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Another evening walk, another glorious meadow, another glut of painterly photographs! Is it art or are they just 5000 piece jigsaws-in-waiting? What’s ultimately disappointing about these images, their billowing impressionist effects aside, is they can’t truly describe the way the breeze was running across the meadow, making puffs of powder paint out of all the…
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Designed by Paul Julian, directed by Ted Parmelee and narrated by James Mason, UPA’s 1953 masterful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story is proof – if more proof is even needed – that animation isn’t the preserve of children.
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An old wallet of photographs surfaced recently from an era of my life I otherwise have no tangible reminders for, including a set of very poorly exposed snaps taken one bonfire night. The subject of the photographs is the burning of a human-sized alien effigy in the small garden of a pebble-dashed house somewhere in…
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Desquamation, deriving from the latin word desquamare, meaning ‘to scrape the scales off a fish’, is the word describing the shedding of our skin. None of us like to think too long or too hard about what comprises the dust collecting on the surfaces of our homes, but to watch Street of Crocodiles is to…
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The nice thing about participating in the fortnightly Kick-About is the gentle pressure it applies to respond in new ways to new prompts. When Gary Thorne proposed ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ for the Kick-About #3 prompt, I experienced that initial moment of creative freefall, known less poetically as ‘having no ideas’ – or rather…
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Metropolis – our last kick-about prompt – inspired a wide-range of creative responses from a wide-range of creatives. I experienced a proper thrill of anticipation as the submissions began to arrive via email, blogposts and Twitter. Metropolis brought with it some very clear and beloved associations; many of us couldn’t wait to channel our inner…
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Back in May, 2002, I was asked to make a short documentary on Fred Pearl. Fred Pearl worked for the toy manufacturer, Lines Brothers, as a model maker of dolls and toys in their factory. He went on to make a wide range of models for films, and set up his own model making business,…
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Hey Tom, first you gave us a goggling cluster of eyes, next a gaggle of jellied Sea Monkeys, and now we appear to have a bristling asteroid field of jaunty traffic-cones… What creative and technical challenges did you face bringing this latest cg asset to life?
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Another trip out into the luxuriant froth of the Kent countryside yesterday evening to locate and photography an entire field of ox-eye daisies – or Leucanthemum vulgare if you’re feeling fancy. The sunlight was milky and yellow and the effortless pointillism of the meadow was another impressionists’ delight!
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Norman McLaren’s 1968 study in human locomotion transforming ballet dancers Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren into snaking chains of vertebrae and carousels of smoke…
Red's Kingdom 