John Lennon's Imagine - A Perfect Circle's cover

It isn't about animation but it was just too good to pass. A perfect song from a perfect voice: James Maynard Keenan.

Mary and Max - a must see animation film

Imdb synopsis:

MARY & MAX is a claymated feature film from the creators of the Academy Award winning short animation Harvie Krumpet. It is a simple tale of pen-friendship between two very different people; Mary Dinkle, a chubby lonely eight year old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz, a 44 year old, severely obese, Jewish man with Aspergers Syndrome living in the chaos of New York. Spanning 20 years and 2 continents, Mary and Max's friendship survives much more than the average diet of life's ups and downs. Like Harvie Krumpet, MARY AND MAX is innocent but not naive, as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity, kleptomania, sexual difference, trust, copulating dogs, religious difference, agoraphobia and much much more.

This capture is to remind you Banksy's work again:)

Not forget to mention, Philip Seymour Hoffman's voice acting is really brilliant in this movie.

Animation Insiders Book

This is a new series of books dedicated to animation, put together by Patrick Beaulieu and written by very talented animators like Jason Ryan, Victor Navone, Jason Schleifer, Matt Strangio etc. It should be available by now, so you may want to check it out.

Web site is: http://www.squeezestudio.com/SStudiopress/

Fallen Art

What a marvellous short:



Technically, there are some little problems with animation but I always put story, storytelling and creativity in front of technical perfectness and I believe that is what the artists should be after in the first place. So this is much more valuable to me than a short which has nearly perfect (can't be perfect in real terms, can it?) animation but a poor or cliche story.

An acting test-Good day

A previous version of this was on vimeo for quite some time. I decided to do some changes in the weekend according to some animator friends' comments. So just wanted to post the latest here. It is not finished by any means but I am working on a 2d short film at the moment so it may take some time to return back to refining it. Probably I will update it after May.


Good day (WIP) from Eray Kiranoglu on Vimeo.

Canlandirma.org: Karakter animasyonu hakkında Türkçe forum

Şimdi reklamlar:
Animasyonla ilgiliyseniz ve paylaşımcı ruha sahipseniz sizi yaklaşık 2,5 ay önce açmış olduğumuz Türkçe foruma acı bir kahvemizi içmeye bekleriz.

http://www.canlandirma.org

As an Unnecessary Information Inc. note: We recently opened a character animation message board in Turkish. This is just a message for inviting people to the forum. Don't say you weren't curious about it :P

Jungle Jail

I hadn't seen this until 2 months ago. I found it on aniboom as the most viewed and liked animation. It is kinda weird but I discovered aniboom pretty recently too. Well in fact, I heard its name way before but never viewed the site before; for some reason I don't really know:) Anyway, this short is a very nice piece in terms of snappy and cartoony animation. The story is quite original too.


Jungle Jail from Al Duccino on Vimeo.

Let's welcome some Banksy art

My sister showed me some of his art and I couldn't resist to post some. These satirical pieces of art are done by Banksy, a pseudonymous graffiti artist from England:

His web site is: http://www.banksy.co.uk
And here is the trailer of his film, "Exit Through The Gift Shop". It will be in UK cinemas on "March 5th" his web site says and it is mostly about how these art pieces are created; I think?

Machinarium

This is just a great game so be sure to not miss it. The designs, characters, puzzles, all are combined very creatively and artisticly which is very hard to find in games nowadays.

A very talented animator classmate, Bjarki introduced me with this studio's (Amanita) previous game: Samarost, which I loved at first sight. The puzzles were a little bit easy and the adventure was short comparing to Machinarium but the visuals and animations were just brilliant as well. This was the point I got interested in this studio's work. Machinarium is their first full-length game so be sure to support their effort if you liked the demo.



Buy it on steam or from their web site: amanita.

Spirituality & Now

A very meaningful speech from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Buddhist meditation master. Video is from the documentary movie: Zeitgeist.
The speech is quite powerful if you think deeply about it and try to get the real message. And I am not talking about fashionized and emptied "carpe diem" approach. I think, in this approach, people tried to be "seemed" as they were living the the moment fully (seemingly energized about everything, getting into different costumes, styles, trying to be different from the guy next door, getting -so called- personalized with the help of the goods they buy). Because they were doing it for the sake of doing it, in contrast, they were more like cloning themselves: creating people who use same set of behaviours, same looks, same way of thinking. People who care about packaging instead of actual important content. This was/is just not right.



Text:

Spirituality is a particular term which actually means dealing with intuition.
In the theistic tradition there is a notion of clinging into a word. A certain act is regarded as displeasing to a divine principles. A certain act is regarded as pleasing for the divine … whatever.
In the tradition of non-theoism, however, it is very direct — that the case history are not particularly important. What is actually important is here and now. Now is definitely now. we try to experience what is available there, on the spot. There is no point in thinking that a past did exist that we could have now.
This is now. This very moment. Nothing mystical, just now, very simple, straight forward. and from that nowness, however, arises a sense of intelligence always that you are constantly interacting with reality one by one. Spot by spot. Constantly. We actually experience fantastic precision, always.But we are threatened by the now so we jump to the past or the future. Paying attention to the materials that exist in our life — such rich life that we lead — all these choices takes place all the time, but none of them regarded as bad or good per say — everything we experience are unconditional experience. They don’t come along with a label saying ‘this is regarded as bad’, ‘this is good’. But we experience them but we don’t actually pay heed to them properly. we don’t actually regard that we are going somewhere. We regard that as a hassle. waiting to be dead. That is a problem. That is not trusting the nowness properly, that what is the actual experience now possesses a lot of powerful things. It is so powerful that we can’t face it. Therefore, we have to borrow from the past and invite the future all the time.
Maybe that’s why we seek religion.
Maybe that’s why we march in the street.
Maybe that’s why we complain to society.
Maybe that’s why we vote for the presidents.
It is quite ironic. Very funny indeed.