major post

Pinscreen animation makes use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. Drill millions of pins holes in the metal plate and insert the steel pins into the hole. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. Because the depth of needle eye changes to form different levels of shadow, showing lines and shapes, and then frame by frame into the film.

The cold and hard steel plate and steel pins, with the creativity of animation artists, make use of pins change and light design, to create the lively, creative, humorous, imaginative and philosophical ideas in the animation. The flexible tension and artistic conception expressed by the pinscreen animations are incomparable with other animation techniques. This technology can achieve some special effects that the traditional stop frame animation cannot complete, and the style is unique and strong.

Night on bald mountain is the first pinscreen animation. The unique quirky atmosphere of pinscreen animation and the changing effect of static and dynamic perfectly restore this imaginative wild work. The film is only 8 minutes long, but it creates a frightening atmosphere through flowing images, laying an important foundation for the development of later animation.

According to the classic definition of documentary, it can be clear that the most important feature of documentary is its non fiction, that is, the authenticity of recording materials, but the definition of “creative processing” leads to the broadness of the extension boundary of documentary, which leads to the special branch of animated documentary. Animation documentary is a kind of film type combining animation and documentary.

Different from the general documentary form, it may seem unique and absurd to present it with animation, but this is just an innovative form. The new form of animation, as an “alternative excavation of realism”, challenges the traditional way of documentary production. The challenge lies not only in the way of presentation, but also in the challenge to the meaning of “truth”.

The essence of documentary is fiction, that is, the fiction of reality. The biggest characteristic of animation is to assume that no matter the character image or the scene itself can not be found from the reality at all. However, the animation character or the animation scene are all the mapping of real life. Moreover, the animation documentary is quite different. All the virtual animation characters and scenes it presents have real people and things as the prototype. ” This point and based on the real events adapted from the film and some of the same place.

Jiri Trnka is a Czech illustrator, puppetmaker, filmaker and animator. He specializes in handcrafter puppet making and his craftsmanship is pretty remarkable. His short Ruka (the hand) is both is surreal as it is thought provoking. The shorts main conflict is between our protagonist who is an unnamed character within his house and a giant hand that appears from a box in his home. The conflict escalates with the hand imposing himself on the protagonist in his own home. It ends with the hand putting him in a cage. The metaphor might be a cautionary tale on people being forced to live a certain way because of their governments. Just like in the animation everything seemed fine but in the end freedom was lost. The metaphor may seem heavy handed but it’s execution of the message it was sending was heard loud and clear.

Drawing animation is very interesting because its works as multiple things. It lends itself more to traditional cinema featuring live action segments. It acts as a sort of meta narrative where the progress of the animation is incorporated into the film. Pioneers of this in particular style are Claire Parker and Alexander Alaxief. Claire Parker was an MIT graduate. The drawing animation method involves the usage of an invention called the pinscreen which involves the movement of 240000 vertically lying pins. It functions similarly to the zoetrope but its most notable difference would be that reassemble pieces of images using things later on known as pixels. In some ways it could be considered as the first precursor to digital animation.

Arthur melbourne cooper has an impressive repetuar of content. producing a total of over three hundred films between the years 1869 and 1915. His most impressive animation is Dreams of Toy land. It’s a very surreal animation done with stop motion animated puppets. For 1908 to have so many moving parts to ones animated feature is very time consuming, and must be even more time consuming when you realize it came out in 1908. I enjoy the mixing of live action and animation. It works especially in this animation because the only thing that’s animated is the dream sequence. The moment to moment action is very sporadic but always feels intentional.

For my last post, I would like to share some of my favorite stop motion music videos in the hip hop scene. I know I have done a couple of posts related to music but I love seeing artists team with other artists to create something grand. So many creative juices flowing into one project produces greatness! Also, I just really enjoy music and I want to create animated music videos.

I love this music video made for the song Shadrach by the Beastie Boys. This song is iconic and I love how abstract the style is. I can tell what is happening the entire time and the color palette is super appealing. You can clearly tell that they are performing in front of a crowd and I wonder how the animator was able to capture how it feels to attend a Beastie Boy concert.

This characters for this music are so funny to me because the main subject is a donut. Also, the song is about a heist and the rapper (which is a donut) is running from the cops. If you don’t know, cops are stereotyped for always eating donuts. Also I have never seen a cut out animation for a music video. Even though the lyrics are pretty vulgar, I enjoy watching. I even like how at the end, the animator uses his hand as a shadow to snatch the soul out of the donut (kind of like the hand represents God)

During the Golden Age of Animation, Tex Avery has a game changing idea. He wanted to make animations for adults and started making parodies. One of his parody films that was successful was Cinderella Meets Fella (1938). This film was a parody of the animation Bosko the Ink Talk Kid (1929).

Parodies became popular mainly because of all the cultural references. If you were someone that followed the media at that time, mainly adults, then you could understand the references. Parodies are meant to be funny and to make fun of things popular in our society.

This was a game changer in the animation business because parody animation were really big on YouTube. There are mainly channels devoted to only creating animated parody videos and some are even music videos.

One popular channel that I used to watch in middle school was How it Should Have Ended. It’s literally a channel full of parodies about funny ways a popular movie should have ended. Although I haven’t watched any recently, i remember my favorite one being to The Hunger Games. I will share the link below. I hope it’s as funny as 13 year old me thought!