Final Biopic projects on Vimeo

Well done to you all. Some very accomplished work in terms of ideas, narrative and depiction, and for many of you a first foray into film making/animation to any large degree, so the technical aspects are also showing great promise.

Here is the link of those uploaded to Vimeo...

http://vimeo.com/groups/45714/videos

Pictoplasma - Pen to Paper @ Concrete Hermit

Another useful exhibition for you and your Biopic project. Here's the blurb from the Concrete Hermit website...

26th March – 24th April 2010

Berlin based project Pictoplasma is regarded as the world’s leading authority on contemporary character design. Starting with the first Conference in 2004, a diverse, international audience has been attending Pictoplasma Festivals in Berlin, New York and Argentina establishing a vast creative network and lively exchange of ideas. It’s numerous publications and events focusing on the impact and role of character design within the world of contemporary art and design have found international acclaim.

Their latest publication, Pen to Paper, launches in the UK with an exhibition at Concrete Hermit on the 25th March. The book presents the most adventurous images of a select group of international artists whose work finds its genesis in traditional analogue techniques. The recent revival of analogue skills has injected immeasurable visual wealth into the world of illustration, fine art and especially character design. Artists reject the computer and channel their creativity through spontaneous freehand drawing. The spontaneity of this kind of creativity allows for a more free-flowing form of expression, leading to edgy and untamed beings, erupting with energy – the perfect antidote to the plethora of digital imagery abundant today.

The exhibition will feature a fine selection of figurative drawings, watercolours and collages.

Cut-out animation from Jan Lenica

You may know Jan Lenica's poster work, but he has worked in many fields such as costume design, children's book illustration, architecture, music, and film. In his animation you may recognise a lineage of political satire collage/cutout style harking back to the Dada group of artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters or John Heartfield, but as this clip points out, you may also recognise his influence on the likes of Terry Gilliam (Monty Python animation era) and Jan Svankmajer. If you are interested in this lineage, see this great website with its timeline of photomontage, called "nu-real: fantastic photomontage and its possible influences 1857-2007"

If you click this film and see it in youtube there are many other very seminal films to view down the right hand side or just look here at TheMotionBrigade's movie selection...all very good.

Yuri Norstein, analogue genius

Make sure you check out his films, but this documentary is very interesting to understand his working process and crazy hardware!

His use of visual poetry, and atmospheric characterisations, locations and detailed motion are painstakingly constructed in layers of acetate and paper on huge panes of glass which can also be projected through with filmic textures.

Czech animators/Film makers...

Worth going to at the Horse Hospital. This is the blurb from their website...
An exhibition presenting work by five Czech film directors, artists and animators: Michal Zabka, Vaclav Svankmajer, Noro Drziak, Jan Bubenicek and David Sukup. All graduates of the Film and TV School of the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), they share the heritage of the great Czech animation school as represented by the works of Karel Zeman, Jiri Trnka, Jan Svankmajer as well as having the great animator Bretislav Pojar as their teacher. Already acclaimed for their work while at FAMU, all five filmmakers are now working on their highly anticipated first feature length films. Photographs from their films, puppets, props, designs and story-boards document their filmmaking processes and illustrate their highly individual work.
Curated by Zuzana Povysilova

The exhibition is complemented by screenings of their films at the Ciné Lumière on 14, 18 and 20 April.

Johnny Kelly's Lipsync workshop with some of our first year group

Results of a two hour stop motion workshop with Johnny Kelly (movie kindly donated from his Vimeo page) at Camberwell College of Arts, November 18th, 2009, involving BA Illustration First Years students and FDA Design Practice and Illustration (for Sequence & Interaction) students, and some sections by the production company who represent him, Nexus Productions.

A very successful and impressively organised workshop with great results! Thanks Johnny. See photos of the workshop here...

Participants listed by Johnny Kelly as follows:-

0:00 — 4:00

Maelle Noe

Eun Kyoung Ju

Ben Woodcock

15:08 — 25:04

Lucy Towle

Sophie Whetton

Victoria Wilmott

Charlotte Jones

25:05 — 29:06

hemalodedra (sorry I don't know full name here!)

Aaron Cook

Lewis Stringer

29:07 — 34:05

Ella Mclean

jozy2 (sorry again, real name unknown)

Emma Williams

37:11 — 41:09

Maelle Noe

Eun Kyoung Ju

Ben Woodcock

Multitudes of motion...

Showreel of Swedish director Daniel Eskils, showing an assemblage of his often lo-fi/partially lo-fi moving image techniques which might interest you, ranging across puppetry, costume, collage stop motion, overhead projector drawing, and good old pixillation.



Kris Moyes' videos for Beck, The Softlightes and Architecture in Helsinki (Heart it Races), show similarly imaginative and mostly lo-fi techniques. See more of his work here





When searching for Kris Moyes' AIH video on YouTube I also found a repertoire of their other videos, and they obviously have a taste for maximum energy and effect for minimum means. Note their combination of costume, movement and a gymnasium...Might be useful for your Leisure Centre exhibition?

Tron

And finally a sweded version of Tron, the very hi-fi-for-its- time sci-fi film from 1982.

Isabella Rossellini/Sundance Channel

Innovative use of paper technology and crude [ish] film techniques. These are simple but informative films about the reproductive mechanics of crustacea. Check out more here and thank you to Noel Bramley for drawing my attention to this.

Fluxus

Following on from Mr Keen is an example of rapid fire, information saturated film making from experimental 'art' group fluxus.

condensed stories via moving image

Jeff Keen's exaggerated and riotous use of pace through rapid cuts and stop frame animation cram visuals and ideas into short timespans. Here he uses a hand-made/lo-fi mixed media approach to moving image, and a dreamlike non-linear narrative. See more about him here, here and here.



In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (which we will show you soon) he uses lo-fi means again to create abridged versions of famous films in short timespans. He calls these sweded versions. They contain key points in the narrative cut together quickly to give a precis of the storyline. This has become a bit of a cult process now with YouTube full of sweded versions of famous films. Gondry has also written a book called "You'll Like This Film Because You're In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol" which he hopes will enable anyone who reads it to make imaginative films with limited means.

See Michel Gondry's sweding of his own Be Kind Rewind trailer here!