A Game with No Rules: rear projected Kiwi short film melodrama
"A trio of future Kiwi screen stars smoke, smoulder, steal - and worse - in Scott Reynolds' serpentine short noir. Kane (Marton Csokas) and his Zambesi-clad woman on the side (Danielle Cormack) set about ripping off Kane’s rich wife (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) with bloody results. Writer/director Scott Reynolds and longtime partner in crime, cinematographer Simon Raby, serve notice of their talents - and inspirations - with heady lighting, deliberately shonky back projection, and opening titles right out of Hitchcock [Saul Bass inspired]. Muso Greg Johnson supplies the horns."
(NZ On Screen)
Fig.1 Scott Reynolds/Zee Films (1994), "A Game with No Rules" Aotearoa New Zealand, 35mm 16 minutes.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Communication Design: defined, standardised, professionally certified?
"So now there's yet someone else adding to the pile of what they feel is 'the' definition, when it's really just 'their' definition. I have mine, Bass has his. Rand had his. I bet Armin has his. Bierut, Scher, Danziger,, Bantjes has hers, and the list goes on an on and each definition (as well as the 'definitive' term) is always different, in semantics at least. The philosophy itself varies somewhat less, but it's no less tragic.
This should be a call, loud and clear within our industry, for certification and standardization."
(Michael Holdren, 18 April 2008, comment at Tiny Gigantic)
Holdren, M. (18 April 2008). "A comment replying to 'Communication design, the definitive definition.'" Retrieved 21 May 2011, 2011, from http://www.tinygigantic.com/2008/04/17/communication-design-the-definitive-definition/#comment-27369.
[Michael Holdren attacks Josh Kamler's effort to define 'communication design' as a singularly identifiable discursive field (Kamler, 17 April 2008). In doing so Holdren criticises the effort for being simply a personal definition. This is an appropriate critique given that Kamler fails to draw on available literature in the field. In his comment Holdren calls for communication design to be defined through its standardisation and professional certification. In Basil Bernstein's terms this can be understood as a call for regulation through 'strongly classified singulars'. While this might appear logical from a professional perspective both efforts must be seen as being misguided because they ignore the essential character of communication design. Both efforts are attempts to stall the process of 'disciplinary recontextualisation' which continues to form and reshape the boundaries of communication design and which provides its essential utility as a means for adapting to change.]
Kamler, J. (17 April 2008). "Communication design, the definitive definition." Retrieved 21 May 2011, 2011, from http://www.tinygigantic.com/2008/04/17/communication-design-the-definitive-definition/.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
John Whitney: Motion Graphics Pioneer
"John Whitney, Sr. was one of the earliest and most influential of the computer animation pioneers. He came at the problem from the background of film, working with his brother James Whitney on a series of experimental films in the 1940s and 1950s. His work in this area gave him the opportunity to collaborate with well known Hollywood filmmakers, including Saul Bass.
His earliest computer work used analog devices for controlling images and cameras. After the second world war, Whitney purchased surplus military equipment and modified it to be used in his art making. One such device was an analog mechanism used in military anti-aircraft controllers, the M-5 (and later the M-7). Whitney and his brother converted this device of war into an animation controller, and used it together with a mounted camera as an animation stand. ...
After establishing his company Motion Graphics, Inc in 1960, he used his analog devices for the opening to the Hitchcock movie Vertigo in 1961. His company was focused on producing titles for film and television, and was also used in graphics for commercials. But Whitney was far more interested in the use of the technology as an art form, and began a series of collaborations in art making that has lasted for years. Many of these early collaborations revolved around the advancement of the vector graphics device as a viable tool for making art. Whitney received funding from IBM to take a look at the use of IBM equipment in the design of motion. He worked with IBM programmers in the development of a language for extending the computer to the control of graphics devices. This resulted in one of his most famous animations, Permutations in 1968."
(Wayne Carlson)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Expanding the narrow definitions of documentary animation
"The term 'animated documentary' can still upset a truth-seeking purist. But over the last few years our understanding of what a documentary is has expanded from the narrow direct cinema/cinema vérité definition of the 1970s and the 1980s. A more inclusive definition with room for both classic documentaries like the European city symphonies of the 1920s and the personal film essays of the 1990s and the 2000s is now gaining support.
There was a close connection between animation and documentary filmmaking in Europe in the 1920s (Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, Dziga Vertov) and in the UK in the 1930s (John Grierson, Len Lye, Norman McLaren). This close connection continued at the National Film Board of Canada after World War II and through to this day. Even Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences accepted the animated documentary as documentary proper by giving the Oscar to McLaren (Neighbours, 1952) and Saul Bass (Why Man Creates, 1968). The direct cinema/cinema vérité movements and the total dominance of TV documentaries closely based on journalism have dominated the documentary tradition since the 1960s. But postmodernist thinking combined with more individual/personal artistic filmmaking have brought the artistic elements of the European documentaries of the 1920s and 1930s back. And this scene has also opened up for the modern animated documentary.
At the NFB the filmmakers never stopped making animated documentaries, and a similar tradition has been kept alive in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. I believe a major reason for this is the social democratic political thinking that lies behind both the ideology of the NFB and the film politics in Scandinavia. The film industry deserves state funding because the films play a vital role in our democracy."
(Gunnar Strøm, March 2005, 'How Swede It Is ...and Danish and Norwegian: Scandinavian documentary animation', p.13, fpsmagazine.com)
Fig.1 Monika Forsberg & Susie Sparrow 2006, We Believe in Happy Endings
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Dark Genius of Kyle Cooper
Kyle Cooper "specializes in crafting title sequences - the short introductions and closings to films, videogames, and television shows that list the names of the cast and crew involved in the production. In this boutique industry, Cooper is king. He has designed the lead-ins to 150 features - including Donnie Brasco, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Sphere, Spawn, Twister, and Flubber. The movies themselves may not be cinematic classics, but Cooper's credits - which operate as minifilms in their own right - consistently stun and entertain audiences. For this spring's Dawn of the Dead, he even used real human blood. Critic Elvis Mitchell, in his New York Times review of the movie, summed up the Cooper effect: 'The opening and closing credits are so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for.' Indeed, the word in Hollywood is that some filmmakers have refused to work with Cooper, says Dawn of the Dead director Zach Snyder, because he's 'the guy who makes title sequences better than the movie.' Not since Saul Bass' legendary preludes to The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Vertigo (1958) have credits attracted such attention. Cooper counts Bass' work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead-in for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as his greatest influences."
(Jon M. Gibson, Wired Issue 12.06 - June 2004)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
