Van Beuren Studios 1929-1936 Home of Tom and Jerry
Not that Tom and Jerry. This Tom and Jerry:
Dimples loves these classic animated characters from the 1930s because they are an excellent example of the drawing style that pleases us. These cartoons are also noteworthy for their storylines which adopted increasingly surreal qualities. Cartoons should get crazy and these cartoons were that and more.
It is difficult to find examples of Tom and Jerry on DVD today but many of the characters that originated at Van Beuren Studios are available on the Golden Age of Cartoons series. This is a must have collection if you’re obsessed with the 1930s as we are here at the Dimples sanitarium.
[tags]2D animation, Van Beuren Studios, 1930s animation, Tom and Jerry[/tags]
Lightfoot LTD Personal Animation Lightbox
The Dimples Team has been lucky enough over the past few weeks to get our grimy hands on a few animation tools and we hope to review them for you on this blog. It’s been our experience that reviews written on the more professional sites by more professional folks neglect to reflect on the issues that are important to amateurs like us who hope to create a home studio environment for learning and fun. We’re not professionals and we don’t have unlimited budgets. We have limited short term goals that are met by equipment less sophisticated than those used by the professional animator.
For the past two weeks we’ve been using an inexpensive lightbox available from Lightfoot LTD. The model we’ve tested is the 12F personal lightbox. This box is only $99.95, has two peg bar options and is not equipped with an animation disk. It’s your basic bargain basement special. First, we compared the cost of this box to the cost of building a similar box the Home Depot way. Buying this lightbox from Lightfoot is cheaper than building a similar box yourself. Don’t waste your time trying. What about the lack of an animation disk. It’s much better to have a disk but, because this lightbox is small and almost weightless, you can turn and maneuver it with ease. A disk would be much better but for most things you can get by with this. Also, in the digital age, chances are that you’re going to do at least half of your work in a digital environment. That’s how we evaluated this lightbox. We used it to draw our key frames and did the tweens on our computer. If we were making a feature film, we’d want the fancy disk for big bucks, but we’re grimy fingered amateurs trying to make a few minutes of fun and this lightbox satisfies our needs and allows us to spend more money elsewhere.
If you purchase this box or another one from Lightfoot LTD or another vendor, the Dimples Team suggests that you also buy a spare pegbar at the same time. You’ll need this for transferring your images to the computer. At the present time, we’re using our scanner to transfer images and we glued our spare pegbar to our scanner to attach our drawings and ensure everything lines up properly. It’s only a few bucks to get a second pegbar. Also, we went with the Acme bar but, in hindsight, we’d choose the round pegbar.
The bottom line is that this is a highly workable and inexpensive lightbox for the student and amateur hobbyist. If you outgrow it, you can always sell it on Ebay but you’ll probably want to keep it as a back-up or a place to develop ideas and design characters.
[tags]animation, lightbox, lightfoot ltd, 2D animation, hand-drawn animation[/tags]
Trunk Animation Ltd. – Three Great Animators
There’s some wonderful animation happening at Trunk Animation Ltd. from Steve Smith, Siri Melchior and Layla Atkinson. Here is a list of awards this trio has won from their web site:
Bafta Nomination, 2003
Cartoon d’Or Nomination, 2000 and 2003
Nomination for Best Promo, British Animation Awards 2004
Nomination for Best Promo, British Animation Awards 2004
Special Jury Mention, Brisban International Animation Festival 2004
1st Prize, Aspen Internaiton Film Festival, 2004
Gold Prize, Charleston Film Festival 1997
Audience Prize, Britspotting, Berlin 2004
ASIFA Korean Prize, Siggraph 2003
Silver Award, MADC, Brisbane, Australia 2005
2nd Prize, Chicago Childrens Film Festival 2003
etc, etc, etc….
The list goes on but the few mentions above give you a flavor of the talent pool at Trunk. A huge amount of animation is available on Trunk’s web page including commericials, show reels and movie clips. They’re all worth studying.
The image above is a portion of a scene from “Leap of Faith” by Steven Smith. Dimples doesn’t even like 3D animation but we liked this. It’s 60 seconds of viewing fun. Steve has a section on the Trunk site about moving images and design that is worth reading/watching. He makes a good point that “words are cheap as chips”.
Layla Atkinson is one of those folks who know exactly what they want to do from a very early age. Her most recent film is “Stealth Lunch”. A coordinated band of foxes pursue their prey through a fantastic landscape. This 90 second film is available for viewing on the Trunk web site. It reminded Dimples of a preditor ballet.
Siri Melchior is the third member of the Trunk team and her movie, “The Dog who is a Cat Inside”, is our favorite. It’s a tremendously inventive bit of animation story-telling. Don’t miss it when you browse the Trunk page.
Variety of invention and fantastic story-telling seem to be epidemic at Trunk Studios. Dimples enjoyed the show.
[tags]Trunk Animation, animation, Steve Smith, Layla Atkinson, Siri Melchior[/tags]
The Rotten Eggheads Animation Contest 2006 – MTV
The Rotten Eggheads is an animated on-line series from MTV about five characters with large heads. Dimples has to admit that before seeing this contest, we didn’t know that this cartoon series existed. The webpage says that The Rotten Eggheads are part of MTV’s European programming. This is from the contest rules:
the rotten eggheads – ï¬ve unique characters starring in the homonymous open end animation series known from the mtv load project and honoured with numerous awards. the starring characters have two things in common: an enormous egghead and a fragile fate.
at the end of each episode at least one egghead breaks. a new episode of this series goes online on www.therotteneggheads.com every friday themed: “weak! every week!â€.
The entry should be an entire episode of the Egghead series in cut-out style Flash animation. The prizes are as follows:
your ideas are worth cash! the designer of the best episode will earn 3000 USD and as the winner doesn’t take it all, the second prize is endowed with 1000 USD. the third place will still be rewarded with remarkable 500 USD.
The entry deadline for uploading your cartoon episode is September 30, 2006. The call for entries went out in July. Frankly, that’s not much time to create an entire episode. Templates to start your entry are available here.
[tags]the rotten eggheads, 2D animation, animation contest, flash animation, MTV[/tags]
David Demorest – Artist and Flash Animator
David Demorest creates some great flash animations. He’s a graduate of the animation program at Sheridan College in Canada. Dimples thinks that program is one of the best there is and David is doing them proud. His flash animations contain funny clever characters and beautiful movement. Dimples loves this head-on alien walk. David lives in Utah and works creating animations for children’s software.
Krishna Animated Feature – December 2006
There are few cultural mythologies more diverse and more superhero filled than Hinduism. It’s treasure waiting to be mined by the growing Indian animation industry. In December of this year, Aman Khan from Mumbai, is releasing a 95 minute animated feature film on Lord Krishna chronicling his childhood. From The Times of India, Aman Khan describes his film:
“Lord Krishna is one of the most revered avatars and has a colourful image. While the West has made animation films on their super heroes, India has never tapped the wealth of our mythological characters. Lord Krishna has a universal appeal.” This, however, isn’t Khan’s first tryst with animation. “I have done other animation projects on Akbar and Birbal, Vikram and Betal and the Panchatantra series. While making Krishna, I’ve consciously tried to incorporate day-to-day incidents from a child’s life and then narrate the story. That makes it easier for children to understand the moral of each of the tales from Krishna’s life. Though the film will recreate colourful childhood aspects of Krishna stealing butter and winning the heart of people, it doesn’t focus on his romantic side.”
Aman Khan’s young Krishna is a hand-drawn 2D animation. A 3D animated feature on Krishna is planned by another group for 2007.
[tags]2D animation, Indian animation, Mumbai animation, Krishna, Aman Khan, hand-drawn animation[/tags]
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