The Danish Poet

Another animation I enjoy. The Danish Poet is by the National Film Board and helped launch Torill Kove's career as an animator and director.

The style of the animation is very simple and reminds me of traditional animation. Kove hand drew it with pencil and paper, scanned it and digitally edited it. It brought forward the theme of the story, of coincidence and retelling the narrator's origin. In my animation class last term, I used a tablet to hand draw my final animation project and found it incredibly tedious. I cannot imagine hand drawing it first, scanning and then digitally editing.

There are little quirks in this 2006 Academy Award winner from the little cows in the back and to the ridiculousness of the main woman growing her hair out to an unrealistic length. The narration added much to the film, something common in film making and with the mere quirks, make it very endearing.

Count the ones you know!

WARNING: Includes violence, swearing, and sexually suggestive material.

Logorama was created by a collective team of French animators. In 2009, it won the Academy Award for best short animated film.

This entire animation is about branding and how much it overwhelms us. There were so many different brands that I either recognized or didn't, and what I liked about this film is the creative use of each brand, whether it is a building, or the dropping of liquid to make 'Nickelodeon.' Although we pass through our day with brands around us, we aren't usually aware. With this video, it shows people that are equally unaware, but to us, it is prevalent.

Something about the animation that took be surprise was how light coloured the film appeared for it's darker and dramatic scenes. This made the brands visual and recognizable. What really made the film stand out was as I mentioned, the use of the brands in their everyday life and the creativity used to put them in unexpected places, like the X-Box logo for the crack in the earth.

The Joy of Books

I've always been a fan of animation. Last term, I took an animation class and enjoyed learning more about it. One of the most meticulous types of animation was stop motion. Stop motion, as I learned, takes such a long time to do, having to pay attention to each and every detail in every shot you take. Although exhausting to do and often annoying to know that your 3 hours of photo taking is equivalent to only one minutes, it was rewarding to see the final results.

This video, the Joy of Books is a stop motion piece that I've admired. I first discovered it in an article in the Toronto Star earlier this year and became quite interested. It takes place in a bookstore called Type Books in Toronto and illustrates an imaginative world after the store closes.

It was produced by Sean Ohlenkamp, an associated creative director at an advertising agency. To help with this project, he recruited students from Mohawk College's creative advertising program.

In the world with computers and eBooks, it was refreshing to see the diversity of movement a real book can have. Through this video, you are in awe about the time and effort (especially since I went through the same thing on a smaller scale) spent on the animation and it made me remember the imagination I often grasp from reading a book.