David Lynch may be focusing on his music these days, but we’re still pretty stuck on his films — and so, apparently, is animator Lee Hardcastle, who has created a very funny claymation rendition of Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead, packing the entire story (such as it is) into 60 seconds. The creepy baby, the cleavage, and that unmistakable hairdo are all there in the clip, which also makes excellent use of cotton balls as smoke. If you like what you see, visit Hardcastle’s YouTube page to see his versions of everything from The Lion King to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Here’s a must-watch for Monty Python fans: Cartoon Brew has posted a segment that aired on Bob Godfrey’s Do-It-Yourself Animation Show in 1974 that has Terry Gilliam teaching viewers how to do the cut-out style of animation that made him famous. He explains that he makes cut-outs because “it’s the quickest and easiest form of animation I know” and then takes us through the entire process, from choosing images to storyboarding to filming. The 15-minute clip also includes a healthy selection of Gilliam’s best work to date. As a guest, he’s both informative and funny, but long-time fans may be most charmed to see him looking so young.
Boing Boing points us to an inspired video, created by AndyTDesigns, imagining what the credit sequence might look like if Pee-wee Herman were to launch a new TV show. (Note: he absolutely should.) “It would be great to see a Pee Wee show based more on Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and more episodic in nature, with P.W. solving mysteries, finding missing things, and having adventures, but along the way his playhouse friends help him as well,” writes the film’s creator. The minute-long opening credits find our hero on his bike, solving crime with the help of some familiar friends. And the animation, which rotates ably through a number of styles, is superb.
Video artist Jennifer Steinkamp’s decades-long love affair with digital art is still as passionate as ever. Best known for gently swaying curtains of flowering vines, her large-scale video installations use pixels like a pointillist deploys pigment, creating immense images from millions of microbe-size dabs of color. The impact of her work is in large part due to her manipulation of CGI code simulating the organic movement of explosions, breezes, ocean tides, and the human body.
Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet uses classic hand-drawn techniques in this sweet and stunning tribute to French auteur Jacques Tati’s unique, dialog-free style.
An aging stage magician makes over a young lady in Chomet’s take on Tati’s unproduced 1950s screenplay. In the present-day animated version of Tati’s story, the titular world-weary traveling illusionist settles in a boarding house for vaudeville performers — including a family of trapeze artists, a suicidal clown, and a ventriloquist — accompanied by a teenage girl who believes his magic is real.
The go-to site for technological experimentation, Rhizome offers a riveting array of new-media art, networked culture, and creative internet information.
Founded way back in 1996 to support a developing community of digital-art pioneers, the savvy site now boasts more than 2,500 avant-garde works in the ArtBase, its online archive. Affiliated with the New Museum since 2003, Rhizome also publishes a dynamic blog, commissions emerging artists to create new-media projects, organizes exhibitions and events, and provides a powerful platform for the discussion and promotion of experimental art.
Ad agency DDB Canada may have taken the charge of making a car commercial powered by the car itself a little too literally in their new TV spot for the Subaru WRX STI. Their team ended up printing 760 frames of an animation, pasting it to the side of a race track and having the car itself, with a mounted camera, create a flip book effect. Click through to watch the end product.
A multi-artist crowdsourced remake of the 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated proves that art has the power to raise the undead.
Beloved for its DIY production design and allegorical power, the original Night of the Living Dead was ready-made for interdisciplinary inspiration. NOTLD: Reanimated invited 150 artists to illustrate their favorite scenes, with the wildly eclectic results augmented by the full-length original audio. Comprising everything from photography to puppetry to painting, the project honors and builds on the dark humor, independent artistry, and enduring influence of the OG American zombie.
Live-action cartoonist and New York Public Library artist-in-residence Flash Rosenberg creates situational portraits using images, words, and whimsy.
From Dada-esque flights of fancy to unsettling historical testimony and more planned-out animations for dramatic readings (John Lithgow’s Mark Twain is a perennial favorite), Rosenberg expands portraiture’s meaning to include the viewer, time, and artist’s own imagination. As Live from the NYPL‘s artist-in-residence, she creates composite, time-lapse “conversation portraits,” depicting the participants’ images, ideas, and actual words, in a witty, evocative art-form all her own.
Combining art and music, Sketch Theatre presents a frequently updated series of short, single-shot, time-lapse videos of artists drawing while digging the tunes that inspire them.
Artists including Brandi Milne, Syd Mead, Ron English, and Lola have all been filmed for the site, drawing along to their favorite songs — from Dirty Projectors, the Raconteurs, Daniel Johnston, and Holly Golightly, respectively. An eclectic and mesmerizing testament to the mysteries of inspiration and artistry, Sketch Theatre is also a treasury of killer sounds.
