• ANIMATION 209 FIRST PROJECT:

  Where am I?:

  
  

  Where am I: Download and Play in Both Directions

  
  

  For this project we had to use Adobe Photoshop[$] and Premiere [$] to create a short 10 second composition. Mine is one minute long. It is intended to be viewed as an interactive motion picture toy rather than a passive TV watching experience. Therefore, you must download the entire Quicktime[$] format movie RUSL-whereami.mov to your computer. It is about 80 Megabytes so it will take a good 5 minutes to download even with a fast modem and take ages and ages with a phone line connection.

  My intentions in making this piece were somewhat muddled and mostly determined by the parameters of the school assignment. I will leave the interpretation of meaning up to the view but do remember to look at it more than once and to play with the 'slider' bar of the movie viewer so that you can explore it more completely.

  Where am I is about disorientation and technology, I constructed it based on the poem, read by ..., and featured on the 2001 Anti-FTAA fundraising album. The album features a bunch of great songs and spoken word about the resistance to corporate globalisation that took place during the Anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City, April 2001. I attended with Jane, riding with the Bikesheviks Velorutionaire [organised by the Right to Move/La Voie Libre, Montreal] and we got more than enough toxic teargas for one lifetime.

  The pictures used are: text from Ashley's typewriter, random legal nonsense fineprint, my old video card and my old modem, old perforated computer paper, a wooden dinosaur model construction sheet,

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• AN ABRACADABRA [GOOD] ANIMATION:

Strindberg and Helium:

Strindberg+Helium: in Absinthe and Women

There are four Strindberg+Helium animations on this website. Stringberg is a depressed 19th Century Philosopher with scary eyes. Helium is an upbeat pink balloon character with a squeaky helium voice who repeats what Stringberg says. The animation is meant to be funny. The flash animation is set in the middle of a black screen page with a scrawling handwritten font.

The animation relies on clever dialogue and minimal motion to support the characters. The characters are drawn very expressively but don't have too move much. In later animations there are more special effects such as text and changing scenery or camera angles which make the motion more exciting. The first however shows only the bar and Strindberg's reflection staring back to him from his cup of absinthe.The techinques are very simple but supurbly executed. Timing is central to this short animation, as it is with all comedy. The overall design has drawings and scenery that are dark, brooding and reflect the sombre character of Stringberg. As the animations are so short very slight images play a big role. Even the ornate timepeice, lamp and furniture in the opening graphic [above] help to set the scene. Helium is drawn by the computer with very bright clean lines to furthur highlight the juxtaposition of the characters.

I found this piece very engaging because of the humour mostly and the weird ornate 19th century imagery plays a role in keeping attention. I think overall the peice is very sucessful. However it is not deep enough for the play to be longer and upon repeated viewing the film becomes less interesting. But it is definately the kind of animation you would email to your friends because it is so cute and bizarrely funny.

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• ANIMATIONAL RESOURCICAL :

mumbleboy

I think this is a useful page of animations from Milky Elephant - who also made the Strindberg and Helium and has a really cool website home page. Mumbleboy is a prolific artist of web animations. His style is intensely psychedelic with music. Everything seems to be very simply designed in flash using geometric shapes and bright colours. The later animations are better than the first ones. Mumbleboy is a useful website because it really seems to take advantage of the medium effectively. Some are interactive animations.


nfbwebworks

The National Film Board of Canada also has a useful website. There don't seem to be a lot of web based animations but several in the Webworks section is good. There are a few other animations here and there such as Wade Hemsworth's classic logdrivers waltz though it is very low-res. There are also a lot of resources on how to make a film via this public agency which I hope might be useful to an animation student eventually.

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• MOOR LINCKS:

• webpage ovf martin rose
  
• business's webpage de jim meyer
  
• bikesexual webserver links
  
• bigfiles directory
  
• temp bikesexfile
  
• trip to europe in 2003 blog
  
• radio show - the pedal revoltionary
  
• critical mass webpage
  
• chunk 666 webpage Portland
  
• pedalplay page Vancouver
  
• superbad.com - simpler than animation
  
• shirley and spinoza streaming internet radio
  
• the onion - your source for news every week
  
• vancouver.indymedia.org

- secret link -

   

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