Young the giant

I'd recently discovered this uber cool indie band - Young the Giant. Formed in 2004, they were previously known as the Jakes. I simply love all their songs on the album especially Strings, My Body and Cough syrup. You probably heard Cough Syrup in one episode of Glee.





There is this something in their music that draws me in. Their lyrics speaks to my heart perhaps. I just love their sound especially their acoustic covers. I love the creative pattern of the drummer, the riff of the guitars and bass and the voice of the vocalist.

Check out their music.

The Grammys - Dave Grohl's speech

I love the Foo Fighters. Here is one of the most touching acceptance speech in Grammys. If you make music or has been listening to music pretty much growing up, you  have to hear this speech.





Transcription:

This is a great honor, because this record was a special record for our band.

Rather than go to the best studio in the world down the street in Hollywood and rather than use all of the fanciest computers that we can buy, we made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine. And we couldn't have done it without the best producer in the world, Mr. Butch Vig. I haven't worked with Butch Vig in twenty years. We meet each other twenty years ago when we made a Nirvana record  and it was an honor to work with you again (looking at Butch Vig) We have a lot of people to thank...

To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of making music is what's most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do. "It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on a computer. It's about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].

Freddiew: Youtube films

I discovered Freddie last year by chance last year and I'm glad I did. His videos on Youtube is by far the most professional film directed in my opinion. The awesome plots created, amazing editing, sound design and witty lines drew people in. I did a little research of his background and realized that he graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. No wonder his stuff are pretty impressive. The props and equipment used are sick!

Freddie Wong and his friends came from Los Angeles. An interesting fact about him is that he is a professional Guitar Hero/Rock Band player.

Here are some videos that I think were pretty impressive.














Epic. Check his video channel out on Youtube.

Indie: Kimbra

Now here's an uprising star that I adore very much. I found her at Dianna Agron's blog and I was blown away. In a nutshell, Kimbra Johnson (born 27 March 1990),  Kimbra. Her debut album Vows was released on 29 August 2011 in New Zealand, and 2 September 2011 in Australia on Warner Bros. Records Inc.

A few songs that is on loop pretty much everyday: Cameo lover, Good Intent, Settle Down and Plain Gold Ring.

Things that make her awesome.

1) Her music. She's got pretty amazing stuff going on. I love her poetic description and honesty. Her groovy tunes gets me up on my feet. I can't deny the fact that she got some creepy lyrics going on especially 'Settle Down' which may scare people with commitment issues but I love it. I love the crazy stuff she do. I read from the Vanda & Young website that she was announced as 2011 winner of the Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition. That is pretty impressive.

2) She is pretty good live. I checked out some of her live performances. I wouldn't say it is perfect but it is undoubtedly good. Check out some of her studio recordings. It is definitely mind blowing.



4) Her full band. I think one of the plus points is really her band. She is so awesome and her band is really bring her qualities way out. Those crazy harmonies and groove. I adore her drummer too. He impressed me too much.

5)By now you should have noticed her hand gesture. She got all sort of hand signs going on when she's really into the song which I find pretty interesting and attractive. I also love her little dance.

6) Her music videos. Oh my globe awesomeness. She just got all the best people with her.




It was announced today that she will be touring with Gotye (I love this dude very much too) in the states. Check out her website http://kimbramusic.com/   I'm so excited about all these promotions in the states. These amazing musicians needs to be heard. I'm really sick of all those trash on the radio. We need real music in our lives.

Len Lye

Biography

• Len Lye, born Leonard Charles Huia Lye (5 July 1901 - 15 May 1980)

• A Christchurch, New Zealand-born artist

• Known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture.

• His films are held in archives such as the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley.

• As a student, Lye became convinced that motion could be part of the language of art, leading him to early (and now lost) experiments with kinetic sculpture, as well as a desire to make film.

• Lye was also one of the first Pākehā artists to appreciate the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, and this had great influence on his work.

• In the early 1920s Lye travelled widely in the South Pacific. He spent extended periods in Australia and Samoa, where he was expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community.

Techniques

• Experimented with new colour processes such as Dufaycolor and Gasparcolor
• “Direct animation”, a method of painting, scratching and stencilling directly onto motion picture celluloid.
• Different materials and paints in order to achieve a surreal and experimental look that gave it a real surface so it didn’t appear merely as painted on.

A colour box
Lye began to make films in association with the British General Post Office, for the GPO Film Unit. His 1935 film A Colour Box, an advertisement for "cheaper parcel post", was the first direct film screened to a general audience. It was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the film itself, synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra.



Comments

• Len Lye presented a mass of complex and jumbled movements through painting directly onto celluloid. This had the added effect of creating a greater sense of off-screen space, as if the patterns are streaming in and out of the frame. Furthermore, the dynamic shapes seem to dance to the popular Cuban music making up the soundtrack.
• Color films were still uncommon in the 1930s & there was considerable novelty to seeing streaks & shapes & shadows in all colors bouncing around on the screen.

Rainbow dance



• An advertising film for the Post Office Savings Bank, combines original live action footage of a silhouetted dancer (Rupert Doone) with graphic backgrounds and cartoon drawings.
• Increasingly began to incorporate more 'concrete' symbols within his films, yet did so in a rather idiosyncratic manner, continuing to formally experiment with music, colour and movement.
• Len Lye used a recurring silhouetted figure in the film, enacted by dancer Rupert Doone, and transformed the surrounding mise-en-scène into a colourful, shifting landscape, aided by the use of stencil patterns and deregistration effects.
• Rainbow Dance (1936) has an increased appeal by right of incorporating a human subject. It clocks in at just under four minutes, featuring the dancing & sportsmanship of Rupert Doone turned into surreal animation, partly an early example of rotoscoping.



Len Lye’s work
• Lye’s sense of movement was rooted in the physical, “the kinetic of the body’s rhythms”, not purely a matter of visual patterns.
• Lye’s cinematic “figures of motion” sublimated their commercial purpose by emphasising geometric and all-over abstraction and direct authorial inscription.
• His work appeals to more than just our visual sense, it appeals to our physicality, our sense of our selves and our own bodies. The kinetic sculpture in particular creates a visceral reaction in the viewer - you feel the sound of it echoing through your chest as it ‘performs’ its choreographed ballet of movement and sound. Fountain III (1976) is an enormous, slowly revolving over-arching bouquet of steel rods lit with theatre lights, and it made me feel simultaneously awed, amazed and slightly seasick as I walked around it.



Significance
• Len Lye is recognised as one of New Zealand's leading contemporary artists, film-makers, sculptor and kinetic designers.
• A major initiative, led by the New Plymouth District Council, the Govett-Brewster Gallery and the Len Lye Foundation to create a landmark centre celebrating the life and works of Len Lye required significant funding and support from both within Government, and abroad.
• Contribution in developed hand-crafted abstract cinema.
• Len Lye was a major influence on Walt Disney for Fantasia.

Bibliography

• Auckland City Art Gallery (1980) Len Lye: A personal mythology 
• Bouhours, Jean Michel and Horrocks, Roger (ed) (2000) Len Lye, Paris, Edition Centre Pompidou.
• Curnow, Wystan and Horrocks, Roger (1984) Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings'
• Horrocks, Roger (2002) Len Lye: A Biography, A
• Horrocks, Roger (ed) (2002) Happy Moments: Text and Images By Len Lye
• Kashmere, Brett (2007) "Len Lye" in Senses of Cinema
• Len Lye in Te Ara online encyclopedia
• Horrocks, Roger (2009) Art that Moves: The Work of Len Lye, 
• Horrocks, Roger (ed) (2009) Body English: Text and Images By Len Lye

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UPA

UPA (United Productions of America) 
HISTORY

Introduction

• UPA was founded in the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941

• Among them was John Hubley, a layout artist who was unhappy with the ultra-realistic style of animation that Disney had been advocating.

• The points at issue concerned working conditions

• There were resistance to the studio's basic approach to animation

• Along with a number of his colleagues, Hubley believed that animation did not have to be a painstakingly realistic imitation of real life; they felt that the medium of animation had been constrained by efforts to depict cinematic reality.

• UPA's big break came in 1949, when Bosustow made a deal with Columbia Pictures to provide the cartoons for them to release.

• UPA had fallen heir to Columbia's cartoon properties, such as Tito & His Burrito and Flippity & Flop, but preferred to develop properties of its own.

• UPA’s original stories like Rooty Toot Toot stand out from the thick crowd of theatrical cartoon shorts — which included an ever-increasing amount of UPA's own influence.

• UPA Pictures' legacy in the history of animation has largely been overshadowed by the commercial success of the vast cartoon libraries of Warner Brothers and Disney.


Characteristics of UPA animation


• The UPA style was characterized by flattened perspective, abstract backgrounds, strong primary colors, and "limited" animation. Instead of using perspective to create the illusion of depth in a drawing, UPA's cartoon objects looked flat, like the blobs of color that they were.

• UPA's innovations include limited animation, by which fewer and simpler drawings were used to make animation effects. Because it allowed great saving in production cost But as originally conceived, it was less a cost-cutting shortcut than a choice of styles.

• Instead of filling in backgrounds with lifelike detail as in, say, a forest scene in Bambi, UPA presented backgrounds that were broad fields of color, with small squiggles to suggest clouds and trees.
• Instead of varying the shades and hues of colors to imply the colors of the natural world, UPA's cartoons contained bold, bright, saturated colors.



Reduced movements in UPA animation


• First, the amount of movement within the frame was substantially reduced. Rather than have a cartoon woman move her entire head in a shot, a UPA cartoon might have her just blink her eyes.

• Second, figure movements are often repeated. A character waving good-bye, for instance, might contain only two distinct movements which are then repeated without change. Full animation, in contrast, includes many unique movements.

• Third, UPA uses fewer individual frames to represent a movement. If, for example, Yosemite Sam were to hop off his mule in a movement that takes one second, full animation might use 24 discrete frames to represent that movement. Limited animation, in contrast, might cut that number in half. The result is a slightly jerkier movement.

Techniques used to produce cartoons on a reduced budget


• Cels and sequences of cels were used repeatedly — animators only had to draw a character walking once.

• characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.

• clever choice of camera angles and editing.

• use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement. A famous implementation of this is the "crash" technique, which involves the camera shaking rapidly back and forth to simulate a shock wave.
• "smear animation:" movement is rapid and portrayed in only three frames: the beginning state, the ending state, and a "blur" frame similar to that of a picture taken with a camera that had a low shutter speed.

• cel reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique. • the visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads").

• silhouette helped avoid having to keep track of shading on an animated character or object.

• sliding a cel across a background to suggest movement.

• Stock footage: sequences that are reused frequently. This is the case of the character transformations in the Magical girls subgenre of Japanese anime series. Filmation used this strategy for much of its productions.
• extensive recaps of previous episodes or segments, to cut down on the amount of new material necessary (used often in serials).

• The most egregious case of limited animation, known as Syncro-Vox, involved pasting a film of the moving lips of a real-life person over a still frame of an "animated" character to give the appearance that the character is doing the talking. Cambria Studios held a patent on the technology, and as such, it was primarily used on their productions, such as Clutch Cargo.

• Chuckimation, another notoriously low-budget process, simply moves various "animated" figures by hand or by throwing them across a space. Most commonly used with stop-motion animation, it usually does not allow for characters' mouths to move.

ROOTY TOOT TOOT


Summary
The short retells the classic popular song "Frankie and Johnny". Frankie is on trial for the murder of her piano-playing lover, Johnny. The prosecuting attorney accuses her of shooting Johnny "rooty toot toot/right in the snoot." Nellie Bly the singer ("She's no singer!" shouts Frankie) claims she witnessed the shooting. The case is looking bad for Frankie until her lawyer, Honest John the Crook, spins a wild story about involving innocent Frankie, a jealous Johnny, and an incredible ricochet. The jury convenes and finds Frankie "not guilty." Frankie is thrilled, until she sees Honest John dancing with Nellie Bly. She quickly picks up Exhibit A (the gun) and shoots Honest John "rooty toot toot/right in the snoot" in front of the entire court room.

GERALD MCBOINGBOING


Summary
The story describes one Gerald McCloy, who at the age of 2 years old begins "talking" in the form of sound effects, his first word being the titular "boing boing." His panicked father calls the doctor, who informs him that there's nothing he can do about it. As the boy grows up, he picks up more sounds and is able to make communicative gestures, but is still incapable of uttering a single word of the English language. Despite this, he is admitted to a general public school, where he is chided by his peers and given the derogatory name "Gerald McBoing-Boing." After startling, and angering, his father, he decides to run away and hop a train to an unknown location. However, just before he catches the train, a talent scout from the NBC Radio Network (as identified by the NBC chimes) discovers him. He is then hired as NBC'sfoley artist, performing shows for a division of the company labeled "XYZ" on the microphones, and becomes very famous, with the last scene showing him riding with his parents in a very expensive automobile among throngs of fans.


THE TELL TALE HEART
 
Summary


The plot focuses on a murderer whose increasing guilt leads him to believe he can hear his victim's heart still beating beneath the floorboards where he buried him. Seen through the eyes of the nameless narrator, the surrealistic images in the film help convey his descent into madness.
A surrealistic take on Poe’s story, the entire cartoon is presented from the point of view of the mad narrator (voiced by James Mason). You see everything as he does and the world of this cartoon is asymmetrical, dark, bizarre and utterly nightmarish. “The Tell-Tale Heart” utilizes UPA’s “limited animation” technique, but implements the lack of movement and dimensions in a far more creative and atmospheric manner than their typical children’s material. There’s a lot of camera work in this cartoon, as we pan across paintings of the vast and imposing old mansion (as the audience, we’ve been implanted inside the madman’s body, after all) and they use several lighting techniques to mask portions of the background paintings, revealing them slowly or suddenly depending on the narrative flow, to create a terrifying illusion of movement and horror even when, well, nothing is actually being animated.


Comments


• There are lots of unnerving overlays of things such as veins, webbing out across the frame, or the slow lengthening of the old man’s shadow creeping across the dusty floor, or the pulsing beat of some wet organ flashing momentarily across the screen.
• For an animated film with only a limited amount of frame-to-frame animation in it, Director Ted Parmelee ingeniously gets the most out of what he can and the result is something unique and darkly beautiful.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” was considered so abnormal and disturbing in its day that it was the first cartoon to ever be rated X in Great Britain.


Significance

• UPA had a significant impact on animation style, content, and technique, and its innovations were recognized and adopted by the other major animation studios and independent filmmakers all over the world.

• UPA pioneered the technique of limited animation, and though this style of animation came to be widely abused during the 1960s and 1970s as a cost-cutting measure, it was originally intended as a stylistic alternative to the growing trend (particularly at Disney) of recreating cinematic realism in animated films.

• It was an artistic attempt to break away from the strict realism in animation that had been developed and perfected by Walt Disney. While Disney's animation methods produced lush and awe-inspiring images, it was felt that realism in the medium of animation was a limiting factor. Cartoons did not have to obey the rules of the real world (as the short films of Tex Avery and their cartoon physics proved), and so UPA experimented with a non-realistic style that depicted caricatures rather than lifelike representations.

• UPA studio made the first serious effort to abandon the keyframe heavy approach perfected by Disney.

• Their first effort at limited animation, Gerald McBoing-Boing, won an Oscar, and it provided the impetus for this animation method to be accepted at the major Hollywood cartoon studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM. However, the real attraction of limited animation was the reduction in costs: because limited animation does not require as many drawings as fully keyframed animations, it is much less expensive to produce.

• The 1950s saw all of the major cartoon studios change their style to limited animation, to the point where painstaking detail in animation occurred only rarely.

Bibliography


Books

• Brown Arthur:  Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Cartoons! 
• Animation art: from pencil to pixel, the history of cartoon, animé & CGI
• Barrier, Michael (1999): Hollywood Cartoons. Oxford University Press. 
• Maltin, Leonard (1987): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Penguin Books. 
•  Solomon, Charles (1994): The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings. Outlet Books Company.

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Top 10 Paramore Songs

 I'm an ardent fan of Paramore. I love all their songs but I have my favourites. Here's my top 10 Paramore songs! Not ranked though.

Paramore - Singles (2011)

1) In The Mourning



This song can be on the loop all day. Their best song yet.

2) Hello Cold World (2011)

Brand New Eyes (2009)

3)Misguided Ghost



4)The Only Exception



5)Ignorance

RIOT! (2007)

6) Fences



7) For A Pessimist I'm Pretty Optimistic



8)Misery Business

Twilight OST (2008)

9)Decode

All We Know Is Falling (2005)

10)We Are Broken



Leave a comment of your top 10 paramore songs!