Tag Archives: movies
Stratacut
Man, this stuff is crazy cool and weird:
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2009/06/01/freaked/
This guy creates animations in clay and then slices the clay open and photographs them. Like, since he just needs to produce a 2D image, he then replicated time through the extra dimension of space. So it’s a kind of unusual way of approaching animation or moving pictures.
World champion ball eater
Another animation test for myself. I just wanted to try out different ways of moving this guy’s arms.
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Actors
I recently took a course on directing actors with Jeff Erbach.
Tangentially related to this, I need to recommend the book Playing to the Camera. It’s a collection of interviews with and essays by actors, on the subject of film acting. And it’s nice in the sense that it covers almost a century, interviews European and Russian actors, so you’ve got a fairly broad spectrum of approaches. Continue reading
The movie trailer voice-over post-LaFontaine
So, Don La Fontaine, the primary movie trailer voice-over guy, died this last year. I’ve heard people suggest that they officially retire the phrase, “In a world” in his honour.
I think I recognized his voice in the trailer for Delgo. To me, that kind of exemplified what went wrong with Delgo. The studios turn ideas down because they don’t think they can market them. So if you’re billing yourself as the most expensive non-Hollywood animation in America, then you can’t market exactly the same way the studios would.
Animation
So the animation project I was working on for four months is animated. It’s an episode of the No Budget Show. I said I’d post something about what I learned once it was done.
First, some links that you might find nice:
This explanation of the bouncing ball is pretty great. It gets into variations on the bounce, and use of the bounce in a walking animation. I only found this once this project was pretty much done, so it had no real influence.
There are 8 and only 8 mouth positions
I’m helping with an animated project. One thing that’s come up a few times when I mention this to people is they’ll mention drawing the 8 mouth positions needed for lip sync.
Cheesy dialogue
Someone got me thinking about the difference between unrealistic dialogue and cheesy dialogue. Brick, a movie I love the hell out of, has plenty of unrealistic dialogue. But it somehow uses that to its advantage.
So Brick proves that being unrealistic is not sufficient to render dialogue cheesy. What sets it apart from cheesy dialogue?
Scary faces
So apparently a semi-popular thing to do on Youtube now is to morph your face into a monster.
I know how it’s done but the lizard part of my brain still finds these things terrifying.
Mysterious Locked-Room Mystery
This played at the Gong Show on Wednesday. Continue reading
Goals of effects
To expand upon a comment from an earlier post, there are three goals when making a special effect.
1) Convey what the effect represents.
This is the most important goal. If you create a model city, it needs to look enough like a city that the audience knows that it’s a city when they see it.
2) Look cool
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