Art of Movies

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Total Film and in it was some really cool concept art for some classic films and I thought some of them were amazing. I love just how detailed some of them were. Like the stuff that was done for The Lord of the Rings. There was some concept art for the original Star Wars films too. Still really detailed but the caption talks about how George Lucas was struggling to sell the idea of Star Wars to the studio so he had an illustrator knock up some of these visuals in order to help him sell the film. Which I suppose shows just how important this kind of art work can be to a film.

I've added a few scans of just some of my favourite images in the magazine for your viewing pleasure ;-] I have tried to include the captions but don't know if you can see them.

Stop Motion Animation

These are some of the stop motion animatons that have inspired my animation for the end of this module

Critical and Historical Studies Essay

loving the work of Kyle Cooper right now
basing my essay on this classic title sequence

The South Bank Show: Pixar

Sunday night for me is CSI night. I start watching at about 8 o'clock until I fall asleep. But this last sunday was different. The South Bank Show on ITV did a show about Pixar. So being the dedicated student that I am, I canceled my CSI Sunday and watched it (I even took notes). It was interesting to learn about all the hastle John Lasseter went through early on. Gets sacked from Disney for trying to push computer driven animation, only to come back years later and pretty much run the show.

Seeing some of the older Pixar stuff was really cool and I always forget just how long ago it was being produced.



this was made in 1984...its older than I am!

I found the whole show quite interesting to watch. I was hoping to get a video or at least a link to ITV Player but I cannot find anything. Its worth watching if it ever comes on again though.

Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser is not a moving image designer as I am. Although I decided to base my study into a designer’s influences on him and his work for a few reasons; I had briefly researched some of his work in the first year, I like his work, I feel that his influence can be seen throughout different mediums (not just graphic design) and I feel that his influences would make for better research for this particular piece of work.

Milton Glaser is a Graphic Designer who is probably most famous for his “I Love NY” campaign as well as some other familiar pieces from recent decades. Upon starting my research into his influences I came across this question from an interview from August of this year (http://bigthink.com/miltonglaser/big-think-interview-with-milton-glaser) its in video form and he only really talks about his influences at around the 5:43 mark but the whole interview is quite good.

Question: What historic art movements have most influenced your work?

Milton Glaser: In terms of art movements. Well, I've been persistent in using the history of art as my basic resource. And my favorite periods are certainly the Viennese Cessation and American Modernism and my attachment to Italy and the Renaissance and Piero della Francesca. And the two poles of my affection and experience and influence are Morandi, studied with the fantastic show here at the Metropolitan that was profound and deep and incredibly moving. He was a man who wanted nothing. He didn't want women or success or fame or money, and alternately, Picasso, who wanted everything. He wanted all the money, all the fame, all the women. And I find my personality in life bouncing between those two models.

This was interesting to me because I never really saw these kinds of areas and artists come across in any of Glaser’s work that I had researched in the past. This led me to go deeper into research of Glaser’s work. Specifically his work from “The Push Pin Graphic”. This was a self promoting mailer that he and the other founding members of the design studio of the same name created to showcase their talents and ideas.

Some his work for the mailer had shades of Picasso’s influence as can be seen in the sort of gestural drawings to the right.Upon further research into Push Pin through the book “The Push Pin Graphic” by Seymour Chwast (another of the Push Pin founders) I found that one of the ideas behind the design studio and the mailer itself was to sort of go against conventional design and produce things that were both interesting and different. I felt that this could be where Glaser got his influences from American Modernism as I have found that particular movement was started under similar principals and ideas.

Start at Last

SO this is me finally starting my blog

I'm glad that I can start with animation because it covers something that something that I can get quite passionate about AND it’s something that I’m researching for the course at the moment as well.

Web based animations like those from weebl-stuff.com are something I have been interested in for a few years now and they are partly responsible for my being on the course I’m on now.
Before now they have been a shared joy between me and few of my friends from work and this particular website is something I direct a lot of people to not just for silly cartoons but I also think they are a good example of Flash animations.
Fairly recently they have been responsible for the Yellow Pages 118 247 ad campaign. I think this may be an indication that these kinds of animations can be used in mainstream media such as television in an effective way. Its classic advertising material, repetition of a catchy jingle, with the modern animation twist.