Pixels…

… and skaters

… extra

+ the new band of Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio). Rocks!

This week I saw what a tolerant mother, loads of time and an overexpressive Genesis-gene can do with a person. I went to see ‘Monster road‘ at the independent Off-screen festival in Brussels. This documentary tells the story of the legendary self-thought animator Bruce Bickford and his demented father. When he was young, Bickford started making stop motion animation films with plasticine, shaping and re-shaping thousands of little figurines frame by frame. He put his whole soul into animation instead of getting a proper ‘job’, to the dissatisfaction of his perfectionist boeing-engineer father but supported by his caring mother. Forty years later Bickford hasn’t stopped digging the plasticine, molding and morphing as if life depends on it (he really doesn’t understand why Bill Gates doesn’t spend his whole fortune on animation films).

What Bickford does is impressive. He works with a meticulousness that defies an ant’s work, creating a constantly changing universe with things continuously morphing into each other. Everything is organic, things change wherever your eyes can watch. The stream of information that gets to the spectator is like dreaming in fast forward. Movement is Bickford’s personal God. And violence, not to forget. Bickford abuses toy soldiers, giants and blond women who keep on hacking bashing slashing away each others plasticine fragile bodies. Bickford doesn’t know why he loves violence, but he thinks people like to watch it merely because of the relief that seeing violence on tv or in films simply means you’re not involved in it at the time of watching. Funny insight.

Considering his personal affection with destruction, I think the plasticine itself asks for creating and destroying. Plasticine is an excellent tool for shaping and re-shaping, and its creation/destruction property is even more reinforced by the nature of stop motion animation (to get motion, you need to play God and keep on changing changing*). It’s the tool, the medium which makes Bickford artistically violent.

After the documentary, Bruce Bickford himself answered some questions as if life didn’t depend on it at all (he’s getting a bit older). He talked about his work with Frank Zappa in the 70’s and said they didn’t come along that well, and he slowly explained his working process. He also complained about the lack of means to make proper animation movies (he still works at home), which was really really sad and difficult to believe when you see his work.

Then some die-hard Bickford animation work was screened. Impressive, but after a while I came to understand more why Bruce is still a needy man, living a poor life rich in plasticine. I got a Bickford overdose and suddenly the thrill was gone. All those hacking bashing slamming plasticine bastards morphing into faces faces faces time after time, suddenly seemed more of a therapeutic way of spending life rather than adding some meaning to the world. Of course, it’s still breathtaking and technically very inventive what Bickford does, and he surely is the master of plasticine stop motion, but I suddenly needed more (non-imagery, that is). So kids, please take his beautiful inheritance and inject some witty content into his work to make the man richer than ever.

* Blame this doubling tripling quadrupling of words on A million little pieces by James Frey, currently in my bag.

.. the charms of print

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

In these average times, full of mediocre products, mediocre media and mediocre mediocrity, there are still lights in the dark. These lights push their fields forward, by inventing a new way of thinking, doing and presenting. By being bold and inventive, rising all hopes for humanity again. And NO, I’m not exaggerating, the world would be double doomed without these people.

Well then. The first light in the dark is ‘Logicomix‘. This graphic novel tells the quest for the true face of mathematics, which sounds boring but isn’t since the quest is conducted by the overwhelming charming English professor Bertrand Russell. As a philosopher, logicus, and notorious pacifist, he uses logic to try to save mathematics, and humanity. His adventure is portrayed as if the fate of the world depends on it, a long and intense journey during which Russell must battle his inner demons to achieve the task.

His most famous contribution to the logic field is known as Russell’s paradox: imagine there is a town with one barber, and where the law states that everyone who doesn’t shave himself is shaved by the barber. Who shaves the barber? If he doesn’t shave himself he shaves himself, and if he shaves himself he doesn’t shave himself. We are led into a contradiction. It may seem funny (and it is), but its effect on the philosophy of mathematics was devastating. Contradiction is a fatal bullet wound for any logical system, and it seemed to kill off hope for a watertight foundation for mathematics. With his next book, the Principia Mathematica, Russell tried to repair the damage he had inflicted on his own dream. This book is probably the most impenetrable one ever written by a winner of the Nobel prize for literature. In it, he and the co-author Alfred North Whitehead, famously take 362 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2. Yes, Logicomix also deals with the border between logic and madness.

What I like about ‘Logicomix’, is that the authors tell the story with humour and a lightness of touch that pokes fun at the philosophers and mathematicians involved, but never trivialises the philosophy or the mathematics. The novel is both tongue-in-cheek and profound. Also smart is the fact that the authors let Russell interact with figures he never met, but whose ideas influenced his theories. The novel is loaded with these and other mental interactions. A nice autumn present for anyone who has ever been passionate about something.

And the second light, speaks for itself.

VIDEOGIOCO by Donato Sansone from Enrico Ascoli – Sound Design

‘Onwards’, by Illustrator James Jarvis and visual artists collective Shynola. Music by Canadian band Caribou. Created for the swoosh brand.

Tyger is a magical short film from 2006 by Brazilian director Guilherme Marcondes. This ‘cityjungle’ animation is based on the William Blake poem ‘The Tyger’. What I like about it, besides the visuals, the rhythm (very much like a poem) and the intentionally visible puppeteers, is that it avoids the pure romantic dystopian vision of society by making the tiger not only dangerous, but also a creator of natural beauty along the way. Humans are animals, after all.

A beautiful new indie game called Paper Moon, made by the Californian studio Infinite Ammo.

“Say, it’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea
but it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me…”

Paper Moon Blurst Trailer from Infinite Ammo on Vimeo.

For free on Blurst.com!

Take a look at the work of Julien Vallee, he’s a Canadian living in Montreal, and the world flowing out of his fingers is wonderful.

This video was made for the project Globologos, an event curated by Canada’s Sid Lee Collective. It aims to be an oasis for free-roaming ideas, a place where participants are invited to generate ‘durable’ creativity beyond consumerism. Artists were invited to create a video piece based on the work of Jack Languirand, a well-known Quebecois philosopher and poet. The little gem above is Julien Vallee’s contribution.

Source: Computer Arts December 2008

And this is the new origami-type stop motion music video done by director/animator Sean Pecknold at Grandchildren, who has a couple of Fleet Foxes videos under his belt.

Mykonos from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

Other animated gems

(from the site:) In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s “bed-in” phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.

Source: I met the Walrus

By Monkeehub

By Ludovic Houplan & Hervé de Crécy