Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things
This weekend you will begins seeing a few subtle changes to this small, darkish corner of the intertubes. Not much of a change, really, just my nickname, the name of the blog, and a direct URL (woot! finally) A few graphics will change too, but nothing jarring, I promise.
Ne’er to worry, the content of the blog won’t be changing at all. (should i be apologizing for that?)
This is actually a long time coming; someone else is using my ‘nym and has the domain locked up, and the blog’s name “But I digress…” is being used by everyone and their goldfish. So in order to be somewhat unique (as unique as one can be on the web) I finally settled on a new blog title and ‘nym and picked up a dedicated domain name to go with it. Hopefully I won’t break anything in the transition.
So, keep an eye out over the weekend. The changes won’t be big and shouldn’t effect browsing the site (for either of you) and previous links to it should be fine.
sacredcalf (for now)
From the folks at Buck comes this mind-twisting animation:
It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear. And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause.
The Buck team dug deep, channeling our inner gonzo, to direct and produce this homage promoting Good Books, the online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam.
This is the second Gotye video I’ve posted and I have a feeling it won’t be the last. They get top-notch animators that create imaginative videos that pair well with their songs. In a variation on the “small world syndrome” this is also the second video I’ve posted from the animators at Oh Yeah Wow. (Darcy Prendergast directing in this video) No doubt we’ll hear from OYW again too.
Today’s extra post is to mark the sad occasion of Jean Giraud’s passing.
From Inside Moebius – a self-portrait surrounded by some of his characters
Born in Paris in 1938 his artwork really began impacting the comic market in the 1960’s and has been compared to the Nouveau Réalisme (new realism) style becoming popular at the time. In 1963 he adopted the pseudonym Moebius (english link) for his sci-fi work and just over a decade later, along with Dionnet, Farkas, and Druillet, (a couple other artists i’m a huge fan of) founded the French magazine Metal Hurlant which we know and love here in the US as Heavy Metal. (here’s a link to my post about HM mag)
Metal Hurlant issue 1 cover
It was his art and stories that hooked me and started my 30-plus year love affair with Heavy Metal magazine. (Druillet’s art helped alot, but his stories were a bit more avant-gard and hard to follow)
Moebius was pretty prolific and also created art for Marvel comics and various films over his over half-century career. For me, his two most important works were the Arzach and The Airtight Garage art.
While I’m certainly saddened at his demise, I truly appreciate his contributions to the art and comic world. Here are just a few of his wonderful illustrations.
The Hunter
The Airtight Garage
Arzach
Heavy Metal Moebius cover. I probably have this one packed away with my old HM issues
Poster for his ‘Multiple(s)’ exhibition. I think this is a good example of how his style incorporated Art Deco and Nouveau styles to brilliant effect
[update]
An evening with “Moebius” moderated by Animation Director John Musker was an exclusive special event held at the CTN animation eXpo Nov 20, 2010. For more information about this session visit: ctnanimationexpo.com/moebius/
When sunlight breaks out to play. An imaginative (and brilliant) variation on light animation from Sarah Wickens.
The last installment in the Beyond the Mind’s Eye series.
Next series up would be the Odyssey Into the Mind’s Eye, and we will get to it eventually, but not just yet. There’s a lot of excellent animation out there now and I’m getting a bit of a backlog of great stuff in the draft queue that needs to be posted.
You are reading this on a web page so the odds are near certain that you’ve seen a HTTP status page at some time of your browsing life. The dreaded “page not found” uh, page, is HTTP status 404. Basically, a HTTP status is a 3-digit number (depending on the error/info) that a web page ‘replies’ to requests from other web entities, which is often a web browser. There are probably a few hundred of them and we only actually see a few in our normal travels and travails on the intertubes.
It was inevitable that there would come a melding of cats and HTTP status codes. (is there anything a cat doesn’t make better?)
The following error is actually part of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
"Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout."
I can relate:
A common error code in our house
More after the fold
The following are two incredibly important computer animations; the first 3D rendered animation from 1972, and the first fractal generated animation from ca 1979.
In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/?p=1106.
The first fractal animation. Vol Libre
I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world’s first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each
Rather than a long-form post today I offer you some thoughts. Six of them actually. Now get in there and exercise some of that fat outta your head.
Click Me For a Random Post
The Ruffled Crow 