Computer Animation Arts

Out there in the CGAA community, students are taking on the literary heavyweights - Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. As authors dealing with heightened moods and feverish visions, their respective works lend themselves to strong stylisation and gothic excess. Poe's rather nasty 1845 short-story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar , depicts the gloopy consequences of keeping an otherwise dead body 'alive' via the power of mesmerism; said consequences are outlined in this squishy concluding passage: "As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity." Nice. Below is another illustration by Harry Clark...

Harry Clarke was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1889. He apprenticed to his father in stained glass at the age of 16. From 1910 to 1913 he attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he won 3 gold medals and 2 scholarships. Clarke is celebrated for his stain glass window designs , but it is his wonderfully textural illustrations for the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe that I'm showcasing him here. For those of a literary persuasion, the titles accompanying Clarke's illustrations are hyperlinked to their respective stories. Be sure to take a really close-up look at Clarke's illustrations - the detail is extraordinary. The Fall of the House of Usher The Masque of the Red Death The Pit & The Pendulum The Tell-Tale Heart Ligeia A Descent into the Maelstrom The Premature Burial

The Tell Tale Heart is a rather nasty and wonderfully breathless short story by Edgar Allan Poe . As a nipper, I had an audio cassette version read by Christopher Lee. Here, in a striking animated 1953 adaptation by Paul Julian, the late, great James Mason is doing the narrative honours. Paul Julian worked as a background artist for Loony Tunes and with director Fritz Freleng's Sylvester and Tweety Bird shorts. According to his Wikipedia entry, Julian also provided Road Runner 's 'beep-beep' sound! The Tell Tale Heart is a much darker undertaking - and Julian's emphasis on environment as narrative device is unmistakeable; just take a look at the screen grabs below - stark, graphical and less equalling more. For more examples of Paul Julian's work - including screen grabs from his title sequence to Francis Ford Coppola's Dementia 13 and Roger Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters , go here .