Computer Animation Arts

Yep.

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 saw this - and thought of our CAA Year 2 students and their current foray into the wonderful world of postmodern pastiche and meta-fictional japes...

At last we have the answer to the question, "What do you get if you cross Trumpton with The Wicker Man? " Radiohead 's creepy video for their latest, Burn The Witch ...

Disney animator Eric Goldberg's couch gag for The Simpsons ...

Yep, that pretty much does it.

A nicely executed appropriation of a well-known title sequence from Clement Morin ...

We all enjoyed the original 'Dumb Ways To Die' - indeed, I was singing the song for weeks.  I've just watched this parody featuring notable deaths in cinema - it might make you smile, but I reckon the 'Minas Tirith' bit will make you 'lol' - it did me.  Go on - waste 3 minutes of your life... Enjoy!

I know, I know - I have to move on.  I need to 'get a life'. I have to get passed this fanboy Prometheus grief ... but see? I'm not alone; another bullseye from the How It Should Have Ended people...  

Many of you will already be familiar with the 'How It Should Have Ended' animated skits, which lampoon Hollywood movies by poking fun at their plot holes and contrivances of script.   This selection, featuring  Toy Story 3 , Scream , Aliens,  and the Harry Potter franchise, made me 'laugh out loud' at their pitch-perfect appropriations of favourite moments and skewering of narrative absurdities.  You're probably much too busy to watch these...

Space Stallions is a beautifully observed parody of 1980s animation as exemplified by He-Man and She-Ra (and the recent CGAA Character Design project!).   It's got everything; the over-wrought script, the paint-by-numbers archetypes, the synth-tastic signature tune, the almost-too-sexy-for-a-kid's-show heroine, and the blatant homoerotic/ Village People vibe, with its love of 'real men' with real facial hair!  The real success of this animation is the way it left me wanting to watch an actual episode of Space Stallions while munching my way through a bowl of sugary breakfast cereal.  Take a look at the original opening credits for He-Man and She-Ra and marvel a-new at their utter campness!

Here are two music videos from a band called "Stuck in the sound". This band have really interesting taste for their music videos with lots of obvious references. It is really fun when you can recognize pretty much every scene in the video from somewhere else. First animation is created by a director with a nickname se7en for a song called "Brother" and second video "Pursuit" is an extract from the upcoming album to be released on January 2012 Directed by Caleb Krivoshey and Fortiche. Stuck In The Sound - PURSUIT by stuckinthesound

Prepare yourselves for a new Pingu remake of John Carpenter's masterpiece THE THING (1982) by Lee Hardcastle. This is actually just hilarious and genius at the same time. This looks like a proper home made video even with the sound effects recorded by himself, so it makes this even funnier. Storyboard :))) http://leehardcastle.com/blog/storyboards-pingus-the-thing/

Okay, so, back in 1982, John Carpenter (dir. of horror smash, Halloween ) remade The Thing From Another World (1951), and so unleashed some pretty amazing non-cg special effects set-pieces in which dogs turned inside out and disembodied heads sprouted legs.  This was the film that got the playground buzzing in terms of its extreme gore and 'out there' creature design.  A prequel to the film is due for release very soon, but it appears to this jaded viewer, that The Thing 2011 is just the The Thing '82 all over again - but with cg augmentation probably undoing all that was properly visceral and grisly about Rob Bottin's extraordinary puppets...   Anyway, this postmodernism-themed post could be about the continuing slow death of the avant-garde in terms of film-making as Hollywood stagnates in a perpetual 'nostalgia mode', as it seeks only to remake and revisit its own back-catalogue, as the levers of capitalism demand bums on seats over...

A pitch-perfect parody of boy band pop/pap from some clever/creatively bankrupt ad agency for the Yeo Valley milk & yoghurt company; a manufactured pop group singing a middle-of-the-road ballad with obligatory key-change that is largely indistinguishable from 'real; manufactured pop groups singing middle-of-the-road ballads with obligatory key-changes...

'A "Lynchian" man and woman find a 1950's style educational video that teaches them How To Make A David Lynch Film. While going through Lynch's canon, they learn how to achieve long pauses for no reason, crazy music and sounds, stories with no plot, and how to confuse the shit out of their audience! HOW TO MAKE A DAVID LYNCH FILM is a parody that will bring Lynch lovers and haters together in comical harmonium!' How To Make A David Lynch Film from Red and Tan on Vimeo .

Summary: Awakening from a coma, four years after being left for dead at the hands of a ruthless band of assassins, The Bride seek revenge. A prime example postmodern culture. Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film is a bloody smorgasbord of pastiches and homages to Asian action cinema and Spaghetti Westerns. Analysis: “This movie reshuffles the elements of the classical Hollywood Western, along with elements of other genres of mass culture, in complicated ways that suggest an allegory appropriate to the age of globalization.” (Mcgee, 2007:236) “Quentin Tarantino makes movies for movies' sake. An unapologetic pulp scribe, Tarantino thinks nothing (or is it everything?) of dropping scores of allusions to the beloved pop culture of his youth into his movie-universe comedy-tragedies. It's all part of the arch postmodernism that makes this loony, nostalgia-act promoter who he is: repellent child to some, cult hero to others.” (Canavese, 2008) Mcgee, P. (2007) From Shane to Kill Bill: ret...

Today, I was browsing internet, when I came across this - the famous film, The Shining , but told differently. With the footage from the film and some editing, the mash-up trailer changes the plot of the film. This may be of interest for the 2nd years as they step on the interesting grounds of Post-Modernism. Enjoy!!

A 'Premake' trailer for Pixar's UP , which seeks to suggest that the 2009 animated film you know and love was 'originally' made in 1965 with Spencer Tracy...  How postmodern (but more on this later!).