New ‘Boards Issue & Psyop

The free issue of ‘Boards magazine for February are out, horray! (I think you need to join their mailing list to get invited to see it). They are a great source of information about the commercial production. You can look at their magazine online or download it as a PDF for later.

I was looking over some of their favorite picks for last month and they were making references to Psyop’s “Crow” themed work for MTV HD. I guess it’s been out for about a half a year, however since I don’t have HD TV, I hadn’t seen it yet. Check it out…I’m glad I went to the trouble of finding it right away. Here’s the direct link from the Psyop website.

I found a great article about the making of this animation at dexigner.com which includes interviews.

Psyop is a cool studio in downtown NYC. I got a chance to check out the Psyop office as a part of RESFEST’s Studio tour and it was an impressive place. Their animation is seriously amazing. Still, my favorite ad is the one they did for Bombay Saphire. I remember almost falling out of my seat the first time I saw it on television – it was so damn beautiful! I found out at the tour that they did the Bombay spot for a lower budget than most of their projects, the trade off being that they could have more creative freedom. Projects like those help them showcase their abilities.

New Toy I Want

In the category of stuff I want but don’t need is this awesome Andriod 8 vinyl toy of “Rustboy”. I’ve been so inspired by Brian Taylor’s awesome website documenting the progress of his animated film at www.rustboy.com. I think I first became aware of his website from a web design award he recieved and have since liked to check in periodically with it to see how he’s doing with the project. Latest news is he is talking to people about making it into a full scale movie. I really hope so! So inspiring.

Re-mixing Open Source Movies

Last week I went to an incredibly cool breakfast and networking event put on by NY:MIEG (New York: Media Information Exchange Group). In the process of researching all the speakers prior to the event, I went to Dina Kaplan’s blip.tv website to find out more about her company before the event and found a few cool video podcast shows I hadn’t seen before.

One of them was Rob Parrish’s “Next To Heaven” series These are these surreal videos which cleverly uses open source old movie footage, re-edited (sometimes called re-mixed) into strange surreal films, usually quite dark.

That made me curious to see if there are places online to find these usually hilarious old educational/newsreel films. I did some research and the most extensive and interesting website I found was Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive. Not all of the films are truly open source in the sense you can edit them and then distribute, so be sure to check the links to the creative commons licenses.

There are some interesting old footage to be found, whether you’re looking for atom bomb explosion, whistling grandmas, kids pullling the shoes off Daddy as he reads the paper, a baby crawling race or just simple wholesome reminders of how to live every aspect of your 1950’s life.

(Some charming images from old footage downloaded from Moving Image Archive).

Dolphin Love

I’m working on animation in Erik’s film. Here’s a sneak peak of one of the stills from the storyboard. This is a touching flashback scene in the film where a glass of water sparks the dolphin character to pine for his dolphin girlfriend and the ocean.

See Storyboard Page 1
See Storyboard Page 2