Hearts

Revisiting music that is soft and full in my heart.
Green Arrow. Yo La Tengo

Yesterday I visited P, he has just come out of hospital having just had an operation on his heart. He was dressed in pale blue pajamas covered in white clouds. My gift was strawberries.
Agnes smelly pooch seemed happy to have him back.
I talked to P about the film 'Tin TIn and I', how beautifully constructed it was, and how it touched upon certain ambiguities that occurred in WW2. Perhaps I wanted to tell P more about how touched I felt by the film. It didn't directly talk about Herge's actual crafting of Tin Tin, yet everything explored in the film pertained to the act of creating marks on a page, creating characters. Of expression through the creation of these characters. What an incredible life of drawing. Its funny, I didn't expect such a sensitive film.
Agnes McSmell and D left to see someone about sky lights. It struck me on this visit to P, of how little sky I cast my eyes on in my current climate. The clouds were beautiful yesterday.
P showed me one of the first books he had as a child. It had very rich colours and beautiful lithographic marks, washy tush tone and litho crayon. The typography was all hand set. It would have been an edition of 1100 (from memory?). 'Just' a book for children.
We looked at a few books illustrated by Jiri Trinka. They are fabulous and beautiful.
Then we looked at quite afew more illustrated books. (All in Czech). Two of them had the tale of 'Otesanek'. ( A traditional Czech folk tale. Jan Svankmajer animated a film of this story). Such magnificent books. Many more thoughts here...
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I meant to write about the dvd "More Animation Greats" a National Film Board of
Canada collection (new at the RMIT library) that I watched the other day. Have to discuss later.
Lots of educational material housed in querky, funny and sometimes dull (too many Health and Safety messages for example) animation. Pick of the bunch was The Family that Dwelt Apart. It had fantastic narration. There was also a real corker by Richard Condie in 3D! La Salla. Bizarre and funny! I'll write about that one later.


Thoughts today.
Do animations have to be classified to assess/contextualize what kind of ideological 'charge' they carry/house deliver?
I have to leave this here. I'll faff up my words even more if I continue.
(my) Yo La Tengo (cd) finished filling the room with nifty ditties and salubrious e-bow tones too many moments ago.

Alan Mitelman exhibition. NGV. :)
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:)

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Piotr Dumala


Animator of the week.


AWN article



AWN article 2

Improv in Animation.
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Back to business.
I now have a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book in my posession. All I want to do right now is finish my paper and get on with other projects.
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I have a vision of a pile of paper (my coursework paper) sitting on the ground. Then some gangly little pooch comes along and sniffs at it quizzically. The pooch stands back and hesitates for a second and then barks at the pile. The papers jump up frightened, and then one by one they run off, zig-zagging into the distance as fast as they can. Never to be seen again.
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I watched Houhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas) last weekend. It was so lovely to see on the big screen. Such nice linework and design. It was very nice.
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Also I went to see Tin Tin and I, a very excellent film indeed.
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I received a very informative email from Steven Woloshon regarding his production technique for Cameras Take Five, and I am quite keen to see more of his animations.
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Yesterday I was reading about Ub Iwerks and Disney, about their initial beginning as creators of animation and starting the production company. It is really interesting to read about them and that time frame, as it is quite an insight into the beginnings of ( a production's) inevitable juggling between money, talent, skill, motivation, time etc. Hmm.
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Ping


Oops its been awhile. I haven't worked on my paper for over a week! I have put up a website finally. It is really not ready to be up yet, but on some good advice I've pulled up my socks and there it is ----->>> See inkwinks link
Theres no animation on it !! Not yet anyway. Since it has been up however, my small and excited brain has been aprickle with activity.

Things I want to write about but don't have time just now.
~Shrek #2 Loads of people(well animators seemingly) think its awful (the animation). Hmm I just want to pick this apart a little at some point. Is the dodgey lipsync annoying? Or can it be accepted as part of the style. How much does this matter and why?
~Melbs' International Film Festival animations. In particular Paul Dreissen's, which utterly tickled my every sense. I had to stop myself from humming "Mmmmmm, mmmmm"
Wow, such beautiful lines. Such lovely animation. Such incredibly well crafted sound. WHY did the audience shuffle so!! Ptthhh!
~The animation that Phil Mulloy wrote was very very nifty.
I'll come back and pop in details.
I am so tired, I think flash has aloped with part of my brain. Or induced some kind of inversion in there. Well at least I have the theme to GA-RA-KU-TA circling around in place of said brain. Now the GA-RA-KU-TA animations were truely remarkable.
Real thoughts later. This is just the pencil version.
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end