Lo Fi Stop Motion

I love all stop motion animation, and while I'm inspired by the huge, professional applications of this medium, like Coraline or The Corpse Bride, the type that continually moves me are often the homemade or relatively low budget productions where the sets are hand built and the objects are ordinary. Maybe it has something to do with the joy of imagining that inanimate objects can have a life of their own, and that our childlike sense of storytelling and play can be articulated so simply. The fact that these animations aren't technically perfect reinforces this playfulness and tangibility.




As a big fan of both dinosaurs and origami as well, this student project is an obvious favorite of mine.



This is a perfect example of what I mean. It takes place in this simple, imperfect, magical world and the animation is gritty and bold. I love this very much. That there is film noise also adds to its wonderfulness.



Pingu is a Swiss children's show about a family of penguins. The original series was from 1986 and for me, exists at the perfect balance between lo-fi and slickly produced. It makes you feel as if Pingu is your toy penguin too, and this could be a story you invented as a child, playing with a white sheet and some styrofoam.

Super Awesome Favorite Stuff!

Another digital art related phenomena I am obsessed and inspired by is the recreation of prehistoric life through the use of 3D animation and compositing. Obviously I loved Jurassic Park and all the sequels, however, my all time favorites in this genre are
Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, the chronologically last part of a comprehensive series that chronicles life on the planet from pre-dinosaur life through dinosaurs and to prehistoric beasts and early man. Framestore created Walking with Beasts.


Pod's Travels, an episode from the 4-Part miniseries Dinosaur Planet which recreates 4 very current fossil findings into separate stories. They were created by Meteor Studios

I love these movies because of the great imagination and commitment to both science and creativity that goes into making these. Though the production value on Dinosaur Planet is much lower than the Walking With... series, they are both great stories that follow a storytelling arc that is borrowed from real nature documentaries. I own many videos in this genre and I have always been inspired by them. I really love that these movies recreate these prehistoric worlds using scientific data and hypothesis to vividly describe a world that we will never ever see, but in a fully realized way where we can visit in the form of a nature documentary. The fact that these movies are completely made up, that fossils are all we have, and the stars of these films are puppets and computer graphics makes me so excited for more from the marriage of science and digital art!

A great big inspiration to me.

Aside from so many years of beautiful Comedy Central bumpers that always made me think "I want to make those", one of the penultimate inspirations for me wanting to learn motion graphics was the intro to this show, which was made by a VFX company called a52. I still think it is the greatest of all time:

Mac vs. PC

I personally don't care.  I like Mac and PC, and I feel it's whats under the hood that counts.  For the right price, I could get a computer to handle my imagination, which is the number 1 cause of computer crashes.  I personally don't have a crazy setup.  My hardware is:

Dell Dimension e510

Pentium 4  3.4 GHZ

3.25 GB RAM

running Windows XP

I have an NVIDIA Quadro 1500 graphics card

and I draw with a 9"x12" Intuos 3 Wacom Tablet.

I have a 20" Dell monitor at 1600 x 1200 resolution.

I use the CS3 Adobe Production Suite and I have some other software.  I buy all my software, I don't have any crazy hook ups, yet.

Now, if I could have anything I wanted for my design studio, and money wasn't an issue,  I would probably start out with a Mac Pro with all the RAM it could handle, and switch out the video card for both a Blackmagic Intensity and NVIDIA Quadro CX,  I would get a Pixellexis Redbox, and a 21" Cintiq wacom tablet, plus 30" cinema display monitor and a small monitor on the side "for palletes".    Also I would get a nice comfortable chair and probably have the table that I work on custom built to accomodate the whole thing.  

If there is anyone out there who is interested in writing to me what their dream design computer setup would be, comment it up!

order vs. chaos

So far, This website has been good to me.  There are some things I feel that I am pretty great at, and other things where I definitely can improve.  I got this blog to work through ftp, and it was not too hard.  Trying to fix the CSS on it to match my site is a little harder.  That's where I'm at tonight on the last day of November.  Here is an animation by the South Park guys animating an excerpt of an Alan Watts speech that I want to post which sums up the way I feel about art and the approach towards it that many people have.  Enjoy!