Brilliant old interview with the great Dane Carl Theodore Dreyer I found on my harddrive…I don’t remember where it’s from. enjoy

(link)

*link now fixed

I found another optical illusion by accident while working in 3d - Bistable percepts are when you can force your brain to switch between 2 possible interpretations in a single image.

In this you can see number 3 as either 2 copies of the same thing or a single shaded object. Number 4 is still 2 objects but looks irreversibly like a single one.

More optical illusion stuff here, here and here.

I’m usually never aware that my monitor is actually flickering 60 times a second, but I just discovered a little perceptual giveaway. If you see an isolated shape in space and shift your eyes away from it, instead of smooth motion blur you momentarily see multiple instances of the shape.

My friend Nobuaki translated my Basic Animation Aesthetics essay into Japanese. See it here:

Nobu has also recently translated PSS into Japanese for submission to Hiroshima, which I heard is an amazing festival.

Some months ago I disappointed some jury members because I wasn’t a Japanese schoolgirl. They kind of expected after seeing the film for some reason. I found the comparison very weird. Or maybe they were fetishists for that kind of thing…

*This essay was published recently in Objects Magazine (translated to German). Here is the original English version*
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essay by David OReilly

For the purposes of talking about animation, aesthetics are simply any of the elements that make up the world of a film, the building blocks of images and sounds.

The importance of animation aesthetics is such a subtle yet vitally important one. It might seem superficial to discuss these things, especially because cinema is so much more to do with content and story than a pure aesthetic experience, but nonetheless the visual nature of animation calls for debate on the subject. There is a continuous raft of animation, both commercial and independent, which looks the same, and I don’t believe it has to be so. The more we think about the subject the more playful and interesting computer animation becomes, the medium feels to me like a recently opened Pandora’s box which is still being examined, understood and tamed. (Read more…)

I’m obligated to write a post about all this nonsense relating to using compression in video work, I’ve received many messages claiming I’ve been ripped off and asking how to get the effect.

First of all, datamoshing is an extremely lame title for the effect, it’s another attempt at branding a basic technique as something new and edgy, there really is nothing hardcore about removing keyframes from a video file. The title is and always has been using compression artefacts.

While I did what was probably the first intentional transition using compression back in early 2005, I never structured my identity around it or overused it. It was obvious it would eventually hit mainstream and join the ranks of interesting effects which become embarrassing after they’re easy to do (posterize, glow, van-gogh, mosaic etc). My goal aesthetically has always been the more broader aim of simply not hiding the artefacts of software, the same way Bacon didn’t hide paint strokes, that includes compression but about 1000 other things. It’s not a big deal that it’s now mainstream.

The only criticism for some of the recent, popularized versions of the effect is that it’s being stuck on to a normal performance, when the music or content doesn’t remotely call for it. I don’t believe any form of cinema should be about cherry picking new effects, aesthetics should always serve the content.

“When exaggeration is not inherent in the imagery, but is merely an exaggerated attempt to desire and please, it’s a sign of provincialism, of the wish to be noticed as an artist”

- Tarkovsky