Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.
Previously:
Graham Base’s 1986 alphabet book Animalia has been turned into an CG-animated TV series which is premiering today at midday on the Ten network in Australia, and simultaneously on BBC1 and CBBC in the UK, PBS Kids in the US and CBC in Canada. There are 40 half-hour epidodes, and you can see a trailer here. It’s made in Australia, mostly at Photon VFX.
Remember how we scoured each drawing for the small boy hidden in the page? He has been developed into a main character, Alex, who along with a friend, Zoe, get conjured into the magical world of Animalia. It sounds promising – I just hope I remember to watch it!
Here are some links that interested me:
The Tale of How is a beautiful and intreguing animation, a labour of love by three friends calling themselves the Blackheart Gang, who hail from Cape Town, South Africa. It’s the second part of a larger story they envisage, A Dodo Trilogy. Their ‘making of’ video introduces the makers and explains how they went about it.
(via She Dreams in Digital)
Update: Siouxfire has a cool Concise Overview of “The Household”, a series of interviews, production
images, and information on the two follow-ups completing the Dodo
trilogy as well as the following trilogy (the Bear Histories) at Siouxwire. Thanks, Siouxfire!
(photo credit: David Fletcher)
Radio National’s Bush Telegraph has audio of their April 23rd interview with Jillian Pearce (fast forward to the 36 minute mark). Jillian is a performance artist living in Natimuk, the small town at the foot of rock-climbing mecca, Mt Arapiles, in rural Victoria. Jillian and her performing arts company, Y Space, have for some years been doing exciting work with rock-climbers, dancers, animation and puppetry in ‘unusual and high places’, such as the Natimuk wheat silos, exploring images, stories and relationships with the space and land. Check out their past and present projects, and some of their video.
I came across a lovely stop motion animation yesterday, the Softlightes Heart Made of Sound. It’s directed and made by an Australian animator, Kris Moyes, who has done some other cool videos, including (Wolfmother’s White Unicorn (defaced), and the The Presets’ Are You the One?.
This caused me to revisit Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, which I just loved at the time. It was made in 1986, but it still stands up pretty well; not too surprising considering Aardman’s successes since then.
It’s one of those classics you assume everyone knows, but I’ve been realizing the older you get the less likely that is to be true! The other day I posted Jan Lewis’s Execution Row (postcards of the hanging), a current and clever borrowing of Dylan’s Desolation Row, at my local discussion forum, and the only response was someone young saying they hadn’t heard the song before but I liked it…
This lovely animation about knitting obsession, is written directed and animated by the Finnish animator, Laura Neuvonen.
(via CRAFT Magazine)
(photo by Glenn Watson)
I really laughed my way through Peter Cornwall’s Ward 13, one of a number of terrific Australian animations screened at the summit. It’s a stop-motion animation – action/horror/comedy – about a guy who has a road accident and wakes up in the hospital from hell, complete with bizarre medicines, a green tentacled blob, experimental puppy surgery, and a doctor and nurse who menace with huge dirty knives, cleavers, shears and sticks. You can download the trailer to get a taste of it, and check out how it was made.
Links updated 2015
Tyger from Guilherme Marcondes on Vimeo.
Tyger is a terrific short film directed by Guilherme Marcondes. While William Blake’s poem, The Tyger, was the starting point, it ‘doesn’t attempt to illustrate or pay homage to the original text’. Marcondes interprets the tiger as symbolizing ‘a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress. The tiger is as much dangerous as it is marvellous, and this ambiguity makes us avoid the pure romantic vision of society’.
The story is about relating city to jungle and people to animals, and it is achieved with a wonderful mixture of imagery – a great bunraku-style puppet tiger, used with black light technique; Sao Paulo’s urban landscape as a photographic setting; drawings with a lino-cut quality that morph people into animals, and order into chaos; and animated glowing lines that sprout and twine like jungle vegetation. The music is cool, too.
Joao Grembecki and Cia.Stomboli in Sao Paulo, Brazil, made the tiger, and the puppeteers are Joao Grembecki, Cassiano Reis and Fabio Oliveiro. The full credits are here.
Updated links 2015
Vladimir Gvozdariki is a Russian artist who makes whimsical figures, animations and images. Some are pleasing in their simplicity, but I particularly like his complicated drawings of mechanized animal structures. They are in numerous places in his galleries, like here, here and here and here. I also like how some, like this fish, have made the transition from drawing to sculpture. I could imagine them being used theatrically, and some aspects -the whimsy and the technical details – remind me of some of Shaun Tan‘s creatures in The Lost Thing.
I also like Gvozdariki’s interest in snails and miniature worlds. How would you like to live here?
(via the wonderful BibliOdessy)
