Aurora.

Just got back from the Aurora animation festival in Norwich.
I was there from Wednesday and saw some pretty good / bad / new / old things.

One of the first screenings I went to was a collection of music videos, from well known and lesser known artists and musicians. In particular I enjoyed this one:



This video by Patrick Rebisz uses animation in a perhaps less obvious manner. I thought I would get bored after seeing about a minute and recognizing the formula, but i found it really engaging, from using a constantly moving thing (the fire) which is interesting to look at in itself, to the narrative created by the ever changing photographs. Something of the song tune is also reflected in the motion, it just seems to compliment it so well. I think that the simplicity of this video just gets so well carried through by the great idea it is based upon.



I think this would've been great for the Collection project. Really funny use of existing imagery to animate all the record covers!

One of my favorite films from the weekend was called 200,000 Phantoms, a film by Jean-Gabriel Periot. Based on Hiroshima, the film is made up of hundreds of photos collected from the internet depicting the Genbaku Dome, and the area surrounding it. The Genbaku Dome (i think) was the only building left standing after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima in the 40s. The animation layers up the photos, but the structure of building, like in the situation, remains constant. We see the dome before, during and after the bomb, the dome top of the building enables instant recognition from it's surroundings and lets the filmmaker use photos of the area from different perspectives, with the dome retaining it's own position. A really great film, and a really unique way of animating that seems both ingenious and justified in what it is showing.


I also went to a screening of Jeff Scher films. I hadn't heard of him before, but went along based upon recommendations in the book and I'm really glad I did.
The showing consisted of several 16mm films and later some digital. His film animations were interesting to me by the way he puts them together, how he layers them, draws on the film and manipulates the aesthetic. The stills of his films really do no do the work justice. The animations are fast moving, frantic, with a pace and rhythm. The colours and patterns change constantly. Scher uses what he describes as 'ironic' accompanying music, upbeat, often vintage sounds.

Another film of his I enjoyed was called 'Trigger Happy'. This comprised of a collection of objects Scher had found walking to and from his studio in New York. The items are placed upon a lightbox and animated. A lot of the objects are recogniseable, and i really liked the aesthetics, we also learned that one of the guns was real. haha.

Another great screening was the Animate 07 previews. With screenings and a Q & A session with the artists, including work by Semiconductor:

And Thomson and Craighead's 'Flat Earth':

"A desktop expedition and documentary, woven from satellite imagery found online to make an extraordinary five-minute journey around the world, encountering the splintered voices of bloggers which interleave and overlap as if to form a single conversation."

All the information for this film was collected in one particular month, and the animation zoomed in and out on the earth (as if using Googleearth) on particular areas, where we heard 'blog' entries from different people living in these areas.

I often dislike digital animations for looking too shiny and simply digital. But animate made me question this dislike as i saw 2 films, digitally made that I really enjoyed.