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New Wallace and Gromit Episodes Coming Online
chachi5000 noted that
CNN is running a story about
Aardman releasing
Wallace and Gromit Shorts Online.
There will be a dozen of the one minute clips featuring the awesome
plasticine duo. Also bits about the feature film coming in (sigh) a few years.
Anyone who hasn't seen the existing Wallace and Gromit trilogy is
missing out.
How can anyone accomplish anything in one minute? The real episodes were a little squished into their 40 min frame, and one minute is really pushing it.
But what I really want is Chicken Run 2!
Everything is mainstream now.
Their American following has never been that great? I mean, humour is humour, and it's just a shame that "Gumby" and "Davey and Goliath" are the only true claymation options that they have...
"The Great Vegetable Plot" :-)
Would Americans get it? They have vegetable patches and Great Schemes.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I first saw Grand Day Out in 1990 at an animation festival in Boston. (Along with a Rug Rats short and something bizarre called Deadsy "You can no play with Deadsy unless you have them great big sex-o-thingies".) I'd never seen anything as funny as Wallace and Gromit, and that mechanical thing they ran into on the Moon had me in stitches. Electronics For Dogs, "Gromit! We've forgotten the crackers!", the "parking brake" on the rocket... just thinking about these moments makes me laugh.
That animation festival also ran Creature Comforts, which isn't as funny, but is its own form of genius: interviews with real people, immigrants from other countries about how they compare London to their home country. Nick Park then made up animations of zoo animals speaking the voices instead of real people. Unique. Unusual. Unforgettable.
For years after that, I looked for Grand Day Out on video tape, but it wasn't until the success of his later shorts that videos became available. Now there's little in my collection I treasure more.
Rock on, Nick Park, rock on!
--Jim
Aardman have produced a couple of CG shorts recently; the first I saw on last year's SIGGRAPH reel featured two posers in a nightclub trying to pick up the same girl, the second is three little plasticene-looking monsters explaining to the camera why they don't have their short film ready in time, and ends with them singing a song dressed as flowers in a desperate attempt to fill time. The later one is VERY hard to tell it's not claymation. They've also used it a fair bit in their TVC work as well as for certain effects in Chicken Run.
I get where people come from when they decry the use of computers in animation these days - sometime I see the quality of 3D kids shows like Beast Wars or Max Steel and I feel like burning my computer in disgust - but the extreme crappiness of a lot of 3D animation is nothing to do with the tools, just a lack of creativity on the part of the production companies. CGI can be used to create stunning imagery and animations, it's just a shame that as yet most of the stuff the general public sees on TV is just so bad...
There is an Aardman DVD available that has Creature Comforts, the three Wallace and Grommit movies, and a large amount of behind the scenes video footage. I know it exists because I have it in my laptop at the moment. (I commute 2 hours to work, so it pays to have a DVD-ROM in your laptop)
That would be "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire", done by BBC Animation for the Comic Relief charity in the UK. I think the animators were Aardman people donating their time, but using BBC facilities.
h tml
Official web-site at http://www.comicrelief.com/other/robbiereindeer.s
Scott McCloud discussed this phenomenon in his book, Understanding Comics.
Essentially, the more realistic the images, the less likely the viewer can really identify with or feel for the character in precisely the way that the artist wants. Too many distractions, too many subtle cues being converted into too many interpretations.
Whereas if the characters are rendered more abstractly, using simpler geometry, simpler facial expressions, fewer digressions from the message, then the viewer can empathize or identify with the characters very easily. The less it looks like someone else in particular, the more it could be you.
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toaster-cum-TV
For those of you whose Latin is a little weak:
cum is a Latin word meaning "with". This specific example means "toaster that additionally is a TV", or "toaster with TV features added on". It's usually shown in italics to emphasize that it is really a foreign word. The Latin word cum rhymes with "broom" or "doom".
The common gutter slang word "cum", which rhymes with "come" or "dumb", refers to sexual climax. For details, see your friendly local porn web site; the word will likely be used heavily. Of course, if you have Net Nanny, you won't be able to look this up.
(If you read a college story about some person who graduates summa cum laude, does Net Nanny block that? Silly censorware.)
As a teenage lad, when I first encountered this word, I asked my dad what "cum" meant, and no I didn't just happen to guess that it was pronounced "coom". I did helpfully spell it, however. We happened to be in a crowded public place at the time. He instantly went spitting angry and told me to just shut up. I had to look it up for myself later.
Nick Park (the guy who created and made these characters) is from my home town - Preston, Northern England. He did a talk at our college about 12 years ago. *very* tedious man (monotone as hell) but very clever. He would chat for a bit, rolling some plasticine around his fingers, then five minutes later he's done a little Gromit without even looking and tosses it into the audience. Mine might be worth something one day...
seany