Meet my friend Jindra Polak, resident of Prague. I've known him for a few months now (email) and had no clue he has his own blog!!! He's an artist and animator, and also has just started reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.... how freakin' cool is that?!??!?? Below is his first animated film (I believe).... done without a framegrabber, no armatures, and I suspect he did the entire soundtrack with nothing but his own voice.... you tell me, does Prague breed natural born animators, or what??!??!?
3 comments:
Wow, I'm published on Darkmatters, cooool!
The Rolling Stone magazine cover will be next I hope!;o)
Thank you very much for kind words, Mike!
Yes it was my very first attempt... I didn't know anything about stopmo, it was shot with my cheap digital camera, edited in iMovie and it looks like it!;o)
But I've learned a lot since, so I hope the next one will be better.
About the soundtrack - I recorded the main melody in Garage band, all my vocals (except the little "boing" at the end;o)) and the voices for both the characters too. The noise in the background, water and birds etc. is taken from iMovie library.
And I'm not really sure about that natural born animator thing too... when I see all the stuff you guys at SMA can do, I've got a loooong way to go.
I'm starting to work on my new film these days, based on my "Evil that won't sleep" poem, so we'll see, if there's any progress going on in my style!;o)
Cheers
JP
Hey, nothing wrong with iMovie.... it's all I've ever used!!! I supercharged it with some plug-ins from Stupendous-Software.com that give you incredible power.... what I like to call Poor-Man's After Effects!
Whatever you do though, don't upgrade to the new iMovie!!! I heard they've stripped it down to absolute bare bones, so if you want any kind of decent capabilities you have to shell out for a more expensive editor. Apparently they wanted it to be perfect for making little YouTube movies.... $%^#&*%*!!!!
About the natural Born Animator comment.... there's a huge difference between acquired skills and natural aptitude. The ability to animate smoothly and tell a story etc is really acquired skill.... and while the actual animation itself in your clip is rough, you've got everything else it takes to be a great animator displayed prominently there!!!! The rest is stuff that you'll learn little by little.... easy as pie!!!
I love the way you intoroduce the viewer into your little animated world through the drawings... made incidentally by the animator's hand... perfect touch! And speeding it up like that was brilliant, as was (especially) doing it upside-down and then rapidly spinning it into view. Perfect!!! Ditto for the out-tro at the end, bringing us back to the real world (and showing the lamp you lit the animationm with... too cool!). The fact that all the music and voices are your voice... it's like animator as one man band, using his own body to create this powerful micro-reality that's so much more fun and - well - animated than drab reality is! Now all you have to do is learn about armatures, tie-downs and getting good smooth animation.... all kid's stuff!!!
See ya on Rolling Stone buddy!!!
Forgive me for being off-topic, but i noticed the books you mention. For hard-to-find or out-of-print books, i've been using Alibris (http://www.alibris.com/) almost as long as i've enjoyed Darkstrider dot net. Just sharing a handy link.
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