Computer Animation Arts

"Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices" "Melvin Jerome Blank (May 30, 1908 – July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality. After beginning his over-60-year career performing in radio, he became known for his work in animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and most of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons during the golden age of American animation. He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons. During the golden age of radio, Blanc also frequently performed on the programs of comedians from the era, including Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, and Judy Canova. Blanc was nicknamed "The Man of a Thousand Voices", and is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry". - Wikipedia

 Who is Weird Al Yankovic? For those of you who are not familiar with the music of 'Weird Al', he is a extremely talented music artist and musical comedian who has been creating comedy songs and parody songs of contemporary artists for over 40 years. Including, recreating and performing in parody versions of the contemporary music videos. Starting in the 1970's he has created over 150 parody songs and sold more than 12 million albums. Creating parody songs such as ' Eat it -1984' (Beat it by Michael Jackson - 1983), ' Armish Paradise - 1996 ' (Gangsta's Paradise by Colio - 1996), and ' Smells Like Nirvana -1992 ' (Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana 1992). However, in this post we are looking at two of Weird Al's songs 'Don't Download this Song' and 'Word Crimes'. Both of which were visualised using animation. "Don't Download this Song" - 2006 'Don't Download the Song' is a comedy song which captur...

"Star Wars - Episode IV Sound Design Explained by Ben Burtt" by In-depth Sound Design Legendary sound designer Ben Burtt (Lucasfilm, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and more) explains how he 'found' the iconic sounds for Star Wars from the world around him.

The Bancroft Brothers Animation Podcast taughtbyapro.com/category/podcasts/ Twin animators Tom and Tony Bancroft get together and talk about their Disney Animation past, the present animation business, and the future of animation. Interviews with talented artists, inspirational words, and wild speculation will help you grow as a person – or not. Presented by TaughtByAPro.com – your destination for the art instruction you need. See http://taughtbyapro.com for online animation, character design, illustration, comic arts, cartoon creation and more. Tony Bancroft: Animator for both The Lion King and The Emperor’s New Groove. Memorable characters such as Pumbaa, the lovable warthog and spinach puff specialist, Kronk were two of the comedic creations that Tony brought to those Disney classics. He capped a successful 12-year career at Disney, being named co-director of the award-winning feature Mulan; adding to his list of credits, “youngest director in Disney’s his...

Thom Yorke talks about his soundtrack for the remake of Dario Argento's extraordinary horror film, Suspiria... Suspiria 2018 trailer

Oh, what camp, ironic marvellousness is this?  For any soon-to-be year 2 students enjoying this, welcome to the wonderful world of postmodernism! (Now where did I put my flares?)

I'm clearly going a bit Moana mad, even to the extent of really wanting to buy my niece some slippers with Moana's pet pig Pua's face on them. O' the power of consumerism! Anyway, let's not get all philosophical here, many of you get plenty of that already. This little something will pleasantly borrow your ears while you're hard at work leading up to an imminent crit, or over the Xmas holidays. " Draw me like one of your French pigs. " ( source ) Happy holidays everyone and best of luck to you all, enjoy!

Have fun trying to identify all 43!

The Piano Guys (actually one pianist and a cellist) are a 500 million + views Youtube success, whose pared down melanges of beloved film themes have inspired an enthusiastic following.  They've just released their latest mash-up of Batman themes, featuring a fanboy's fantasia of batmobiles in their video.  For me, their Lord Of The Rings  cover provokes outbreaks of goose-bumps, and attests to the extraordinary achievement of Howard Shore's score for Jackson's impressive trilogy.

Sometimes when you hear a song or a piece of music, a complete animation gets made in your head. Sting's The Night The Pugilist Learned How To Dance is one of those songs.  You'll have to go here to listen to it - and I encourage you to do so - because I'm willing to bet its classic 'fish out of water' narrative and evocative Parisian lilt will put you in mind of Pixar in an instant.  It feels like it was written for animation with its Paperman meets Sylvain Chomet -vibe. I've included the lyrics below where you'll quickly appreciate the elements that give this song the classic bone-structure of an animated film.   Much can be learned from Sting's sweet little story in terms of working-up ideas for animated shorts, not least the effect of putting cultural opposites together in the name of love... "The Night The Pugilist Learned How To Dance" In the streets around here there was nobody tougher than me, I was quick ...

When previous The Tune's have featured the work of Bernard Herrmann, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith, I’m probably taking a risk featuring the soundtrack from a Godzilla film. Then again Masaru Sato’s soundtrack to Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla probably has more cinematic credibility than you’d expect. Take the fact that Sato composed  the score for Akira Kurosawa’s hugely influential Yojimbo . It’s bombastic opening theme and iconic shots of the mysterious, vagabond samurai becoming instantly iconic . Jump forward a few years and Sergio Leone remakes Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars and the pieces slowly come together. Sato was one of the great Japanese film composers in an era where Godzilla was fair game as far creating serious musical landscapes goes. Though it's unfairly short, I really love this soundtrack. The closest comparison I can think of is Ennio Morricone's score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It's very different in so much that Sato opted for a Bi...

As dissertation pressure looms it's hard to find a way to concentrate. When I was writing mine a savior for me was having the right music to listen to, and the main source for me was a constant stream of classical music. You may already be using sites such as Spotify and YouTube, but a favourite of mine is Last.fm . All you do is type in your genre or desired artist, such as Baroque in this case, click the 'Listen to radio' link and it will generate a radio station with only similar music playing on it. There are few adverts and I found the constant stream of music beneficial because I wasn't always looking for something else and having to click links to remove ridiculously long adverts. I definitely recommend listening to classical music, (I don't know about you) I always want to sing along to music I know and that leads me to lose where I am, whereas classical music is always pleasant in the background! :)

You Only Live Twice has to rank as having one of the great underrated film scores. Okay - Nancy Sinatra and the high pitched strings of the opening theme have ensured its legacy in pop culture until  the end of time. The opening themes to Bond have always been bigger than the films themselves. Yet the rest of John Barry’s score stands out as an equally sumptuous feast for the ears, which doesn't get as much credit as it deserves. Thwarted perhaps by the film's unfair critical reception.  Capsule in Space  for example, perfectly encapsulates what makes the film such an enjoyable popcorn spectacle. Despite all of its absurdities, You Only Live Twice - for me at least - captures a grand sense of cinematic danger and scale which dares to place Bond in a situation which is far greater than his own abilities can handle. A secret base in a volcano is unbelievable, but it’s cinema of the most exciting kind. I love You Only Live Twice because of it’s absurdities. For all...

Featuring the work of Jerry Goldsmith , James Horner, Eliot Goldenthal and John Frizzell, this 2009 concert by The Tenerife Film Orchestra & Choir is a selection box of musical motifs from the Alien franchise.  As always when I watch actual performances of classical music, I experience an attack of open-mouthed idiocy as I realise that I still don't know how all those human beings manipulating all those wooden and metal objects are actually making the music - or even more amazingly, how they're making all the hairs on my arms stand up. I give you Alien - A Biomechanical Symphony - happy listening.

In common with The Omen (1976), Ridley Scott's  Alien (1979) was another of those infamous horror-movies-for-grown-ups, that, as a small person, I was compelled to seek out and experience.   Alien was the film my mum had forbidden me from watching (after my dad insisted she watch it, much to her continuing regret!).  You knew right from those now famous opening credits, that Alien was serious in its intent to scare you - and that it was going to show you something truly otherworldly.  That intent is absolutely locked into what is sinister and strange about Goldsmith's score, with that opening agitation of strings and the melancholy, almost  ' The Last Post - like' horns (as if foreshadowing the proliferation of human casualities the film will soon be showing us).  It is in the Face Hugger cue included below that you really get to the aural identity of the film - that eerie, moaning wind sound, so desolate, so inhuman, created by blowing acro...

You might think this is a bit weird, but I've got Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score for Richard Donner's 1976 horror film, The Omen on my iPod.  You might think it weirder still if I were to admit to you that I listen to Goldsmith's score frequently.  Like some aural thermostat, the music to The Omen is able to dial down the innocuousness of any situation and instil instead a palpable sense of foreboding and dread.  I like listening to it on long train journeys and casting my eye around my fellow travellers, relishing how Goldsmith's score lends sinister intent to their otherwise ordinary behaviour or gives terrible significance to the way the train rattles unsteadily on its tracks, shuttling me at break-neck speed to an inglorious messy end... In short, listening to The Omen compels me to make movies in my mind - and not very nice ones.  Indeed, there's something about the promise of doom and impending catastrophe captured in Goldsmith'...

A few years back I screened Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist for CAA year 1 as part of an 'Unheimlich' film programme that also included Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) , Invaders From Mars (1953) , The Stepford Wives (1975) , Halloween (1978) and Blue Velvet (1986) .  The underlying theme was American cinema's ambivalence for perfect lawns and picket fences.  Here are shared visions of suburban disquiet and the horrors of homogeneity; here are narratives in which home and hearth become 'final girl' obstacle courses and crawl-spaces, in which domestic space is invaded - sometimes brutally, but more often with stealth and chilling, invisible haste. ( They're here already! You're next! ) .  Indeed, with the exception of Poltergeist , all these films end uneasily with the threat to our domestic space unvanquished in the final reel; sure, Blue Velvet appears to restore order and equilibrium, but no one actually believes everything is going to be o...

I wanted to share my latest musical crush with you.  Tony Bank's Six Pieces For Orchestra has been on repeat-play on my iPod for a couple of days now, specifically the third piece entitled Blade - which I've included below for your listening pleasure.  Tony Banks is one of the founding members of the British rock group, Genesis - but I didn't know this until after I'd purchased the cd on a whim.  If I had known, I might not have bothered, because for me Genesis associates too strongly with 'Dad rock' and Phil Collins.  Tony Banks isn't the only former rock musician to go the classical route; Paul McCartney, for example, has similarly composed classical works - Liverpool Oratorio (1991) and Standing Stone (1997) - as well as The Frog Song ;) Banks' Six Pieces For Orchestra is filmic and very accessible and maybe its immediate ease on the ear and slight sense of 'movies-I've-seen-before-deja-vu' will undermine its staying po...

It's 1992 and I'm 17 years old and the teaser trailer for David Fincher's continuation of Twentieth Century Fox's Alien franchise has me busting my guts in almost painful anticipation...  I'm disappointed, of course.  Just about everyone is.  People hate this film.  People hate the fact that Fincher's  Alien 3  begins with the undignified deaths of beloved characters from James Cameron's triumphant Aliens (1986).   I don't.   I love this.   I think it's courageous and sissyphean and European.  People hate Sigourney Weaver with a shaven head.  I don't.  I think Ripley has never been more beautiful, more butch, more frail, more feminine, more Ripley   - and my longstanding teenage crush on Sigourney Weaver gets a little more complicated.   No, I'm disappointed by Alien 3 because the plot has a massive hole in it, because the film's inciting incident is a cheat, because they've tacked a film distin...

There hasn't been a ' TheTune' for a long time! I listened to this earlier today on BBC Radio 4 and really enjoyed it. It's a fairly technical discussion about how European classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg influenced Hollywood film scores from the 1930's onwards. Catch it while it's still available! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m0lv4 "Young British Composer Tarik O' Regan tells the story of how the tradition of Western classical music, its composers and maestros, underpinned the golden age of Hollywood film score. More or less the entire Hollywood music scene, as it blossomed in the 1930s, looked to serious European and Russian composers for film score composition. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, two of the greatest composers of 'serious' 20th century music, both lived and worked in LA - much to the consternation of the European classical music establishment. Many composers on the run from Europe i...