Aardman have teamed up with the online gadget store Firebox.com and are looking for short animated stopmotion Morph films.
There's a chance of winning a one-off signed original sketch of a scene from your film by Peter Lord, Creative Director of Aardman, a copy of Stop Motion Pro6.5 High Definition software or an Animation Station.
Enter now
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Press release from
www.barbican.org.uk/animate
As part of their renowned Animate the World Festival, the Barbican is launching an Animator of the Year competition this year to recognise undiscovered talent in the UK.
As a highly respected animation blogger we’d appreciate your support in helping us to spread the word about this competition – as well as perhaps entering yourself.
What’s up for grabs:
Animator of the Year Winner:
o Winner’s name and animation will be posted on the Barbican Animate the World website on Friday 3rd April.
o A pair of tickets to every screening in the festival*
o A pair of tickets to one of the special adult animation workshops during the festival.
o A special box set of Pixar DVDs
Animator of the Year Runner up:
o A pair of tickets to a festival screening of your choice*
Entrants can design and share their own animations via the dedicated online Animation Studio
The Barbican’s Animate the World festival starts on Saturday 4th April and this year features a brand new strand; Animate Advanced, catering especially for adult fans of animation. Festival goers can enjoy new animations such as Bill Plymtpon’s nourish Idiots and Angels and classics like Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet.
For more information about the festival or the competition please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Xtranormal is an online tool for creating simple movies. After selecting an over all theme you are placed in the script editor. From here you can configure everything from selecting the set and characters, writing the script and actions to choosing the camera angles. The voice synthesiser has a range of about 6 voices and the British man I chose was clear and realistic. Even though it is in a beta I found nothing that did not work and fairly quickly produced a short clip. Although you are not going to be able to recreate ET or Titanic with this tool you could use it for animatics or simple presentations. You need to register to be able to save your film results.
Mark Wallinger's exhibition The Russian Linesman "Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds" at the Hayward Gallery contains a selection of 8 Edweard Muybridge photographs from his Animal Locomotion series.
The examples include the classic Bird in flight and some more obscure pieces such as Man performing acrobatics and Man performing contortions (part 1 and part 2). Although I've seen these in books there's always something special about seeing them hanging up on the wall.
For an animator I found some other items of interest such as Foley Artist Tacita Dean's massive dubbing cue sheet shows the relationships between sound, voice and image.
There are also many examples of anatomy in the form of statues and paintings. Smugglerius shows the muscle structure of a man, it was made in a rather macabre way, being cast directly from a skinned/executed smuggler. Dying Gaul is another example of anatomy in the form of a full sized sculpture and George stubs contributes with a human skeleton.
A couple more things of note were the sterographic pictures and Albrecht Durer's illustrations of perspective machines.
I know that Mark Wallinger was trying to put across a point about thresholds and boundries of different forms but for me it was a good resource of interesting material.
Finally and for me one of the main reason's for the visit was Robert Hooke's Flea
The BBC reports on a "Flash Mob" at the Tate museum, organised on Facebook these budding artist produced 200 morph models as a tribute to the late Tony Hart.
Morph Flash Mob Video on BBC
