which is a good description. I walked through the archive in a few minutes, subscribed to the RSS on a whim expecting to throw it away after a few days and yet, I get excited when a new one comes in. Odd. Anyway, I love it and had to share.
I like stop motion films. Usually, the ones online are silly but sometimes you see one that blows your mind. Sorry I’m Late is just freaking amazing. Like, just… wow… I … wow. The patience these people must have is.. gah!!!
Actually, it seems quite a bit more serious than that. The Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute film written, directed and produced by Chris Bouchard. A story that was pieced together from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Bouchard says the film was created as a tribute to both the books by J.R.R. Tolkien and the films by Peter Jackson, but also as an experiment in low-budget film making. A collaborative effort of several volunteers and contributors, The Hunt for Gollum has seriously high production values and actually looks like it might be really good. You can find out for yourself when it debuts at Dailymotion.com on May 3rd. In the meantime, check out the trailer.
The Seed is animated short by Johnny Kelly and Nexus Productions using Creative Suite 4 tools. It was funded by Adobe to feature CS4 and the animation is a combination of graphic/illustrated animation and paper craft stop motion. Its a beautiful production and they have also provided a making of video to show you how they did some of the animation.
South By South West (SXSW) is the annual interactive/film/music conference & festival held in Austin, Texas. This year is the 22nd annual conference and it will be Niki and my 4th year in a row. To say SXSW is awesome is an understatement. Its has been one of the best and most amazing music experiences I have ever had, and each year gets better. As my friend Cyrus said: “Its like the Disneyland of music. You can see a year’s worth of shows in four days”. And he was dead-on.
One of the challenges of SXSW is preparing for it. With 1500+ bands playing at 70+ venues over four days and nights you have to have a gameplan. Who are you going to see? When are they playing? What day shows should we hit? Can we get in for the show? You have to ask youself all of this to achive the best SXSW musical experience.
SXSW posts a band list, which is daunting in itself, to help you find out who is playing this year. Seeing that many names on one page, its really easy to lose your place and everytime you re-read it you see bands you missed last time. Luckily, some people over at Sun are hosting a SXSW Artist Catalog with band notes, pics, links and a tag cloud. Its a great tool and really helps you see who is attending. Expect to see more on the blog about SXSW over the next month as the March 13th kick-off is rapidly approaching!
Parks on Fire is a new piece of video art by Scott Pagano. Mr. Pagano, with his fancy-pants RISD cred, has done a lot of amazing work with a large list of world-class electronic musicians. Seeing him live at the Recombinant Media Labs (R.I.P.) in San Francisco as visual counterpart to Speedy J (oh, don’t get me started on him!) was inspirational. This particular piece is set to the chilled-out sounds of Trifonic.
Parks on Fire is the latest short graphic film creation of digital artist Scott Pagano. It is an exploration of the complex, interpenetrated, and reflective relationships of structure, form, and motion that both bind and conflict the natural and manmade worlds. The experience is a visual and aural expedition through a series of uniquely explicated environments. Stunning synthetic worlds of micro precision evolve and meld in to landscapes of natural forms evoking the achingly unknowable sublime that is here captured, redefined and expressed via intensive digital reprocessing. Sound and image drive each other to create the uncanny sense that both are emerging from the same dammed-but-divine ethereal engine. The lush cinematic soundtrack is by Trifonic, and is available on their debut release Emergence.
I have been an on-again-off-again fan of Ze Frank since his debut with the now classic “how to dance properly“, that god and everybody has seen by now. I used to work at Macromedia, back in the day so anything Flash based tended to float by our desks. Since then I would catch up on his work now and again and most recently saw him open for one of the Macromedia (now Adobe) MAX conferences. Good times.
Ze Frank is featured in a short pilot called “The Remnants” and seeing his name made me check it out. You should too…
The pilot for The Remnants, written and directed by John August. Starring Justine Bateman, Michael Cassidy, Ben Falcone, Ze Frank, Ernie Hudson, and Amanda Walsh. It was shot during the WGA strike in February 2008, using the SAG internet agreement.
The project is currently in development with 60Frames in association with NBC/U, so it could in theory become a series at some point. Either way, we had a good time making it.
Read [Found via io9, via John August, via... just follow the chain]
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