Thursday 31 January 2008

Early CGI Animation Session

I have now watched some of the short films of early CGI that I missed in the screening session.
Panasonic 'Glider' directed by Robert Abel 1981, the paper glider planes flying through mesh buildings, smooth animation but rather monotonous.
Macintosh 'Pencil Test' 1988, a clinical film, simple graphics but I liked the link between crosssing over from hand drawn work to computers. As I discovered computers quite late I missed the developement stages of computers and what they allowed peolple to do for leisure and work and this short film seems to sum up the bridge between the two mediums.
'Megacycle' directed by Don Mitchell 1989, this film was rather depressing to watch because of the monotony and the thought that life could be so mundane as nothing more than a series of the same path travelled by people who are all the same, with no distinguishing features. It is very clever but over whelming, reminicent of Kraftwerk music videos.
I watched some other films on the Computer Generated Classics DVD but found most of them used the same themes of monotony and continuity, some were interesting, like the Rolling Stones video using real footage of the band with computer image figures interacting with them. The figures were imaginative as they were just coloured lines, very fluid and transparent so you could see everyting else behind them. Probably looks dated now but it still seems clever to me......

1 comment:

Andy Wyatt said...

Great to see some video on the blog. If you ever don't feel like writing just put some images up..a picture speaks a thousand words as they say. Now we have been through the blitz of workshops, how are you feeling creatively?