I found out about Michel Ocelot, the French animator, by pure chance. While looking at the Studio Ghibli Wikipeadia entry, I happened to see a section titled “Distrobution,” and there I saw a list of more than a few French films and decided to take a look–see. To my surprise, and delight, Michel Ocelot is an amazing director of animation. If you enjoy animation (especially Russian animation like that of Yuriy Norshteyn) then you won’t want to pass this up! → Want more?
Recently I have been reading folktales from around the world, mostly found through online repositories. These repositories are usually a horribly organized list of unsearchable links (sending you to some sort of HTML Hell). As it happens, I came upon a really horrible web page, born from the same family tree of terrible design, but full of awesome ‘Japanesey’ folktales, written by third graders. → Want more?
During my last year at art school I wanted to make a short film. Unfortunately, the project fell through (I wasn’t able to obtain a film permit for the Pasadena Civic Center parking lot). Although, I did sneaked in there once or twice.
With the footage I acquired by means of stealth (taken with the world’s worst camcorder circa 1992), I made experiments using Adobe AfterEffects. Bellow are the results (sans audio).
→ Want more?This will be the first in a series of written observations and analysis, covering past and present film. I will begin with Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du loup), a French film created by Austrian director Michael Haneke in 2003. Haneke has been involved in filmmaking since the early 1970s. In the 90s he began to produce his films in France. I’m not sure the reasons for this, but my guess is that he enjoys creating within the open-minded French cinema. He started first in television. His first film was The Seventh Continent made in 1989. The film was about escaping urban decay. I should say, ‘human decay’ in an urban setting. Here is a quote by Haneke taken from Wikipedia. → Want more?
I don’t know what happened to me lately but since New Year’s Eve I’ve been staying up far too late most nights making ‘der sweet jams’. These recordings were made exclusively with Ableton Live 6, which I’m growing more and more fond of. So, please, by all means, have a listen. Some of these tracks were made generatively using Live’s follow rules. Others, like Robotic Joy, were simply composed using midi notes.
To hear the files you will need the Adobe Flash 9 browser plug–in. The files are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncomercial-Share Alike 3.0 License for the United States.