Let’s call today Saturday Morning Panoramas! We’re featuring two films today that examples of long panoramas that tell the story of a place and not only a character.
I enjoy stop motion work. It has a weight and tangible feeling that I haven’t yet seen replaced in digital animation. Maybe that’s an indictment of my own viewing habits, but I don’t think so. It isn’t always as smooth and polished as its animated cousins, but you can’t say it isn’t a labor of love as these shorts alone can take nearly a month to complete. Feature length movies, you can imagine, take much longer. For instance, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, required 12 shots for every one second of finished film (source) and took a crew of 200 animators/puppeteers three years to complete (source). That’s just a thought.
Now, I don’t want to confuse you so I’ll tell you right out that the second of these isn’t stop-motion (the film making style I just rambled on about), but is a mash-up of hand drawn images being animated into that panorama-style of storytelling and I love it. I dare you not to feel inspired to create something after watching these two. Maybe it’s a drawing, a story, a tune, whatever; if you’re like me, these are the types of things that really get your creative mojo pumping. Uh, so to speak.
In any event, the videos below are fantastic and a bit of a change of pace for this humble little series of posts. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
This Is Where We Live
by 4th Estate
The Filmmakers write:
Welcome to our city - to our world - of books. This is where we live.
A film for 4th Estate Publishers’ 25th Anniversary. Produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.
The film was produced in stop-motion over 3 weeks in Autumn 2008. Each scene was shot on a home-made dolly by an insane bunch of animators; you can see time-lapse films of each sequence being prepared and shot in our other films.
Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing
by no name party
The Filmmaker writes:
'Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing' is a humorous animated short film that takes the viewer into a lovely and detailed designed comic city. There you're going to witness a row of odd incidents that are obviously related to Matilda, a quite inconspicuous old lady.
We drew alot of linearts with some fineliner. Scanned it and preojected in 3D onto a Mesh (Maya). After weeks of pain and horrible rendertimes (we hadn't that much experience) we did it. Everything was drawn by hand. All 3D Stuff is done in Maya and the comp was done in Combustion.
Want more? Check out the other episodes in the Weekend Animations season: View the series list.
As you can see, this feature changed its name. Last week, and when I thought about doing this (an action that took me all of about 10 seconds), I thought "Saturday Morning Animations," and why not? Seemed like a perfectly natural thing to call it. In my mind, I saw it this way:
So I wrote up the posts—in a flurry, I did 7 over two days—sat back and waited for it to debut. And then came Saturday when I noticed an interesting thing: it seems Tor.com has a series, compiled by the fantastic Irene Gallow, that is titled awfully similarly and last weekend, we had picked out a similar animation: The Cat Piano (which remains pretty hip).
Well what might seems amusing to you was pretty troubling to me. I ran around over what to do in a slight panic on Saturday. Should I just keep marching on? Should I cancel my series after its pilot episode? Should I maybe go outside for some fresh air?
Of course, I didn't really want to cancel this series. But I was concerned about the possibility of repeating content, like last week for example, and be called unoriginal. On the other hand, I happen to really, really enjoy animation. Granted, I'm a total outsider/consumer. I've never worked in animation, or in the visual arts for that matter. But I do consume quite a bit of it both voluntarily and happily. And I've taken care to put together "playlists" and explain why I've thought to group them together the way that I have.
In the end, I tweaked the name a little and decided to keep going. I think that between the two of us, both sites provide a different flavor. The unwritten benefit there (which I'm about to write, because I'm a total spoilsport) is that you, my good reader, have two places to get your animation fix over the weekend. I would highly recommend you check out Irene's series as well. It's good stuff and worth viewing.
So the name's changed, but the song remains the same. I hope you enjoy the ride.
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