Tag: animation

Some Friday afternoon entertainment

thegirlinthecafe 5 Comments

All these stop motion short films make me:

1. Smile big time
2. Want to make one myself

Now there are quite a lot of them there, but I will point you to the ones I like best:

1. Her morning elegance
I love love love this film. And I also really love the song, it is called Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie, who also made the film. (More info about how they made the video here).

2. Firekites – I love how the birds fly from blackboard to blackboard.

3. Deadline which is made entirely with post-it notes!

In case you are wondering what stop-motion means: Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence. (from wikipedia) Basically it is a film made of photographs.

I have actually taken the photographs for a short first stop motion video, but I have been majorly struggling with all kinds of crappy editing programs to turn it into a film. I didn’t succeed and gave up. Maybe my editing course ext week will push me in the right direction to finish it.

I have also bought a timer for my camera, as I also really want to try to make a timelapse video.

There are some unbelievably cool examples of those here and a more basic one here. It must be possible to find some interesting London-by-night spots for my camera. It is basically just setting up a tripod and have the camera take a picture every 2-3 seconds.

Enjoy your weekend!

Flushed Away – review (9/10)

thegirlinthecafe 6 Comments


So yes it was a part of the NFT youth program, but they had the preview, and I couldn’t wait to see Flushed Away (imdb) longer than absolutely necessary. It will be released this weekend, and it is safe to say that this is a film suitable for the whole family. Children (and the young at heart) can enjoy the story about pet posh mouse Roddy St. James (Hugh Jackman) from Kensington being flushed into the sewers of London. And adults can enjoy all the jokes and references to other films that are thrown at you along the way. It’s Aardman, so the characters do resemble the likes of Wallace & Grommit, but they are done through CGI. If you loved W&G you are going to love this.

There is a highly enjoyable voice cast with Ian McKellen (as the Toad), and Bill Nighy and Andy Serkis (Gollum) (as his henchmen) as the absolute highlights. And you’ll never look at slugs the same way again after this film. The soundtrack is rocking, the story entertaining and original. Take your family and go see it, it’s fun.

For me the whole reason to mingle into this youth program was of course Whitey, the big, not too bright, albino rat, brain damaged by all the shampoo tests they have done on him. “When I went in I was grey” is one of his remarks about this testlab, which he luckily seemed to have escaped to now work for The Toad, a big fat green monster, ruling it all in downtown London. Whitey is supposed to be the tough guy, he is much bigger than the others and wears lots of bling bling (think stereotype mafia bodyguard type). But he surely has his softspots, embarrassing his mate Spike by wearing pink woolen gloves with red hearts on it (it’s all Love Actually). And ending the story with “Oh I love a happy ending”. Absolutely Billiant.

Let’s see if they can keep the Penguins from snapping the Oscar for Best Animation Film this year. Highly recommended.

If you don’t believe me, check out the slugs : Everybody Dance Now!

[rating:4.5/5]

The Girl gets a life

thegirlinthecafe 4 Comments

In the train back home from work I was thinking about what I could do on this course. I didn’t need to think long about that. I think I know a girl who can’t wait to get a life of her own. I have no idea how much we are going to accomplish in just 3 evenings, but it would be cool to have her starring in her own (very) short movieclip. Consider this to be a very rough first sketch attempt (and I am very bad with Flash), but I do have a micro story in my head, which could be fun to make. And I think she’s happy to finally have a beating heart.

(And several messages from Denmark are confirming that the postcards now really are available in cafe’s in Denmark. And the DVD of the project is still lost. I’ll give it until the start of June, if it hasn’t arrived with the next person then, I’ll send a new DVD around. I still hope on a happy ending though …)