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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.
It is nice to know that despite the preponderence of computers in animation today, something that's this "old-school" can still occur (albeit online-only, I guess).
May clay-mation never die.
-J
Cracking good cheese, Gromit!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ain't it Cool News had a story on this earlier. Looks like the title will be The Great Vegetable Plot and the director is shooting for a release 2 years from now. Here's to hoping it turns out better than Chicken Run, which just rubbed me the wrong way for some reason. *shrug*. I just can't make myself care about the well-being of chickens, which are so darn tasty. ;)
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
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.
One thing I love about the Wallace and Gromit shorts is their attention to detail. Every scene has interesting little bits in the background -- stuff going on that you might catch on the fourth or fifth viewing. I'm afraid that in stretching things to a full-length feature, some of this will be lost. Chicken Run, while fun enough, disappointed me for exactly this reason. It was kinda funny, and had some amusing references to other movies -- and certainly they put a lot of work into it -- but it just doesn't have the *depth* that Wallace and Gromit do. I hope Nick Park will prove my fears unfounded.
Read the article and enjoyed. Will be funnier than anything to see the inventions.
:-) You gotta love the protection it provides. :-)
As I read the last part:
"Park has now expanded the idea to make them into mini-movies where Gromit demonstrates the innovations, which include a high-powered cricket ball bowling gun and a toaster-cum-TV."
I had an idea. I ran to my daughter's room where her PC is protected by Net Nanny and put the url in. No go
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...
that's all...award Karma accordingly.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Feathers McGraw, as far as I recall.
Cheers,
Ian
One minute... why you can buy a 20 minute phone call for one min... ah shit.
wrong thingy.
Get your Unix fortune now!
(any Fast Show/Brilliant fan will understand :)
How many things made today can you say that about? (Not a rhetorical question: suggestions please!)
it's not like there's any advantage of making everything out of plastercine!
Apparently there is some advantage, otherwise Nick Park wouldn't spend so much time working in plastercine.
I've seen "Wrong Trousers", I've seen "Final Fantasy". Both were created from a different medium (stop animation vs computer graphics). Both movies are great examples of what can be done with the medium.
But Wrong Trousers had a depth to the animation-- There were things going on in the background... the expression on the characters faces... the Pengiun was evil, and you knew it. My 2 year old Nephew knew it.
Final Fantasy was a fun and groundbreaking movie, but it lacked detail. Yes, their hair moved realistically, but the characters were cold, their expressions were hard to read, the background scenes were cluttered and hard to make out. The only reason I could tell that there was any attraction between the lead women & lead man was because of the dialogue. If the mute was on, I couldn't tell you *what* was going on. Not so with the Wallace & Gromit movies...
Comparing those two movies, I would say that there isn't much advantage to using computer animation over plastercine ! (not yet, anyways).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
They already have lots of other stuff here, at AtomFilms, but this is reallly cool! I love Aardman Animations, they are great! Some of my favorites are Creature Comforts (done by Nick Park) and Pib and Pog (two little kids playing around with sulfuric acid, lol, priceless).
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
"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
So if we are drawing a picture, you are saying that there is no point in using crayons, pencils, pens, paints, collages etc etc and that we should just the one great medium whatever that may be?!?!?!?!
Wow, I didn't know a toaster could do all that! I mean, is that the greatest thing since sliced bread or what??
Sorry, couldn't help it. Seriously, is that some kind of British thing? Can someone translate?
They're even more funny if you watch with your language selection set to French. Try it sometime (particularly on the one with the penguin thief and the robotic trousers).
Why bother.
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...
Blummy Days!
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
have you seen this chicken?
there's more than one way to do me.
Go to Marjacq.com and click on the "Developer" menu and then "Frontier Devlopments" to read about it. Not much information there except that they are working on it.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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
You're thinking "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire". Caught that last holiday season, but was available only as Region 2 DVD (Thank YOU MPAA!). I don't think it was Aardman.
It's available this year on Region 1. Great movie.
The amount of detail that the animators put into Wallace and Gromit is incredible. You can watch the video repeatedly and find something new. Like the news papers always fortell what the future may contain.
;)
A particularly advanced example of this is the news paper in "A Grand Day Out". If you read it you'll find out about Feathers McGraw who is in The Wrong Trousers which was completed a few years later.
Also, in "A Close Shave" you can see Feathers Was Here written on the Jail cell that Gromit is in. It does seem that Feathers is perhaps one of the most exciting characters that was created.
Consider that it's a bowling ball but from the two blank little eyes you can tell it's evil and it doesn't even have eyebrows but when it rubs the flippers together you can sense it like the evil from Sauron.
Just a small other point, the hole in the eyes of the characters are so that the animators can put a needle in and move the direction that the eyes look.
Hope this has been interesting, informative, insightful and funny
internet like monkeys'
Comparing those two movies, I would say that there isn't much advantage to using computer animation over plastercine ! (not yet, anyways).
I haven't seen Final Fantasy (just short clips in the previews), but I think a more fair comparison would be comparing plastercine in Wallace & Gromit to the computer work in Shrek. They have different looks, being different media, but both "work". Probably because they have good artwork, good animation, and good stories to go with them.
That said, Nick Park definitely has a gift in story-telling. I think if he were to work with computers, it would be equally compelling as his work in plastercine.
Which suggests to me the problem lies in Final Fantasy, not the medium...
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.
[
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
subtly hidded on the Aardman site under the banner 'Trade' are about 20 commercials plus some clips from movies. Its got some of their recent CG material too. http://www.aardman.com/trade nice flash intro...ahem
Here is why they change the names of British books and films for Americans. From a few posts down:
toaster-cum-TV? (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, I didn't know a toaster could do all that! I mean, is that the greatest thing since sliced bread or what??
Sorry, couldn't help it. Seriously, is that some kind of British thing? Can someone translate?
Correct my British if needed, but doesn't "cracking" mean "good"?
Just wondering.
Virg