Rolling animated images of kaleidoscopic heads, skeletons and other absurdities. Abstact, surreal and darkly comic. This short was Run Wrake's (as J.M. Wrake) graduation film from The Royal College of Art, 1990
To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.
Although only a couple of minutes long, this animated short makes the point that oxygen is the stuff of life whether on land, in the air or water, but that it is becoming scarcer as man-made pollutants crowd it out. This is a film without words in which plants, birds, fish and, finally, man come to the same "breathless" end
Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collection includes Numbers 1–5, 7, and 10, while the missing Numbers 6, 8, and 9 are presumed to have been lost.
Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York’s emerging filmmakers such as Francis Lee, taught with Hans Richter, and assisted Ian Hugo on Bells of Atlantis. Color Cry was based on a development of the “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process, using fabrics as stencils, with the images synchronized to a haunting blues song by Sonny Terry, which Lye imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave. —Harvard Film Archive
Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
In 1958, graduates of the Film School in Łódź – director Mieczysław Waśkowski and camera operator Adam Nurzyński – produced in cooperation with Tadeusz Kantor the short film Somnambulists. The colourful, painting-like moving image was an attempt at transferring the informel onto film stock.
Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.
The film was produced applying mixed techniques on Super 8 film support.
What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite another story.
This is no animation, it's one picture. Short experimental film by Mirai Mizue
A surreal short animation by Mirai Mizue.
"We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
Coiling and turning orbs travel through the stratosphere. Birth and transcendence short animation from Run Wrake and Howie B.