First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80′s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80′s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80′s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

Here’s a collection of shorts by Maya Deren, an influential ’40s filmmaker. She took the kind of narrative techniques that were just getting to a mature state in the commercial features of the day and applied them to her art films. Emotionally-affecting conventions that movie audiences had become sophisticated enough to expect–like “limited third-person perspective,” where the camera is restricted only to items of interest to one character–were still a startling novelty in the art world.

(Tangent: limited third-person perspective is so ubiquitous in films today that it’s better to illustrate it with an example of its absence. Part of The Phantom Menace‘s lack of emotional affect is rooted in its mysterious reliance on “omniscient,” and not limited, third-person perspective, where the camera takes the viewpoint of an outside observer.

When Natalie Portman enters the Galactic Senate, most living filmmakers would, somehow or other, contrive to show us her face together with a view of the chamber from where she’s standing. We see a thing, we see an actress looking at the thing, and we read her for clues as to how we should respond to the thing emotionally. Instead of this, we get a wide shot of the chamber alone, like something out of Metropolis. Omniscient third-person perspective was a common tactic in the silent era, and it’s a key reason why modern lay audiences watching a silent film sometimes have trouble caring too much about what’s going to happen next. )

It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to appreciate Deren’s originality these days, when there’s a broad public understanding that Eisenstein’s rules aren’t for “the movies” alone, but can be deployed to whatever weird ends you like. (To get a better idea of her impact, consider that she influenced Kenneth Anger, generally credited as the inventor of the music video.) “Meshes of the Afternoon” is her most famous film, but I’ve always liked “At Land” best. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rumor that she died in a voodoo ritual gone horribly wrong is not true.

(direct link)

“Metronome“, by Daniel Cockburn.

at the same time as this adorable Spanish kids’ cartoon:

“…could corrode the very bonds that hold society [quack! quack! quack!] together…” Both, by the way, are pretty good.

The strength of their approach is that you’re buying a vanilla MP3, which means it works with everything, and which allows them to lampoon any movie they want without rights hassles. The downside is that you have to sync up the movie and the soundtrack yourself, Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon style. Fortunately, they’ve worked hard to make this easy—they tell you exactly when to start playing the commentary track. They also have a “robot” that exactly mimics the on-screen dialogue every once in a while, so that you can verify that you’re still in sync. Finally, the commentary track (at least the one we bought) comes with text file telling you where in the commentary each DVD chapter starts, in case you want to pick up from the middle.

All in all, I’m overjoyed to be able to hear the guys back doing what they do best, for movies that we know and love (to hate), without having to wade through any of the skits that were getting increasingly grating in MST3K’s final days. Here’s hoping that it proves to be a rewarding business model for them!

Incidentally, the guys will be performing a live riff of a movie during the San Francisco Sketchfest next month—and we’ll be there!

When I was at CalArts, I took a crack at Maya again…version 5 this time. There had been a lot of improvement, of course–modelling was now much closer to sculpting out of blocks of clay, and not so much like gluing spheres and cones together. And you could paint right on your model, too, which helped a lot. But getting around in it still felt awkward to me. Mondi Anyango, another student at CalArts, is in the business of creating custom interfaces for his 3D work, including one made with a freeware motion-capture program called EyesWeb. But that sort of thing is pretty well beyond me. (And also, I guess, the Polar Express folks–take a look at this animator’s opinion on what they did wrong, complete with photo examples.)

…so recently I downloaded the demo of version 6, ready to grit my teeth and try again…and I got a wonderful surprise. Version 6 has full integration with a Wacom tablet. They’ve let you paint and sculpt with the tablet for a while now, but you still needed a mouse to get around the 3D space. Now you don’t. The difference is amazing. Something in my brain just sort of clicks into place.

And now, the best part–they’re starting to make Tablet PCs that run Maya.

“Oh anything can happen
On any particular day
There ain’t much you can do
When the Force is not with you
The world burns down around us and we walk away.”

The Force is not with you. Wow.

After the oil runs out and the Library of Congress is run by rats and pigeons, I bet itinerant actors in covered wagons will be doing the story with wooden lightsabers. (And fortunately, since very few smallpox-vaccinated people were ever exposed to the New Trilogy, its memory will be erased entirely.)

The overall tone of the article is a bit keynote-addressey, but it’s these little hints of a bygone production process that are amazing to read:

The Cray was a cool computer, able to do six billion computations a second. It was engineered to such a high level of performance, that it was actually designed to crash three or four times a day. And the only people who could start it back up again were people from Cray. So, when you bought a Cray, they sent people who would live with it, called Crayons, in a trailer in the parking lot…

If you watch the credits, you’ll see a couple hundred Chinese characters at the end: those are the names of the artists who painted mattes in Taiwan. A year later, that was totally obsolete. Computers could do all that. That’s how fast it changed…

When we did FernGully: The Last Rainforest, which we ink-and-painted using traditional methods, we used 4 tons of paint and produced 16 tons of finished art just to make one film. Now it’s on a few tapes or disks.