Talks Torsten ReilTorsten Reil: Animating neurobiologist builds better animations

By coding computer simulations with biologically modeled nervous systems, Torsten Reil and his company NaturalMotion breathe life into the animated characters inhabiting the most eye-poppingly realistic games and movies around.

http://www.ted.com/talks/torsten_reil_studies_biology_to_make_animation.html

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa the creator of 'The 99'

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is the creator of THE 99-the first group of superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. THE 99, has received positive attention from the international media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, Wired, Elle, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe.
http://www.al-mutawa.com/?Biography

The story of 'The 99' the comic
As the leader and mentor of The 99, Dr. Ramzi Razem directs the quest to find the lost Noor Stones of Baghdad, which is the comic book’s main plot line.

As legend has it, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, they razed the largest library in the city, Dar al-Hikma. To erase any record of the civilization, they threw the books into the Tigris River, which ran black with ink. But the caliphate guardians, in a desperate attempt to save the vast knowledge of the library before it was destroyed, concocted an alchemical solution that would absorb the contents of the books. The solution solidified into the 99 Noor Stones, which supposedly contain the lost knowledge of the Library of Baghdad.

Ramzi believes the legend, including the idea that the stones activate superpowers within certain people. He conducts his search through the nonprofit 99 Steps Foundation, and although possessing no superpowers of his own, he helps other characters to use theirs.

Darr-The Afflicter (one of the characters), an American paraplegic who manipulates nerve endings to transmit or prevent pain.
http://www.the99.org/the99/
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0619/p04s01-wome.html

Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

Voice Drawing by zefrank

http://www.zefrank.com/
A very nice voice drawing by zefrank here

Visit also zefrank's blog and site for many interactive and participating toys

Messa di Voce (2003: Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara) augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of virtuoso vocalists with real-time interactive visualizations. The project touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative.



One very nice stop motion animation re-posted here from zefrank's blog
Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie



Her Morning Elegance
Directed by Oren Lavie, Yuval and Merav Nathan
Featuring Shir Shomron
Photography by Eyal Landesman
Color Todd Iorio / Resolution

Oren Lavie is a songwriter of curly brown hair, whisperish voice, green eyes and suspiciously cold feet. He was born in 1976, two minutes behind schedule, and has been trying to catch up ever since.

Watch 50 Categorized Dance Animation Videos

Here you will find categorized links to more than 50 posts on Great Dance that include videos of many different types of dance and movement animations such as 2D and 3D, stop-motion, visual effects, interactive performances and installations, computer games, machinima, live action and CG, motion graphics, visualizations, pre-cinema and many other types.

Pravda , La Survireuse by Gye Peellaert

http://www.guypeellaert.com/guy.html

Guy Peellaert is dead in Paris on November 17 from an infection then a double heart attack following several years of self-dialysis (from a cancer which he had radically stopped since two years)

Belgian advertising illustrator Guy Peellaert was one of the first cartoonists to embrace Pop Art and incorporate Andy Warhol's appropriation of mass market iconography into his work. His first comic, Les aventures de Jodelle, (Jodelle's likeness based after yé-yé chanteuse Sylvie Vartan) appeared in 1966, swiftly followed by 'Pravda la Survireuse' (her visage modelled after Françoise Hardy) for the magazine 'Hara-Kiri' in 1967.
Peellaert recently art directed this animation, based on 'Pravda'.
The animation was made by Gallien Guibert from www.thegenre.com

After contributing a number of photo collage-based style strips to 'Hara-Kiri', Peellaert adopted a photo-realistic airbrush style and made a successful return to advertising and illustration; most notably on David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs' LP cover and 'Rock Dreams', his collaboration with rock journalist Nick Cohn.

Video projection tools v2.1

The videoprojection tool was developed during a workshop that Hc Gilje gave for students of scenography, choreography and directing at KHIO in Norway june 2007, and further developed for the workshop he had at the medialab prado in Madrid may 2008 (including some features from the newly released max 5).
The workshops were an introduction to working with video as a tool for creating and transforming spaces: to thinking of video as light, and how you can mask a projection to project on multiple objects and surfaces within the projector´s projection angle and to exploit the depth of field in video projectors.
You can find more here: http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/resources/video-projection-tools/
http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/
http://hcgilje.com

Animata

Animata is a real-time animation software, designed to create interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances, and promotional screenings.The peculiarity of the software is that the animation is generated in real-time, making continuous interaction possible. This ability also permits that physical sensors, cameras or other environmental variables can be attached.The software can be connected with many pieces of external software in order to make use of the possibilities of these applications in the fields of image processing, sound analysis, or motion capture. These applications can analyse for instance sound input, or user movement, and this data could drive animations reacting to these environmental changes in real-time.
http://animata.kibu.hu/
http://www.piksel.no/piksel08/p08_workshops.htm
See also: http://createdigitalmotion.com/

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

PRESENTS: http://www.yhchang.com/

#***one of the most beautiful, strange, conceptual net art sites***#!

thanks to: http://www.visualcorrespondents.com/

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour

Whatever you need to know about Artificial Intelligence in an academic approach.
http://www.aisb.org.uk/

Animals save the planet

Nice animal animations prompting us to save planet earth
http://www.animalssavetheplanet.com/?page=home

ABLE DANGER THE MOVIE

POSTING ABLE DANGER

To conclude our series of blog posts from Paul Krik, writer/director of Able Danger, currently in theaters, here is his breakdown of how he posted his movie.

Able Danger was shot on an Panasonic AG-HVX200 by accomplished Brooklyn-based cinematographer Charlie Libin. We shot HD using no tape. It was shot to P2 cards, basically RAM and then copied to a hard drive. It was edited on Avid mostly on a laptop in a basement and then on an Avid at Jump Editorial. It was edited in HD but at the Panasonic "native" file size of 1280 x 720. This is not true HD, but after testing the camera's 1920 x 1080 record modes, I found the difference negligible and the 1080 mode had problems with motion. And the file sizes made shooting 1080 inefficient.

After much research about the absolute best methodology for finishing, I decided on the following; 123,840 uncompressed TIFF frames (86 mins x 24 frames per second) were exported to a hard drive and brought over to one of my favorite post production facilities, NICE SHOES, and colorist Chris Ryan imported the TIFF sequence into the specter (German color correct box) and bumped up to true HD 1920 x 1080. It was color corrected there and laid down to D5.

No special pro lenses were used. We used a wide angle adapter on occasion and a long lens adapter for daytime surveillance. For surveillance night scenes, we used military grade night vision.

I did all of the sound editing and sound designing and editing and music editing in the Avid. The final was mixed in Protools. Shots that needed effects were exported as uncompressed TIFFs out of Spectre and went to one of two places:

1. AFTER EFFECTS was used for the surveillance graphics. It took months to develop the surveillance look. We (Roberto Serrini and I) experimented with a lot more graphics on screen and a lot more text. But that took away from the beauty of the imagery and became too noisy and less "filmic" also getting the right interaction of the onscreen text, the surveillance chatter (which I recorded through a kids' toy voice distorter) and the onscreen action took a lot of fine tuning. I worked intimately with my assistant and After Effects artist refining ad infinitum. After I color corrected the night vision in Specter, TIFF frames were exported and we laid the After Effects back on top and then exported TIFF frames.

2. THE FLAME was used for some "gun flashes" and "electricity" in the stun baton were added after the color correct and bump up to 1080 HD from the Specter. The color TVs were composited and tweaked in the flame by Nick Sasso at Manic. Final finishing took the After Effects TIFF frames and conformed in the flame and laid down to D5 at NICE SHOES.

The film basically only existed on hard drives until we were done and laid down to D5. I think it was pretty innovative. The dream sequences on top of the World Trade Towers were shot on green screen, and uncompressed TIFFs were exported out of Avid and into FLAME and matte paintings and comps were done in flame. The intro animation was done in After Effects.

www.abledangerthemovie.com

Jeremy Bailey

His work has been described by filmmaker magazine as "a one man revolution on the way we use video, computers and our bodies to create art". Jeremy lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
http://www.jeremybailey.net/bio.html
http://www.640480.com/home.html

"Pimpinella" in Fleischarchives,org

...received a beautiful music treatment by peter whiskard...

http://www.fleischarchive.org/htmlArchive/news.htm

A BRIEF HISTORY OF OPTICAL SYNTHESIS

INTRODUCTION
The technology of synthesizing sound from light is a curious combination of research from the realms of mathematics, physics, electronics and communications theory which found realization in the industries of motion picture films, music, surveillance technology and finally digital communications. As such, it's history is an interesting cross section of 20th century history, reaching from the euphoria of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century inventors (who often struggled between "scientific" and "supernatural" explainations of their work) through the paradigm-smashing experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920's and 1930's to the cynical clash of ideologies of the Post-war years and finally to the dawn of the digital era in the 1970's.
This history has its fair share of eccentric and fascinating characters, such as Lev Theremin, Arseny Abraamov and Daphne Oram--the first woman to create and run a sound studio, as well as the first woman to "design and build an entirely new sound recording medium" (Jo Hutton in Organized Sound). There is quite a bit of work left to do, particularly in recognizing and translating the legacies of the Russian avant-garde artists such as Boris Yankovsky, Evgeny Scholpo, Nikolai Voinov and the forementioned Abraamov, whose works are largely unknown outside the former Soviet Union. A forthcoming article on "Russian Graphical Sound" for the Computer Music Journal by Andrei Smirnov could be one of the biggest English-language breakthroughs in this area.
Quite clearly, the connection with filmmaking is very close. Optical sound technology was developed first solely for recording soundtracks for early "speakies", and every one of the Russian innovators used their graphical sound techniques to provide music scores for the kino. But the connection with the "Visual Music" movement in cinema is also very close, with perhaps the works of Norman McLaren providing the strongest bridge. But the "direct cinema" techniques of many filmmakers from the 1920's and 1930's on through the 1960's and 1970's show more than a casual relationship with the techniques of direct optical sound synthesis. The works of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, John Whitney, Hy Hirsch, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Larry Cuba and many others all reflect an ongoing lineage of this "visual music" tradition. (The "Kinetica" screening programs, available from the iotaCenter of Los Angeles, provide the most comprehensive overview of this fascinating film history, and the Visual Music website gives an excellent synopsis and timeline as well.)
MORE: http://umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html

on Beckett-ing

"'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett."
Using appropriated footage from a single episode of "Charlie Rose," filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical



Endgame Scene 1
The first scene of the play by Samuel Beckett animated with lego!

Marius Watz (b. 1973)

Marius Watz is an artist concerned with generative systems for creating visual form, still, animated or realtime. His signature is a brand of visual hedonism, marked by colourful organic shapes and a maximalist attitude. Most of his works deal with drawing machines implemented in software, live visuals for music or large-scale projections of plastic visual systems.

Work: http://www.unlekker.net/

Blog: http://www.generatorx.no/

Play: http://www.evolutionzone.com/

"Brilliant Noise" by Semiconductor

Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.

Read more...

http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/ssl/ssl.htm

FATCAT RECORDS http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/mediaItem.php?id=43

YOU TUBE VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz5wHsGhjtg

http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/

"ANIMATED PAINTING"

Animated Painting

(1904) American

B&W : Short film

Directed by Edwin S. Porter
Cast: (unknown)
Edison Manufacturing Company production; distributed by Edison Manufacturing Company. / Cinematography by Edwin S. Porter. / © 16 February 1904 by [?] Thomas A. Edison or Edison Manufacturing Company? [H42209]. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.37:1 format. / The production was shot on 12 February 1904. 30 (16mm) feet.
Trick film.
Survival Status: Print exists in the Library of Congress film archive (paper print collection) [35mm paper positive].

http://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/A/AnimatedPainting1904.html

An artist is painting a sunrise at sea. After a few finishing touches he stands back and admires the painting. The sun immediately commences to rise. From all appearances it becomes very warm as the sun rises, and the artist is seen to throw open the window and fan himself furiously. The climax is reached when the artist rushes from the room and returns with a large tub of water and a pair of tongs. Seizing the sun as it soars in the air he plunges it into the tub, causing a great cloud of steam to rise.