Someone's alone.

Thought of You.

"Thought of you" is one of the most beautiful animations which explores the contemporary dance in 2D animation.

Animator and designer Ryan Woodward is well known for his commercial projects - he has done storyboards for some of Hollywood's major hits. I would just like to mention that he worked on one of the films that has a special place in my heart - Where the wild things are.
However, the true treasures lie within Ryan's personal independent projects. One of them is "Thought of you".

What makes "Thought of you" so special is that there's no dialogue, no facial expression, only two dancing human bodies and yet, this film is packed with emotions, you feel it as something very personal and you can sense with such great intensity the complexities of relationships.

The magical song used in the film is “World Spins Madly On” by The Weepies .

To me, the process of making this film was equally inspiring as the film itself. If you're interested, you can see it here.

To each his own food universe.

Food lovers usually like taking photos of food. But what happens when you add extra dosage of creativity to the photography and food?

These unbelievable food landscapes might look like paintings but they are actually photographs of real food. Each detail you see in the photos is made out of different sort of foods. The artist who creates these wonderful scenes and then photographs them is Carl Warner. The process of making his art consists of making sketches of the landscapes,  choosing the right ingredients to work with , picking the perfect shaped fruits and vegetables, photographing them and finally fine tuning the images which all takes a couple of days. For me, the most impressive thing in Carl's photos is how he manages the light.

Another example of fascinating use of photography and food is delicious art made by Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle, the husband and wife team. They create unbelievable micro universes with foods and humanoid toy characters.

You adore these, right?

Ok, for the end, a wonderful blog called Diamonds for dessert can give you some useful tips on how to create your own homemade food universe. For example you have the instructions on how to make cute turtles or graveyard cupcakes?! which you can later engage in any sort of activity * !!! * and take photos of it.

Sensology.

"Fisherman"

This wire sculpture by Steve Lohman creates such a powerful illusion of a 3D drawing in space capturing one of life's moments.

"TV man"

"Trio"

I love the flow that you can feel in his work. One of the things which creates that feeling is the fact that all of his works are made out of one continuous line of wire.

"Bike lady"

I had the similar feeling of continuity and flow while watching Michel Gagne's incredible animation "Sensology". Michel Gagne is a Canadian animator who has worked on many great projects, Pixar's Ratatouille among others. He claims that he had a synesthetic experience while listening to jazz musician Paul Plimley's live performance and felt the strong urge to animate what he experienced so he started working on Paul Plimley's music piece Sensology.

The amazing thing about this animation is that Michel did not produce any storyboard or made any pre-production plans. He just animated what he felt while listening to Paul's music. And another fascinating thing is that there's no vector animation in the film, each frame is hand-drawn. It took 4 years to finish the project but the final product is a master piece.

"Every film is a kind of a dance."

Norman McLaren (1914. - 1987.) was an animator and film director, great explorer who loved experimenting, thus he was a pioneer in many areas such as drawn on film animation, visualizing music, graphical sound and abstract film. 

scenes from "Pas de deux (1968.)"

His film "Pas de deux" is completely hypnotizing. Two ballet dancers become endless reflections of themselves creating almost stroboscopic effect. Pas de deux was created by photographing backlit dancers dressed in white against a black background. McLaren then used an optical printer to expose individual frames up to 11 times which gives the movie surrealistic atmosphere and the traces of movement look like an artist's brush stroke. This was a completely new technique for the time the film was made.

Pas De Deux is only one of Norman McLaren's master pieces. His explorations in the field of visualizing music are completely fascinating and are especially interesting to me cause his work is considered as part of the history of synaesthesia in the arts.
"Synchromy" which was made in 1971, reminds me so much of the earliest days of video games. In it, Norman made the perfect synchronization of sound and music. 

The process of making this film is what makes it so special. Each celluloid film has a sound area which is a narrow strip alongside each frame where an optical soundtrack is placed. This recorded sound is rendered as an image, then read by a sound system synchronized to the film projector and produced as sound again. In Syncrhomy, Norman painted the sound by hand after carefully calculating how the images would be read by a projector, and then he placed those pattern cards on the picture areas of the film so the viewer can see what would normally only be heard.

If you are interested in exploring all of his films, you can find them here.