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[Himmler]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Quintopotere @ Jul 30 2006, 06:12 PM) [snapback]245913[/snapback]</div>

However, that guy knows just a couple of tricks with sand, but isn't so good in drawing...
Well he's obviously better than me, but I hope he'll practice more...
[/b]

it's art... you don't really need to draw or paint everything as you see it, you only have to suggest it
and he's doing those pretty fast...

[Quintopotere]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Himmler @ Jul 30 2006, 06:25 PM) [snapback]245925[/snapback]</div>

it's art... you don't really need to draw or paint everything as you see it, you only have to suggest it
and he's doing those pretty fast...
[/b]

Ok, guys: I'll never say one more word against that guy!
But I think I should be free to dislike how he draw...

[Mighty Midget]

[kidding]NO SUCH FREEDOM! DIE! [/kidding]

Fair enough.

[guesst]

I saw a video of a woman doing this awhile ago. Same sort of thing, but her's were less cavepaintingly and more soft and feminie and in some ways more attractive.

Not to say I don't like this one. Pretty good stuff.

[ReamusLQ]

That was really cool. I like how at first you'd be like "what the heck is he making?" and suddenly he adds one little dot of sand and it looks amazing.

My favorite was the monkey to the lion transformation.

I still think the spraypaint artists I see in San Francisco and places like that are cooler though.

[rlbell]

It makes me yearn for the ability to ransack the archives at Canada's National Film Board.

The amazing thing is that he does it fast enough to hold your attention between tableaus.

There is a similar style of image making for animated films-- each frame is pressed into a thin sheet of clay, that is backlit. The deeper the impression, the thinner the clay, so the more light that gets through to expose the film. I suspect that clay is used, instead of sand, as the image is much more durable.

Flying off on a tangent, another interesting technique is forming images by pushing in the needles of a large pinboard (a pierced plate with closely spaced holes, each of which has a needle that can be slid back and forth).

Continuing with the tangent and explaining the opening of this post, the NFB animation studio was founded by Norm Maclaren, who saw it as his mission to push the boundaries of animation, in terms of technique. In the past, the NFB has funded all forms of animation, in Canada, and invited foreign animators to give master classes, to spread their techniques. If someone has created moving pictures by photographing a backlit sand table, odds are the NFB has offered some money to spread the technique.

Norm Maclaren invented the animation technique of pixelation, where the film is a sequence of still photographs of live actors. His classic film "Neighbours" won the Academy Award for best animated short. The technique was also used in Mark Jitlow's (sp?) "Wizard of Space and Time", and the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". Another of his more famous films is "Pas de Deux", which features a film of two dancers fed through an optical printer, multiple times, with each time offset by one frame.

Lord only knows how you would find any of these, but two others worth mentioning are "Variations on a Triangle" and "Cosmic Zoom".

[Lulu_Jane]

I think it's quite beautiful, especially how he works with the music too.

I'd always wondered who the Animal Planet promo guy was anyhoo

[Himmler]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Lulu_Jane @ Jul 31 2006, 03:42 AM) [snapback]246016[/snapback]</div>

I'd always wondered who the Animal Planet promo guy was anyhoo
[/b]

yeah, that was bugging me too, always LOL

[TheGiantMidgit]

I remember this... it's good, but my first thought was "Wow, way to rip off NFBC work."



EDIT: Wow Rlbell, congrats on the cultural awareness, way to read my mind. As a reward, here:



http://www.penny-arcade.com/forums/viewtop...hp?t=1073829061 ...yea, I'm Davoid.

[rlbell]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TheGiantMidgit @ Aug 2 2006, 05:59 AM) [snapback]246394[/snapback]</div>

I remember this... it's good, but my first thought was "Wow, way to rip off NFBC work."



EDIT: Wow Rlbell, congrats on the cultural awareness, way to read my mind. As a reward, here:



http://www.penny-arcade.com/forums/viewtop...hp?t=1073829061 ...yea, I'm Davoid.
[/b]

Thank you for the link. It turns out that the name of the short is "Notes on a Triangle", not "Variations on a Triangle". The beautiful animated short, "The Sweater", is a delightful litmus test for determining if the person with the maple leaf on their backpack really is canadian.

The short film, "Animando", was the result of an internship of a brazilian animator who explores many techniques, including a backlit sand table.

While my father may not have worked on the Little Abitibi dam, nor on the survey crew, he did help with the design and construction of hydroelectric power dams in north Ontario, so "Black Fly "is near and dear to me.

If you want to see a very early example of computer animation, check out "Hunger". The animator drew a few key frames and used computer morphing for the in-betweens. It is only line drawings, but it is from 1974.

The film "Mindscape" was animated with a pinboard.

All of the above are well worth watching.