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Tag: animation

Trailer for Life and Fate

London-based creative agency Devilfish has created this fantastic Saul Bass-inspired animated trailer for a new BBC Radio dramatisation of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate:

Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant star in the eight-hour dramatisation of the book, which will be broadcast from 18 to 25 September on Radio 4. All the episodes will be available for download(!).

(via Creative Review)

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Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In this lovely animated book trailer by Matt Young for Penguin UK, author David Bellos talks about words, language and his new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything:

(via @alantrotter who produced the video, clever chap).

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Something for the Weekend

Good Ink, a new imprint of Portland’s Scout Books, have announced a new collection called American Shorts. Each pocket-sized volume in the series pairs a contemporary illustrator with a classic American short story. The first releases are An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, illustrated by François Vigneault; Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, illustrated by Bwana Spoons; and The Jelly Bean by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by Vanessa Davis. (Pictured below, an illustration by François Vigneault for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge).

Misery Loves Company — Edward St Aubyn, whose most recent novel At Last was released in May, interviewed in The Guardian:

The curious thing about St Aubyn’s novels is the way they counterpoint personal suffering and social comedy: it is misery lit recast by Evelyn Waugh. The upper class into which he was born and which failed to protect him is mercilessly skewered, including Princess Margaret, who does a brilliant comic turn in Some Hope, the third volume in the trilogy. “For some reason I can’t really analyse, I alternate between those two things,” St Aubyn says, “and I feel that to stay with just one of them would somehow be false. But the rhythm is completely instinctive. I’ve just had enough of the anguish, so I move on.”

Also in The Guardian: Anthony Clavane, author of Promised Land: A Northern Love Story, selects 10 novels about football (or soccer if you must).

And because it’s Friday (and an otherwise light news day), here’s Yowie and the Magpie, a great piece of animated storytelling made for Film London / UKFC Pulse Digital Shorts:

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A History of the Title Sequence

A History of the Title Sequence is a short film by Jurjen Versteeg. It charts the development of film title sequences by displaying the names of influential title designers in the style of their own work. In other words, it is a film about title sequences that looks like a title sequence. How great is that?

The film references the following designers and their titles:

Georges Méliès, Un Voyage Dans La Lune; Saul Bass, Psycho; Maurice Binder, Dr. No; Stephen Frankfurt, To Kill A Mockingbird; Pablo Ferro, Dr. Strangelove; Richard Greenberg, Alien; Kyle Cooper, Seven; Danny Yount, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sherlock Holmes.

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The Ultimate Hitchcock Cookbook

Hitch is an animated homage to Alfred Hitchcock by Felix Meyer, Pascal Monaco, and Torsten Strer, students at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover:

(via Quipsologies)

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Something for the Weekend

An interview with Toronto based lettering designer Ian Brignell at The Case and Point:

I’m influenced by just about everything, but I especially like the work that was done on packages from the 19th and early 20th century. I also enjoy amateur hand-lettered signs, since they often contain very quirky and original details that I would never think of. I have to mention that during college I saw a book with some examples of Herb Lubalin’s lettering work, and this was one of the moments that really made me want to pursue lettering for a living.

All Things Considered — An interview with Nate Burgos about his Rare Book Feast video project:

I enjoy writing about anyone and anything which interest me on my design-related blog, an all-people-and-things-considered destination. Then there’s tweeting, lots of it. Twitter is newsprint. Designer Lorraine Wild said, “You have to be interested in culture to design for it.”

Dull But DurableThe Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk on Soviet design and a new book on the subject called Made in Russia by Michael Idov:

There were some genuinely classic designs… The Lomo camera, with its super-saturated film, is still hugely popular in an otherwise digital world. The avos shopping bag, essentially a string vest with handles, was ubiquitous and remains far preferable to plastic bags, just as the collapsible portable cup is preferable to millions of plastic and polystyrene ones. The ribbed drinking glass, meanwhile, and the Saturna and Raketa vacuum cleaners, simply lasted for ever. We may mock Soviet design, but there are lessons to heed from it. Durability, for one. In our disposable culture, rapid replacement cycles have almost inured us to the idea that nothing lasts. Such is the price, apparently, of free enterprise and consumer choice.

Secretly Young — John le Carré’s keynote speech at the Think German Conference earlier this month (via Bookslut):

I was young when I started writing about George Smiley — twenty-eight — and Smiley was already old, a proxy father. But Smiley’s journey through the novel, despite his age, is the journey of a young man’s self-discovery. Underneath his inconspicuous exterior, he is a sensitive man still growing up, still looking for answers, and for the experience that delivers them.

In short: he is secretly young.

And Smiley’s private journey — from this first novel, right through to his last — for me at least, with the advantage of hindsight and no longer the responsibility of writing about him — is a single Bildungsroman that leads him through disappointments, mistaken loves, failures and occasional successes, to some kind of ultimate maturity: that is to say, to the point when he discovers that the object of his life’s search is neither the absolute enemy of his imagination, nor the absolute answer to his quest.

See also: Tom McCarthy, talks about his novels Remainder and C, and his life in Prague and Berlin before becoming a published writer, at The Days of Yore:

Your book is being held up as, you know, avant-garde, or as an anti-novel, or as anti-realist… None of these seem quite right. My understanding of the avant-garde is as a historical thing, it had a moment and it has an implication for now, but it’s almost like saying, “Are you leading the French revolution?” “No!” [Laughs.] If you pay too much attention, then when you sit down to write you’ve been primed to think: “Okay, so I’m being avant-garde; how do I be avant-garde?”

I don’t know exactly where I’m going next, but I don’t think it’ll be anything that blatantly looks either avant-garde or not avant-garde or realist or not realist.

And finally, seeing as it’s Friday…

A Pixaresque animated homage to the late Dave Stevens to mark the 20th anniversary of the film adaptation of his comic The Rocketeer:

(via Robot 6)

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le droit de suite

Le droit de suite is a short typographic film by Paris-based designer Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet for the French collective rights management society ADAGP that explains an artist’s resale right:

The French version can be found here.

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Evgeny Morozov: The Internet in Society

In this RSA Animate video, Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, takes a critical look at the role of the internet in global politics:

(via Kirstin Butler)

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Stanley Kubrick: A Filmography

I posted this on my other site, The Accidental Optimist, yesterday and it got a nice response so I thought I would post it here as well seeing as it’s a long weekend in Canada.

The video is a short animated filmography of Stanley Kubrick by French graphic designer Martin Woutisseth:

If you don’t know about it already, The Accidental Optimist is where I post things I find on the web — usually related to design, architecture, photography, and film — that don’t have a natural place here. You can follow a combined feed of both The Casual Optimist and The Accidental Optimist on Tumblr and Facebook.

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Under the Influence

Here’s the neat animated short for the new nonfiction comic book The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of NPR’s weekly radio show On the Media, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld:

The book apparently looks at the history of the media and argues against the idea that media is external force outside of our control.

The Influencing Machine is published by W.W. Norton.

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Storm

Tim Minchin’s 9-minute beat poem Storm — a witty and f-bomb fuelled defense of science and critical thinking — is beautifully delivered in this animated movie directed by DC Turner and produced by Tracy King:

(via Quipsologies)

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Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti

Yale University Press recently posted a neat animated trailer for Ivan Brunetti’s new book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice:

(via Fantagraphics)

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