jeff watson

Animated documentary by Andy and Carolyn London. Via Underwire.

Looks like Adobe is cooking up some pretty cool tools for everyday video manipulation and animation…

This demo illustrates our research to bring interactivity to video editing: Our system analyzes videos using computer vision techniques, enabling interactive annotation, browsing, and even drag-and-drop composition of new still images using video footage. This is a joint research project of Adobe and the University of Washington. (vimeo.com)

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

via Architectradure.

runwrake.com

Naturally, magnetic fields are invisible, but the scientists from Space Sciences Laboratory at NASA have made animated photographs to make them visible. To create this, they use 3D compositing along with sound-controlled CGI, that make the fields dance in an “absolutely gorgeous movie”, called the Magnetic Movie. (devicedaily.com)

Via Architectradure

Via Architectradure.

Animation by Alessa Kreger.

Blu is refining his very own technique of wall animation, and with seemingly good results. (megunica)

See also: blublu.org

Walter Ruttmann (born December 28, 1887 in Frankfurt am Main; died July 15, 1941 in Berlin) was a German film director and along with Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling was an early German practitioner of experimental film.

Ruttmann studied architecture and painting and worked as a graphic designer. His film career began in the early 1920s. His first abstract short films, “Opus I” (1921) and “Opus II” (1923), were experiments with new forms of film expression, and the influence of these early abstract films is especially obvious in the work of Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s. Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new form techniques. (Wikipedia: Walter Ruttmann)

Cohl’s animation style is rather surreal and also makes good use of the medium. The cartoons are not formally structured, but the images flow easily from one to another as objects melt into other shapes. For example, an elephant turns into a house or a window changes into a man. These films have had an obvious influence on later animated films, such as George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine, or the pink elephant sequence in Walt Disney’s Dumbo. (filmreference.com: Emile Cohl)

McLaren took this equivalence of image and sound even further, and probably to its logical end, in his remarkable film Synchromy, from 1971. With Evelyn Lambart in the 1950s, McLaren had worked out the different patterns of stripes that would lead to them creating different notes of animated sound on the soundtrack area of a filmstrip. In Synchromy, McLaren first composed the soundtrack music using these cards, and then used these same sound patterns to create their exact animated visual equivalant. (“Every Film is a Kind of Dance”: The Art of Norman McLaren)

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Charles Eames and his wife, Ray. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The idea for the film appears to have come from the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke. (Powers of Ten – Wikipedia)