Origami - post 4

We were up at Sesame Workshop yesterday. We stopped by to see Matt Stoddart and I realized we never posted the final "Origami" we did together for Nickelodeon.

While in his office Matt gave us an Abelardo doll.

Abelardo is the Big Bird of Plaza Sesamo

Here's "Origami":



Ed Smith did the animation of the boy. Winnie Tom did the CG animation and most of the compositing.

The music is performed by Yomo Toro on the cuatro which is a ten string guitar associated with Puerto Rico. This is what makes the piece, in my opinion. It's a melancholy sound that provides an emotion weight for the picture.

We went to a basement studio in Jersey City where Yomo likes to record and they laid down the recording in multiple takes on a quarter inch, eight track tape. JZ Barrell was responsible for synchronizing the speeds (long story there) and cutting the track down from roughly five minutes to song you hear in the final.

And Away!

One benefit of working on antique machines is long render times. A sequence which would take five minutes on a newer computer can take hours on one that's just a few years old.

Two hours of waiting, plenty of time to skip out to the movies.

Prior to sneaking out to see "Up", I had only see a couple feature films from Pixar. I liked the fish one, it hit all the right marks. The superhero one left me cold, if I were a 12 year old it may have seemed clever.

"Up" starts out strong enough. A real human, in a real state. Even though its a little sappy, its a well earned.

The first ten, fifteen minutes establish a concrete reality. I don't mean a house-flying or not-house-flying reality, I mean the old guy behaves in a recognizably human fashion. And it's not a kiddie movie. What eight year old knows the long ache of bygone love? It's a cheap emotion, for sure, but it's a real emotion -reminiscent of Jonas Odell's "Family and Friends" -a little dark, a little humorous.

realism courtesy of: the internet

Then, in the lingua franca of the internet - WTF? "Up" is less a hot air balloon, more of a 30,000 foot drop into kiddie film. The craft of the writing is evident -people laugh at jokes that aren't clever or remotely funny because they are properly timed and executed.

Here's what bugs me. Romeo and Juliet, you know Romeo and Juliet, they fall in love but their families will kill one another if they find out. This grim fact colors and forces every action that follows. In "Up" we've got this old guy set on remembering his wife in a grand fashion, there's a kid that tags along (because it seems like the buddy film is the new Broadway musical)and then we get unnecessary hijinx.

I'll admit, I hate the hijinx. I like the crabby old man.

Here's the real thing: the old man, in the presence of his childhood hero, his dead wife's childhood hero, the catalyst for their love decides FOR NO REASON AT ALL to obstruct the hero's seemingly innocent (if obsessive) quest for redemption thus throwing away all hope of finishing his own quest.

Beyond the first section, I found the film to be a mess of cuteness and unmotivated characters. Big disappointment, especially compared to "Finding Nemo" which used many of the same tropes but maintained emotional realism throughout.

Notice how I hadn't mentioned the "Real 3D". It's a creatively bankrupt gimmick which adds absolutely nothing, and possibly detracts from the film experience.

And the "balloon" musical theme is noticeably overused and not very good.

Internet

I did a "google" image search for "animation" and this was the first choice.



This was the second.



The collective unconscious of the internet has yet to define the word.

Checking our metrics, these are some phrases that google has drive to this site:

naked animated queen
origami monkey kids
nedd toons.com
evil toons animation cells
twilight of the gods nude
squiggly line
etchings of athena goddess of war
asterisk after a word in loveletter

In the future, we will be defined by boolean searches. Today, we're not yet * after a word in a loveletter.

Why? Because It's Nuclear

Here's another old, popular one we did for Ka-Blam!

After "Dr. Worm" they sent us another They Might Be Giants track, this a live version of they early cover "Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)" which was released on the compilation "Severe Tire Damage".

The popularity of this video is completely attributable to the song. After "Hockey Monkey" and "Dr. Worm" our team was sort of coasting.

Again, directed by Jesse Gordon with animation direction by Maciek Albrecht. Todor Radosz did the animation.



Our idea centered around looking at the sun through a telescope. I know, I know, you can't do that. We knew it at the time and figured as long as everybody wore goggles while looking through the telescope, we'd be OK.

Surprisingly, Nickelodeon legal had nothing to say.

The only person who cared was the astronomer at Staten Island University Observatory who refused the use of their facility after finding out our plan. He was a nice guy, and I don't at all blame him.

After that we decided to build a set. Maciek took charge here, and did a pretty good job on limited resources.

Of course we had like $250 in budget for lighting. Scott Levy at Eastern Effects took pity on us and rented an amazing package which allowed us to properly light the stage.

Beyond that, what? The casting. The main kid was cast through Nickelodeon casting. I can never understand why doing something like that is so hard, casting through a network casting office. We're doing a segment for your network, what's the problem? There's always a problem. The rest of the kids were taken from the grade school at the end of my block on 8th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn.

Nostalgia, Nostalgia

It couldn't wait.

Nostalgia, nostalgia -I just had to write about WHT.



For over 20 years I thought it was Womeco, and that it broadcast out of the (apparently non-existent but plausibly named) Womeco, New Jersey.

I imagined a tribe of heroic Indians aiding General Washington in late December 1776 being repaid with a bedroom community named in their honor. But no, it's Wome[i]t[/i]co and has little to do with New Jersey.

WHT was similar to then-fledgling HBO (or our local Philadelphian "Prism"), it was a single channel carrying movies and occasional fights directly into the home. HBO, or Home Box Office as we called it back then, used "cable" technology -like the telephone only carrying pictures. WHT used the traditional broadcast signal, picked up by a special antenna and decoded with a TV top box.

the antenna looked something like this

A ten foot antenna affixed to the side of our small military-issue house. And if you wanted to watch the movie that night, you'd first have to lean out the window and knock the antenna around with a broom to get reception -all the time hollering downstairs to verify the operation's success.

This is how I first saw "Alien". My father, at the time much younger than I am now, invited the whole neighborhood (meaning ten to fifteen 10 to 15 year olds). We all crammed into our 8 by 10 living room. I remember covering my eyes in embarrassment as Sigourney Weaver pranced about in her bra.

Near three decades have intervened. My father, no longer with us. Broadcast television, soon to follow. WHT, long passed.

The sensation of a dozen friend lying on the floor screaming at a brand new experience, that can be everlasting.

That's why we're planning a some screenings in a couple weeks at our new space. I'd say we're open for suggestions, but we're not. I'd say we're kicking it off with "Alien", but nostalgia is only useful if it brings you to a new place.

You Can't Tell A Hero By His Size

I believe many animators are attracted to the field out of nostalgia. How else do you explain the toy collectors? The design fetishists? Worst of all, the free passes given to questionable films?

As a child I didn't watch a lot cartoons. Much television at all, honestly. Sure I saw every episode of "Gilligan's Island", but I spent much more time running around the streets playing wiffle ball, kick the can, or card games in the Donahue's back yard while listening to the radio.

There were movies, VHS tapes. My father was an early adopter (in the future, I may write about WHT, out of Womeko New Jersey). "Jason and the Argonauts" is embarrassingly central to my philosophic system.

The animation which seeped between ears came from Children's Television Workshop and commercials. The baseball games ran mostly local spots.

...I'm just a teeny little super guy

Shoot Photos

Second shoot yesterday for prospective CBS Sunday Morning series.

We'll see how this goes, editing Thursday and animating from there.

set up

Class picture

Ben Shapiro, Gail Levin, Steve Brodner, Gil Schwartz

We'll post some clips and pieces of art as it progresses.