Horrible Pain

Here’s a video trying to pitch the concept of “Animascope.”

Basically, you shoot an actor with high-contrast lines drawn all over his costume, and then you can print that and paint it like it’s an animation cell. Of course, it ends up looking more like rotoscoping than real animation. It’s a little more forgiving when applied to mechanical things than to actors. Video processing is really cheap, nowadays, so I’d be tempted to try out something like this, though it isn’t as indistinguishable from real animation as the people in the video would have you believe.

Here’s a Vince Collins cartoon made for the American bicentennial:

My favourite part is the cornucopia with cars and hamburgers coming out of it. This and some of his movies from around the same time have a certain attitude towards colour, plus maybe uniform line thickness, and of course the psychedelic flashing where you keep changing the colour each frame. I’m going to have to analyze that a little more.

Also, I’m fascinated by the eerie sound in this Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t66sYpoWDSw

And this one has a lot of things making me think about how to accent different kinds of motions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDEjtuwjFGQ#t=4m35s
When the pillar vibrates, a light-coloured line-art double of the pillar appears. And so many of the strikes have these elaborate stars and explosion accents that are gone in an instant, but are fascinating.

This is a pretty sweet behind-the-scenes for a stop-motion sequence. I like the use of different measuring devices, like the wooden dowels and the tape on the carpet.