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Zbigniew Rybczynski

Zbigniew Rybczyński (b.1949) is a Polish filmmaker, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, creator of experimental animated films, and multimedia artist.

He studied cinematography at the Łódź Film School in Warsaw (1969-1973); his thesis films were Take Five and Plamuz. During his studies, he became a founding member of the Film Form Workshop (Warsztat Formy Filmowej), the most important Polish neo avant-garde group. From 1973 to 1980, Rybczyński made his own films at the Se-Ma-For Studio in Łódź. During the political unrest in Poland in 1980, he was the head of the founders’ committee of the Se-Ma-For studio branch of Solidarity.

In 1982, during the martial law period, he managed to arrange a job contract that enabled him to leave Poland for Vienna, where he applied for political asylum. The following year, he and his family emigrated to the US, where they lived in Los Angeles and then New York. The first works he made in the US were the short experimental videos “The Day Before” and “The Discreet Charm of the Diplomacy”, both made in 1984. In 1985, he launched his own studio – ZBIG VISION – in New York, which he subsequently outfitted with the latest video, computer and HDTV technology. It was in this studio that he made his most important American films, including Steps (1987), The Fourth Dimension (1988), The Orchestra (1990), Manhattan (1991), and Kafka (1992). Between 1984 and 1989, he made more than 30 music videos. One of them – “Imagine” (1986), made for John Lennon’s composition – was the first music video ever made using high-definition technology.

In 1994, Rybczyński moved to Germany, where he co-founded the Centrum Für Neue Bildgestaltung, an experimental film center in Berlin, and later worked in Cologne. He returned to Los Angeles in 2001, where he worked for the Ultimatte Corporation and continued his research in the area where art, science, and digital technology intersect working out new standards for moving images. Among the results of Rybczyński’s long-term research and experimentation are his inventions in the field of electronic-image technology, for which he holds several US patents, and which are widely used in the film and TV industries.

In March 2009, Rybczyński returned to Poland, taking up residence in Wrocław, where he set up the Center for Audiovisual Technologies (CeTa) at the site of the city’s historic Feature Film Studio. The center, which officially opened in January 2013, includes a state-of-the-art studio designed by Rybczyński for the production of multi-layer film images, and an institute for research into images and visual technologies. After Rybczyński discovered and published huge corruption in CeTA, they fired him and subsequently he declared the renunciation of his Polish citizenship.

1982 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film 
Superimposition of characters in different colours interacting with each other.
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Zdenkó Gasparovich

Satiemania - Wikipedia
“Satiemania’ by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.
“Satiemania’ by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978. The subject matter is somewhat inappropriate. But I am very inspired by the mix of a wide diversity of line and colour styles and mix of handrawn, rotoscoped and cutout images for different emotions and effects.
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Terry Gilliam

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam

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Gianluigi Toccafondo

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Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky (born 1970) is a Russian-American animator, director, producer, screenwriter, storyboard artist, comic book writer and artist. He is the creator of the animated television series Dexter’s LaboratorySamurai JackStar Wars: Clone Wars, and Primal on Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim.

He co-created Sym-Bionic Titan and directed the animated Hotel Transylvaniafilm series. Additionally, Tartakovsky was a pivotal crew member of The Powerpuff Girls and worked on other series such as 2 Stupid Dogs and Batman: The Animated Series.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genndy_Tartakovsky

analysis of simplicity of visual narrative without dialogue.
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Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی‎) (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author.

“Drawings are abstract. If she had used real people rather than animation, immediately Persepolis would have become an ethnic film about ‘some Arab people over there dealing with their issues with God’

Persepolis

Persepolis 2

Chicken with Plums

Biography: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marjane-Satrapi

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Yuri Norstein

Yuri Norstein was born to a Jewish family in the village of AndreyevkaPenza Oblast, during his parents’ World War II evacuation. He grew up in the Maryina Roshcha suburb of Moscow. After studying at an art school, Norstein initially found work at a furniture factory. Then he finished a two-year animation course and found employment at studio Soyuzmultfilm in 1961. The first film that he participated in as an animator was Who Said “Meow”? (1962).

After working as an animation artist in some fifty films, Norstein got the chance to direct his own. In 1968 he debuted with 25th October, the First Day, sharing directorial credit with Arkadiy Tyurin. The film used the artwork of 1920s-era Soviet artists Nathan Altman and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

The next film in which he had a major role was The Battle of Kerzhenets (1971), a co-production with Russian animation director Ivan Ivanov-Vano under whose direction Norstein had earlier worked on 1969’s Times of the Year.

Throughout the 1970s Norstein continued to work as an animator in many films (a more complete list can be found at IMDb), and also directed several. As the decade progressed his animation style became ever more sophisticated, looking less like flat cut-outs and more like smoothly-moving paintings or sophisticated pencil sketches. His most famous film is Tale of Tales, a non-linear, autobiographical film about growing up in the postwar Soviet world.[3]

Norstein uses a special technique in his animation, involving multiple glass planes to give his animation a three-dimensional look. The camera is placed at the top looking down on a series of glass planes about a meter deep (one every 25–30 cm). The individual glass planes can move horizontally as well as toward and away from the camera (to give the effect of a character moving closer or further away).[4]

For many years he has collaborated with his wife, the artist Francheska Yarbusova, and the cinematographer Aleksandr Zhukovskiy.


Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Norstein’s animations were showered with both state and international awards. Then, in a bitter twist of irony, he was fired from Soyuzmultfilm in 1985 for working too slowly on his latest film, a (presumably) feature-length adaptation of Gogol‘s Overcoat. By that time he had been working on it with his usual small team of three people for two years and had finished ten minutes.

In April 1993, Norstein and three other leading animators (Fyodor Khitruk, Andrey Khrzhanovsky, and Edward Nazarov) founded the Animation School and Studio (SHAR Studio) in Russia. The Russian Cinema Committee is among the share-holders of the studio.

To this day, Norstein is still working on The Overcoat – his ardent perfectionism has earned him the nickname “The Golden Snail”. The project has met numerous financial troubles and false starts, but Norstein has said that it currently has reliable funding from several sources, both from within and outside of Russia. At least 25 minutes have been completed to date. A couple of short, low-resolution clips have been made available to the public.[5][6] The first 20 minutes of the film have also toured among various exhibits of Norstein’s work in Russian museums. The full film is expected to be 65 minutes long.

Norstein wrote an essay for a book by Giannalberto Bendazzi about the pinscreen animator Alexander Alexeïeff titled Alexeïeff: Itinerary of a Master.

In 2005, he released a Russian-language book titled Snow on the Grass. Fragments of a Book. Lectures about the Art of Animation, featuring a number of lectures that he gave about the art of animation. That same year, he was invited as “guest animator” to work on Kihachirō Kawamoto‘s puppet-animated feature film, The Book of the Dead.[7]

On 10 August 2008, the full version of the book Snow on the Grass was released (the “incomplete” 2005 book was 248 pages). The book, which was printed in the Czech Republic and funded by Sberbank, consists of two volumes, 620 pages, and 1700 color illustrations.[8] The studio stopped working on The Overcoat for nearly a year while Norstein worked to release the book.[9]

Filmography[edit]

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Ng’endo Mukii

“I propose the use of animation in relation to indigenous people as a means of just telling you that these people are human. Animation is not related to the indexical image. It is able to emulate the human emotion and experiences even if to a fantastical level…since the artist’s hand is very obviously involved in bringing these images to life, animation is not pretending to be alive as is the case with taxidermy. Unlike ethnography, it is not tied to a singular story or to any absolute truths. It allows multiple interpretations of the human experience”

Animation can be used to emulate something that is intangible, something that is humanity. It is our soul, unlimited by the preconceptions and expectations of the ‘real’ image.

A distinctive African feminist voice from Kenya. Highly skilled animator combining work in different physical media: cut-out puppets, drawing and charcoal, photography and video that are then composited and manipulated digitally. The fluid movement comes from the video. The other media are more static with puppet manipulation and boil effects.

Issues:

– Uses a lot of dialogue and text in English
– Many of the concerns are from urban areas. How far do these resonate with poor rural areas, or represent their voices?

Argues that animation can make real people alive. Has the full movie in the middle. Banyavanga Nyainyaina. Death, destruction, disease danger. Jim Chuchu’s film ‘African Stories’ is shot in black and white to separate African stories from the colour and romanticism of the ‘African story’.

Documentary animation technique

Real people do not like to talk on camera, so she animates them in their real words.

Textless NGO shorts

Short film made for Plan International in celebration of International Day of The Girl. Part of the Girls take Over Campaign.
Mobile phone animation. Wanjiku seeks a better future, far from home. Commissioned by HAART Kenya.

Commissioned political/development documentaries

Uses digital compositing of multiple media. But reliant on English text commentary.

This migrant business is particularly effective visually – the combination of very gritty drawings and manipulated video effects, overlaying newspaper clippings and use of ‘binocular framing. Though the commentary is very direct and not so clear on what can be done by the viewer.

A short digital puppet animation with commentary in poetic rhyme, based on a true story of human trafficking, commissioned by HAART Kenya. At the end video clips are added for realism.
Commissioned project for the Danish Refugee Council and RMMS in Nairobi. This Migrant Business, shows the systems that exist that enable and exploit African migrants seeking better lives in the Middle East and Europe. The system creates a cyclic force that ensures that demand and supply will continue to to feed into each other, indefinitely. This is a lucrative trade with vulnerable people as its currency. Really effective digital compositing of photography overlay, rotoscoping and puppet animation of drawing/painting.

Yellow Fever

Rotoscoped paint over.

https://vimeo.com/ngendo

Stencil effects

Ahwak Runaway This film was made at the Ölands folkhögskola last week, during a two-day animation workshop. The students chose Kanye West’s #Runaway film to work with. We selected a sequence and each student was given one second (25 frames) to reinterpret in any way they wanted. Most of them printed out the frames, some worked digitally. They began drawing, painting, gluing flowers, and even foil paper onto their frames, playing with masks and blending modes and layering in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, and worked late into the night to create this beautiful piece. As we were putting the frames together the next afternoon, trying to beat the deadline, we were asking ourselves what to do with the sound. At the same moment, one of the girls began to play a song from #Syria on her phone; Jamal Slitine’s Hobbi Lak.

https://vimeo.com/ngendo

Vimeo channel

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Peter Millard

Peter Millard, Since the Better (2015) This animation starts with a blank screen that shimmers with slight variations in white/cream while a shrill cild/female/robot/alien? distorted voice sings a vaguely familiar melody. This creates tension and anticipation waiting for something to happen. Then the voice suddenly changes to the more familiar deep male opera voice as the childlike simple pencil drawing of a man’s face moves slowly at the same speed and horizontal position across the screen. This drawing ‘boils’ with slight apparently random changes in the drawing as a whole – size and shape of the face circle, eyes and pupils and length of the line of the mouth. This creates a real poignancy of sameness, thinness of the line and blank expression in contrast to the heavy emotion of the ‘we will overcome’ vincera aria that also references the masculinity and tribalism of football matches as well as the operatic strength itself. The title ‘since the better’ then adds a layer of loss and past ‘glory’.

https://lectureinprogress.com/journal/peter-millard

Peter Millard is a London-based animator. He creates his absurdist animations on paper (all recycled) with oil bar and paint. Then he scans the large images in with a large scanner, sizes them up in After Effects before using Premiere Pro to edit. 

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Gottfried Mentor

Gottfried Mentor is known for his powerful tragi-comic social/political allegorical animations using CGI animals. These are very expressive in terms of visuals, dramatic narrative and sound effects/music and fully comprehensible without text. He works with the German animation studio Film Bilder.

How has Gottfried Mentor influenced my own animation?

His tragi-comic narrative style, and use of bright colours and anthropomorphic animals has influenced my animation in Pig Tales, India.

https://viscom4dev.zemniimages.info/portfolio/2-pig-tales-india
Oh Sheep! 2012. Two flocks of sheep are searching for companionship. But their shepherds, being at odds with each other, do everything to keep them separated. The final solution that satisfies them through making them look different leads all the sheep to all fight and kill each other.

!! This is the most interesting. Do detailed narrative analysis of why this is so funny and serous at the same time. Use of dramatic timing, sound, framing, similarities and differences – and lots of blood.

Head Up 2013. Story of an old goat who tries to teach a very young one to behave ‘properly’. But when they get to a big crevasse, it is the young goats who takes risks and takes a creative approach who can get across. The old goat learns that he does not know everything and needs to be flexible to learn also from younger kids.
Lambs (2013). The lamb’s parents are shocked, because their little lamb doesn’t sound like the other sheep: It’s making „moo” instead of „baa” and insists on having coloured pom-poms instead of plain white fleece. But they finally see that all the other young lambs are defying convention with new fashion.

More about Filmbilder animations. See also Andreas Hykade.