Animation Shorts

The creation of an animation short is an interesting exercise.  Gone are the days when the cartoon was played alongside feature films in cinemas.  Instead these creations don't really have a readily recognisable forum or stage where they can find wide exposure. 

The form itself is interesting as it is usually the work of just a small group of people or maybe just one brave soul like students creating course work or a professional looking to explore personal boundaries.

This can mean that the vision is less likely to be diluted and daring it its execution.

The Internet has provided a place to show off these creations with some finding fame on the likes of You Tube.

An example of a personal project is Ryan Woodward used his considerable  gesture drawing skill  taking it to produce an evocative piece of animation The Thought of You.  There are more details on the process on his site http://conteanimated.com/

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

This animation was created as a video for an Australian group the Audreys song Sometimes The Stars.


Sometimes the Stars from The Audreys on Vimeo.


There is an interview with  the director Ari Gibson and art director Jason Pamment here

Out of Sight   was  a graduation project by Yu Ya-ting, Yeh Ya-hsuan and Chung Ling from the Department of Multimedia and Animation Art at National Taiwan University of Arts.  It is a hand drawn imagining of the world perceived a blind girl.

Mapping St Patrick

One of the great things about the growth in digitisation of library and museum collections means that the collections can be browsed without travel and material that even if you made that journey may not be available to the general public.  

As St Patricks Day arrives (17 March) I thought it might be a good time to look at the mapping of Ireland what could be found online .  The earlier maps were drawn with little real geographical knowledge and were therefore prone to bias and perhaps exaggeration of a locations size to match its perceived importance. 

The earliest map of the British Isles is the Mappa Munde dated 1025-1050, available in the British Library  collection. 

Ireland - an undistinguished blob- but mapped nonetheless.

Also in the British Library collection is this map on vellum from the 1530s.  This has some  rudimentary coastal detail.  What it lacks in detail it makes up for in character with some nice illustration. 

This map in the British Library collection dated in the mid 1500s has more detail with lakes, rivers, mountains and Islands.  

This map does mark the location of St Patricks purgatory (marked St Patrick).

In the Library of Congress collection are some later maps showing the growing accuracy of mapping.  This map dates from 1598 and also marks St Patricks purgatory in Lough Derg. 

 And this on this map Loug Derg and St Patricks purgatory are marked together. 

St Patricks Purgatory was and remains an important site of pilgrimage.  

This is how it appears on google maps today. 

You have to look hard to find it!

Happy St Patricks Day !

Siberian Wooden Houses

This is a  picture of a wooden house in Siberia.  This was taken by Vlad Gerasimov who lives in the city of Irkutsk which is situated North of the border with Mongolia and close to the largest fresh water lake in the world, Lake Baikal (20% of the world's surface fresh water that is unfrozen).  This one of a large number of images available on a site dedicated to these houses.

Also included is a short tutorial on creating these High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos.

I recommend checking out Vlads other site which has some great illustrations and downloads.

Luttrell Salter Illustrations

The Lutrell Salter is a book produced in 1320-1325. A psalter is a collection of religious texts. These texts were usually heavily illuminated.

The Lutrell Salter was owned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345) an English nobleman.

The British Library has a copy of this text available online which has a nifty zoom function.

The illustrations in this text carry moral messages to keep the reader on the straight and narrow but also depict folk in everyday activities such as ploughing and feeding livestock. The images are thought to be by a few illustrators

Kinobo Oil Painting

I got a new webcam. It is a plug and play webcam from Kinobo.  It was reviewed as simple and sturdy and that is what it is.  It has also got a unique design.
I decided to use it for oil painting practice.  The paintings not finished but this is where I am.  I thought I would put something with it and that ended up being a clove of garlic.

drawing

10'' x 10'' oil on canvas. About 4 hours.
By the way as it is a cam this is what it looks like from the webcams point of view.

Webpage Designs

One of the ways in which the Irish Government has hoped to spark the entrepreneurial spirit is though the enterprise boards.  Each county has its own board which is responsible for disseminating information, training and grants to aid small and medium local businesses.  One of the by products is that each board has a website to provide information.  Rather than a single template it looks like each board has come up with their own web design.  This provides a great example of different design approaches to fulfill the same brief.  There are 35  in total! 

Below are a sample of those available.

On the downside is that the Donegal agency responsible  for creating employment chose to outsource their design effort to a company based in Derry which is across the border in the UK. It looks great but, really?  

By the way if you are in Roscommon and you need this service you better get out that pen and notepad. 

There is election talk that some of this carry on will be reformed.  With unemployment coming close to 15 %, I hope so.

http://www.leitrimenterprise.ie/

Powerful Illustration

In todays media rich world it is hard to think of a situation when an illustration will convey brand new information to an audience.  The only occasion that comes to mind in modern times is the use of court illustrations.  For an entertaining collection of such images go here.  

While watching a science documentary I was very impressed with the images created by Galileo Galilei . Famous for promoting the idea of the sun at the center of the solar system.  His evidence was gathered using telescopes he built.  With magnifications of between 20-32 times magnification he turned his attention to the moon and produced the first depictions of the moons surface.  Until this the moon was considered to have a smooth surface.  In his book "Sidereus Nuncius" translated to the romantic sounding "The Starry Messenger" he presented his accomplished illustrations. 

Now let us review the observations made during the past two months, once more inviting the attention of all who are eager for true philosophy to the first steps of such important contemplations. Let us speak first of that surface of the moon which faces us, For greater clarity I distinguish two parts of this surface, a lighter and a darker; the lighter part seems to surround and to pervade the whole hemisphere, while the darker part discolors the moon's surface like a kind of cloud, and makes it appear covered with spots. Now those spots which are fairly dark and rather large are plain to everyone and have been seen throughout the ages; these I shall call the "large" or "ancient" spots, distinguishing them from others that are smaller in size but so numerous as to occur all over the lunar surface, and especially the lighter part. The latter spots had never been seen by anyone before me. From observations of these spots repeated many times I have been led to the opinion and conviction that the surface of the moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it (and the other heavenly bodies) to be, but is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the earth, relieved by chains of mountains and deep valleys . . . .

Another article in Time explores Gallileo as an artist.