Canadian Film Vault Opens

The Necktie

The National Film Board of Canada recently released a number of their films and made them available for free downloads and viewing on their website. This is a huge treasury of high quality award winning materials. The site has numerous examples of animated, documentary, feature and short films. You can explore by genre, title, year, length and language. This makes browsing so easy. I enjoy the animation section most. This section features links that take you to educational resources, jobs, festivals and much more. There are some amazing award winning works linked here including: Ryan, Chris Landreth’s Oscar-winning animated short film from 2004. One of my favorites is Caroline Leaf. I especially enjoy the features that not only look at her films but also demonstrate how she made the works. This is great website for students, teachers or just fans of film. Caroline Leaf also has her own website that features a great deal of information. One last note…not all of the films on the Canadian Film Board site are free, but it is still a wonderful resource where you can find quality films to purchase too.

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Inspiration From the Web-Su Blackwell

A friend of mine recently sent me the following website link to look at. http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/ What a cool website and artist. The work is interesting on many levels. As sculpture the pieces are intriguing as they play with the idea of what a book is. The words of a well written book make the images leap to life in your mind’s eye and imagination. In this artwork the images from the book’s page are realized right on the pages of the book. Using books as a form of art has become very popular with the dawning of the altered book craze and the hand made artist book community. These books are art objects themselves with the meaning of the pages and the stories serving as allusions for the artworks. The site also links to several films. http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/films.php Each is interesting as an animated piece. One illustrates the way that an ad campaign was developed utilizing the artists designs and a team of animators. It is intriguing to me especially as I push forward trying to learn the art of animation and pass it along to my students.

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More Video and Animation Fun

Here is a new little animation that I just finished.  It is an example of rotoscoping.  The hands in the paintings are mine knitting the cable cardigan (Central Park Hoodie) that I’ve been working on for many months.  It brings together several of my favorites, knitting, watercolor painting and drawing and technology.  It was time consuming to create, but very fun.  I need to work on sound that could go with it, but for now it’s a cool little thing that I tried.  I will try to post some photos of the actual knit sweater, too.  It is progressing with the shoulder seams bound off together as of today.  I still have the sleeves and hood to knit plus the buttons.  I don’t know if I’ll finish before going back to school this fall, but I will try.  Let me know what you think of the animation!

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