Graphic designer Johnny Kelly’s animations are rad. The above-pictured stop motion papercraft ode to the life cycle is entitled The Seed and was funded by Adobe. Why is this not on Sesame Street? It seems like just the type of arresting, unusual animation that would provoke a lifetime of unconscious aesthetic influences for children who come across it on PBS.
Also check out his 2007 graduation film from the animation program at the Royal College of Art, “Procrastination.” It’s funny because it’s true– and if you’re watching it, you’re probably procrastinating too!
With as many films as there are these days, and likewise just as many ways to review and dissect those films it’s nice when someone can stand out from the thumbs up/thumbs down pack.
Not Coming to a Theater Near You and The Art of the Title Sequence are two sites that offer up unique slants on how to digest your favorite or perhaps your least favorite flicks. If you ever wondered what it would be like to see someone wax poetic about The Burbs or spend pages upon pages chronicling the title work of designer Saul Bass – wonder no further. It has be written.
The first word that comes to mind when viewing a Richard Sarson drawing is “hygienic”. They are clean, exacting works with an economical sense of composition (like a blueprint) and a tactical use of color (like a doctor’s office).
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Sarson is fond of explaining his work by drawing parallels between art and science–for instance, highlighting the spirit of experimentation that guides advances in both. Knowing this, it’s not surprising that Sarson counts Ludwig Wittgenstein as an inspiration. No one walked the interdisciplinary line more adventurously than LW.
This is the new video for “Phones Don’t Feud” from Holiday Shores‘ debut album Columbus’d The Whim which hits stores in August. I don’t know how they do it but Twosyllable Records keeps putting out great things one after the next -New Villager, Bell, and now this. Fantastic!
If the name “Lowly Worm” means anything to you, you’ll leap at the mention of children’s book illustrator Richard Scarry. A Boston-born artist who moved to Switzerland in his middle age, Scarry spent eight hours a day at his desk cranking out classics like Richard Scarry’s Please & Thank You and Richard Scarry’s Find Your ABC’s, both of which were canny combinations of storytelling and lesson-learning. If you’re a young adult of a certain age, it is possible that Scarry is responsible for the greater part of your vocabulary.
“It’s a precious thing to be communicating to children, helping them discover the gift of language and thought,” Scarry said of his work. “I’m happy to be doing it.”
Very happy indeed, if his more than 300 published books are any indication. Like all the best children’s book illustrators, Richard Scarry was particularly adept at stuffing his drawings with tantalizing details that stuck in the minds of young kids. His pièce de résistance was 1963’s Best Word Book Ever, which included illustrations of more than 1,400 objects.
Herewith, an Introduction to the Busy World of Richard Scarry:
Mere days after we first posted about filmmaker Ray Tintori, his latest video for MGMT was released to the world, setting their much-loved anthem “Kids” to a barrage of unsettling images. Beginning with an epic minute-long intro and transitioning into a nightmare vision of infancy starring folk freak pixie Joanna Newsom as a crass housewife, a crying toddler, and a fleet of flesh-mangled monsters, the video eventually gives way to an extravagant animated sequence crafted by Christy Karacas (the creator of Cartoon Networks’ awesomely disturbing Superjail). The reactions to “Kids” in online discussions have been divisive, with some viewers lobbing accusations of child abuse towards Tintori, echoing the controversy over Jill Greenberg’s “crying baby” photos a few years back. We were dying to know more about Tintori and his methods, so we had a chat with the artist to tackle some of the mystery surrounding his work.
So, what are you working on at the moment? Right now I’m finishing up another music video for a friend’s band called Boy Crisis. That should be done in a couple days, and then I’m going to take a hiatus from doing music videos for a while and work on some scripts that I’ve sort of been putting off for about a year and a half. Some of it’s longer and some of it’s shorter, but there are four or five different projects right now that have sort of been put on hold after the music video thing evolved a little, after we did those first MGMT videos.
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