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Cabbie Chronicles: The “Steamboat Willie” of Jamaican animation?
12.29.2010
12:48 pm
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Jamaica has finally distinguished itself a bit in the global animation community. It’s easy to see why JA animators Allison and Anieph Latchman’s five-minute Cabbie Chronicles: Drive Thru Drama short won the Best Caribbean Animation Award at this year’s Animae Caribe Animation and New Media Festival. It’s some straight-up homegrown Kingston street satire.

Don’t get it twisted—Jamaicans have been doing animation for a minute now—for example, Coretta Singer’s fantastical 3-D work has been shown out in the global animation circuit for a couple of years now. And folks can point to the cutting-edge Ninjamaica, but that was a Canadian production. Cabbie Chronicles is straight from yard, and hopefully one of a long-running series that sets the tone for an era of great ‘toons from the island.
 

 
After the jump: check an interview with the screwfaced Cabbie himself…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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12.29.2010
12:48 pm
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Born With Three Mouths
12.27.2010
03:57 pm
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Photographer and film maker Alva Bernadine mixes the erotic with the grotesque in “Born With Three Mouths,” part of an ongoing film project.

To view Bernadine’s other works visit his website here.
 

 
Previously on DM: Alva Bernadine and Spanking As Art.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.27.2010
03:57 pm
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Digital Tattoo: next-level audio/visual art from Berlin
12.18.2010
02:06 pm
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Berlin has always been a bastion of innovative cultural work, and one excellent example of this is the Digital Tattoo Productions outfit.

Comprised of the husband/wife team of video artist and animator Edna Orozco and sound artist Dean “Tricky D” Bagar, Digital Tattoo have executed video-mapping-and-sound projects on historical sites in both their home countries of Colombia and Croatia.

They also recently worked on the body-centered dance theatre piece Quia, performed in Bogota and excerpted below. Check it out and keep an eye and ear out for these folks…
 

Digital Tattoo- QUIA from digital tattoo on Vimeo.

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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12.18.2010
02:06 pm
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Live action Tron-a-sutra sex positions
12.17.2010
12:03 am
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The Tron-a-sutra has been updated and animated for those who found the ancient pictorials a bit too mystifying.

The missionary position allows for easy entry, deep penetration and although women are placed in a passive role (hence “missionary”), it is one of the more enjoyable positions for couples who take pleasure in intimacy.”

To view in detail all 40 positions of the Tron-a-sutra click here.
 

 
Via WHT

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.17.2010
12:03 am
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1979 animated head trip based on Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’
12.16.2010
12:51 am
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Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.16.2010
12:51 am
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Jiří Trnka: The Walt Disney of the East
12.15.2010
07:03 pm
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His book illustrations and animations have influenced generations of children. Understandable then that Czech artist, puppeteer and stop-motion film-maker, Jiří  Trnka was known as the “Walt Disney of the East.”

From the moment he could hold a pencil, Trnka drew pictures. But drawing wasn’t enough for him, no, he wanted to bring his pictures to life. So, he started making puppets and opened a wooden puppet theatre on Prague’s Wenceslas Square. It was here in 1945, that Trnka and his colleagues started making stop-animation films based on the ideas and stories developed in the theatre. Trnka was legendary, as Studio Director, Zdena Deitchova recalled in 2007, “[he] was the symbol of a great artist and a great illustrator, and everybody in the studio in those days looked at him really with great admiration.”

In 1947, Trnka made The Czech Year (Špalíček), which told six separate folk tales of Czech life. It was a defining moment for Trnka as he won several international awards three years running across Europe. Trnka’s next film was the Song of the Prairie, and then, in 1949, he made The Emperor’s Nightingale a beautiful, poetic and unforgettable film, adapted from Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, and voiced by Hollywood star Boris Karloff.

Though he worked with puppets, Trnka’s unique drawing skills were still very evident, as author Edgar Dutka recalled in a memoir:

“He transferred this style of book illustration into puppets, so they are very typical. If I see Trnka’s puppets, I say: ‘Oh, that’s Trnka. His roots are in Czech village, in Czech culture, so those puppets are villagers: short legs… farmers…’ They’re lovely. It’s a special style. That’s why his fairy tale won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1946, because it was something new.”

Over the next ten years, Trnka made four of his best known works, The Merry Circus (Veselý Cirkus, 1951), Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české, 1953), The Good Soldier Svejk (Dobrý voják Švejk, 1955) and arguably his greatest film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské, 1959).

Then in 1965, he made his last film The Hand (Ruka), with which he moved away from traditional Czech tales to a political critique of his country under Russian domination. It was a controversial and very dangerous film to make, one that:

...was an unexpected and surprising break in his work thus far. It was something completely new in content and form. The Hand is a merciless political allegory, which strictly follows story outline without developing lyrical details as usual; it had a strong dramatic arc with deep catharsis…

...When The Hand was released it was officially declared as Trnka’s criticism of the Cult of Personality (Stalin), but for all people, it was an alarming allegory of human existence in a totalitarian society. The film had the strong up-to-date story about the Artist and the omnipresent Hand, which only allowed the Artist to make sculptures of the Hand and nothing else. The Artist was sent to a prison for his disobedience and pressed to hew a huge sculpture of the Hand. When the omnipresent Hand caused the Artist’s death, the same Hand organizes the artist’s State funeral with all artists honoured. Trnka, for the first time, openly expressed his opinion about his own inhuman totalitarian society. The Hand was one of the first films that helped to open the short Prague’s Spring.

In The Hand Trnka predicted his own fate, as he died at the early age of fifty-seven in 1969. Like the Artist in his last film, he was buried with full State honors. This documentary gives a fascinating insight into Trnka’s brilliant creative world.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Jan Švankmajer - Dimensions of Dialogue


 
Part 2 plus Trnka’s ‘The Hand’ after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.15.2010
07:03 pm
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William S. Burroughs ‘The Junky’s Christmas’
12.12.2010
05:03 pm
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It’s that time of year when stories once were told around a roaring open-fire, as snow flakes left their prints upon the windows. Now, continuing in that spirit, here is a tale of redemption and hope to enjoy around the flickering laptops and computer screens of our winter time.

Francis Ford Coppola produced this short Claymation film based on William S. Burroughs excellent story The Junky’s Christmas. Directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel, it opens with live action footage of Burroughs as he begins his tale:

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.
This beat benny wouldn’t pawn for a deuce, he thought.

 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.12.2010
05:03 pm
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Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig Christmas Special
12.12.2010
05:17 am
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Looking for a last minute Christmas stocking stuffer for the middle-aged headbanger in your life. Well here it is, ‘Henry And Glenn Forever: The Boxset.’

Moshing through the snow with America’s most beloved washed-up punk rockers.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.12.2010
05:17 am
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Sekitano Norihiro’s brutal delirium
12.10.2010
03:51 pm
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Sekitano Norihiro’s surreal collage work is a mindbending explosion of day-glo entrails, lysergic flowers, primitive Japanese medical illustrations, torture devices, pop art advertisements, Tibetan hungry ghosts, and mutant babies, rendered in such a way as to maximize the nightmare factor. Into the Bardo. See more here.

“I use pictures of bowels because they have such beautiful colors! My artwork doesn’t mean anything more than how it looks. There is nothing more that I want to explain using words.”

Brutal video delirium from artist Norihiro for Japanese breakcore musicians Maruoso and ZFE (zombie face eater).
 

 
ZFE after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.10.2010
03:51 pm
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Extremely deep zoom into the Mandelbrot set: Infinitely psychedelic
12.07.2010
02:07 am
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The beautiful and infinite geometry of our Universe is echoed in this vivid fractal journey generated by Chris Korda using the Mandelbrot set. Worlds within worlds within whorls.

Korda describes the making of the video:

This is an extremely deep dive into the Mandelbrot set, to 2^316 (binary). In decimal that’s 1E+95, or 1 with 95 zeros after it.
The video was rendered using my own fractal software, called Fractice, which supports distributed processing using a client/server architecture. The render took five months, using a cluster of up to 20 dual-core PCs on a LAN, all running the Fractice rendering server. The actual number of servers varied over the five-month period but averaged around 15. Rendering only occurred at night.

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.07.2010
02:07 am
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