Flooby Nooby

February 23, 2012

Fincher

“Now, my friend Tarsem [Singh] did me an incredible solid and we cut him loose— Brad was gonna be in a bunch of different places over the Christmas holidays. So we sort of sent him an Araflex and he flew to all these places. Originally, we were gonna go to ten other locations. So in I think in four days, he shot us all the material we could ever want on, what I call, ‘The Razor’s Edge’ montage. If you gotta get somebody to do second unit, you might as well get somebody who can shoot better than any DP or director that I know of. We would watch it and go, ‘My God, it’s so beautiful’.” - David Fincher, Benjamin Button commentary

Aurora

Video Credit & Copyright: Christian Mülhauser; Music: Elemental by Pulse Faction; Path of Stars by Jonathan Geer.

Auroras are occurring again with increasing frequency. With the Sun being unusually dormant over the past four years, the amount of Sun-induced auroras has been unusually low. More recently, however, our Sun has become increasingly active and exhibiting a greater abundance of sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections. Solar activity like this typically expels charged particles into the Solar System, some of which may trigger Earthly auroras.

Four weeks ago, beyond trees and before stars, a solar storm precipitated the above timelapse displays of picturesque auroras above Ravnastua, Skoganvarre and Lakselv, Norway. Curtains of auroral light, typically green, flow, shimmer and dance as energetic particles fall toward the Earth and excite air molecules high up in the Earth's atmosphere. With solar maximum still in the future, there may be even better opportunities to see spectacular auroras over the next few years.

February 22, 2012

Tim Burton

Animated spot by Tim Burton for his big exhibition next month in Paris.

The Death and Return of Superman

February 21, 2012

Bad Feelings

Game of Thrones: Season 2

via onanimation

Tom Waits "For No One" - 1979 Animated Music Video

Tom Waits performed in 1978 live at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, photographed and rotoscoped.The original live action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. Shot by Dan O'Dowd and his crew. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang the lyrics. Donna Gordon is the dancer performing as the stripper, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5:30 minute live action short which they turned into animation.

A total of 5,500 frames were captured, re-drawn, inked and painted by hand onto celluloid acetate to create this film. Produced by Lyon Lamb Video Animation Systems and directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology and talent, and was created specifically for a burgeoning video music market that didn't yet exist and arguably may be the first music video created for the MTV market.However, a series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commercially, consequently catapulting it into obscurity.

In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in the making of this short.