a quick time movie of one of them. And the selection of images from their film Holding your Breath are great. I like the look of Bad Baby Amy, too.
Updates:
Lucas‘s Jasper Morello has been nominated for an Oscar in the best short animation catagory.
A review in The Age.
A short video clip from Jasper Morello.
Jasper Morello will be screening on SBS on Friday 10th March at 8.00pm.
The DVD of Jasper Morello, including a ‘making of’ featurette and other award winning films by director Anthony Lucas will be in shops on March 15th.
Updated 2015: broken links
Look Both Ways: Sarah Watt’s animations
(Image from Dendy Films)
I’m delighted the movie Look Both Ways did so well at the Australian Film Awards this weekend, taking out Best Film (Bridget Ikin), Best Direction (Sarah Watt), Best Original Screenplay (Sarah Watt), and Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Hayes).
Its a real gem: everyday, quiet, low key and unpretentious, but deals in subtle and intense ways with life and death and the things in between. Sarah Watt says: “I try and say things like it’s a romantic comedy. But unfortunately I have a tendency to look on the blacker side of life, so I suppose it’s a romantic comedy about fear, maybe, with a little death thrown in.” She has also said “I guess it’s a thing of feeling like you’re extremely fortunate, but with an awareness of how many troubles there are in the world and figuring out how to live with that fortune, whilst not stomping on the heads of those less fortunate. That’s a line that a lot of Australians have to tread daily.”
Look Both Ways is set in Adelaide, where I grew up, and it’s always fun to see familiar places in movies, especially when it doesn’t happen very often. (Shine was the last time for me). Most of the filming was done down towards the port, and the sense of atmosphere, light, dryness and heat haze was absolutely recognizable as a stinking hot Adelaide heatwave.
Another striking feature is the short animations which were done as a collaboration with Emma Kelly (from Tantalus Interactive) and Clare Callinan:
‘Animator Emma Kelly (who collaborated with Sarah on her shorts) drew all the cells over several months. Each drawing was scanned and printed onto suitable water-absorbent paper. Sarah then hand-painted all the ‘watery’ sequences, and Clare Callinan (again a previous collaborator) painted the other sequences, with Sarah finishing each painting. All the painted cells were then re-scanned at Iloura Digital Pictures in Melbourne, camera moves were resolved, and the sequences were recorded out onto 35mm, for integration into the film.’
The animations represent the internal lives of the two main characters. In accordance with their professions, Meryl’s are painterly, and represent her often fearful thoughts (clips (1, 2), while Nick’s are more photographic montage and are visual memories of his life (just a taste in this trailer). There are a couple of other trailers on the LBW site.
I came across another of Watt’s animations online. It’s from a twenty-three minute animation The Way of the Birds, based on a book of the same name by Meme McDonald. It tells the story of the Eastern Curlew:
‘After breeding and nesting in the Siberian grasslands, the adult birds migrate south again within a month or so, leaving their chicks there in the tundra. When they are less than eight weeks old, the chicks make the 13,000 km migration across the world to parts of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand all on their own.’
There are also animations by Watt in an associated online documentary about the Eastern Curlew, A Year on the Wing.
Updated 2015: broken links. Sarah Watt died in 2011.
Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets
Michael Gagne recently released a first series of short director’s cuts animations, Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets, that he created for Nickelodeon’s 2005 Halloween. For example, Nightmare is great. There is a short production diary, too. These are done in Flash, and looking at them it’s easy to see why puppetry and animation are so closely inter-related.
(via PuppetVision)
A peep into the making of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
The New York Times has a short slide-show of some of the sketches and models from the latest Wallace and Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I like seeing the armatures and insides:
Nick Park gives the commentary. I’m not a huge fan of Aardman, but I was sorry to see the Aardman Animation studios had burnt down last week, with many of the original drawings, wooden sets, paperwork, awards and other memorabilia lost.
Mr Bill’s Hurricane Warning
In 2004, Mr Bill, a playdough character who regularly gets squished, was in a public service announcement which was part of an America’s Wetland campaign to teach how Louisiana is losing its coastal marshes and to warn about the dangers of hurricanes in New Orleans.
Foam Latex Puppetmaking Tutorial
Boing Boing points to Kathi Zung, a NYC maker of foam latex puppets used in animated videos and films, and in particular to her Do-it-yourself Foam Latex Puppetmaking 101 tutorial on DVD. I’d like to try something like that sometime.
This is the same technique that was used to make the Leunig Animated series that brought Michael Leunig’s cartoons to life on SBS TV a few years ago. An exhibition showing how it had been made followed, and I loved being able to see in detail how it had been done. Strangely, while the animations themselves were really good, I felt some tension to do with the whole production of animating them weighing down the original whimsy of the cartoons.
Updated links 2015.
‘The Lost Thing’ to become a short film
Having made puppets for a theatre production of Shaun Tan’s ‘The Lost Thing’ last year, I was excited to find out that Passion Pictures is making a short CG film of the book. It will be fun to keep an eye on their gallery of pictures of work in progress over the next months. Among the images there at the moment are drawings of some of the utopian lost things. There were only five utopian lost things in the theatre production, so it will be great if we get to see more of them brought to life in the film. There are also images of a sculpture of the boy by Ron Mueck Mueck, that will be used for mapping the boy from all angles into the CG program. How cool is that!
Harvie Krumpet on SBS
Adam Elliot’s animation Harvie Krumpet won an Oscar yesterday for best short animated film. It has already been shown in cinemas in Melbourne and Sydney, but next Monday we can all catch it on SBS at 9pm. The ABC Radio National program The Makers, always worth a listen, has an interview with Elliot on audio this week, and there is an interesting online interview with him, with a variety of the characters pictured, at Sleepy Brain.
