MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Ben Popp

For this third installment of psychedelic animation witness the strange world of Peter Millard. A UK based animator who I recently became aware of. I love Peter’s use of the medium to boldly go forth into the world of the strange and unknown while keeping a playful tone. It is this sort of animation that originally drew me to the medium as I became aware that perhaps I too could make animation despite my own lack of ability to draw nicely and whatnot. So sit back and behold Peter Millard’s Boogodobiegodongo

Boogodobiegodongo from peter millard on Vimeo.

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!
guest curator: Ben Popp
Continuation of Psychedelic Animation for Marvelous Mondays!

Today features contemporary Animator Amy Lockhart and her incredibly bizarre and strange film “Walk for Walk”. I first saw this film at Onion City and was excited because I knew some of the characters from the Shrimpy Paul comic by Marc Bell, but the way Amy churned the animated landscape was like nothing else i had seen, but could not peel my eyes away. I love to show this film to the youths when teaching animation, especially when they think they know of all the “weird” stuff and then I just blow them away with Amy’s film! So enjoy!!

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Ben Popp

For the month of May, my theme is Psychedelic Animation!!! While this type of animation can range between trippy hypnotic and zany and wild, I am choosing the later for the films to post. And first up is the brilliant and wonderful Sally Cruikshank!! While having made works for Sesame Street the Children’s Television Workshop, it is her short series staring Quasi the “duck” and Annita that really made her an independent and experimental animator. Sally’s animations have such lush and vibrant colors that morph from one scene into the other with an ease of a Sunday breeze. All the while her characters have tasted the kool aid so to speak and have left behind the pre-adolescent realm of children’s cartoons and entered the world of sex, drugs and rock n roll! Sally is a true pioneer of programs such as Liquid Television and Adult Swim which host an array of strange cartoons meant not just for the kiddies! In her film “Make Me Psychic” from 1978, Annita scores a contraption which gives her the powers to make anything happen and of course takes it to a party! Who Wouldn’t do that?! You can get a dvd of Sally Cruikshank’s works by going to funonmars.com but first enjoy Make Me Psychic !

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Ben Coonley
theme for April: Self-Taught CG

Thank you, Echo Park Film Center and Facebook for allowing me to curate Marvelous Movie Mondays for April. This was way fun! I leave you with a 3D animated “literal interpretation” of Sia’s smash hit “Chandelier” by a YouTube user named Casina777. I discovered this uncut gem on Wendy Vainity’s “Liked Videos” playlist. It’s only got about 1,000 views so far…so we’ve got a lot of work to do if we want it to eclipse the “Chandelier” video featuring supernatural tween bouncy ball Maddie Ziegler (which has over 687 million views). But I think we can do it! Let’s make this go viral, OK?

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Ben Coonley
theme for April: Self-Taught CG

The artist Jacolby Satterwhite recently Skyped with an auditorium of enrapt students in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where I teach. In his discussion, Satterwhite mentioned that his formal education was in painting. After completing graduate school, he decided to teach himself Maya (3D animation software) in order to bring to life a body of work he wanted to make based on drawings by his mother. As part of his unorthodox and highly labor-intensive production process, Satterwhite traces 2D illustrations on a Wacom tablet to create wirelike 3D forms, and composites live-action dance video into dense, dreamlike virtual worlds. He does all of the work himself (i.e. does not use assistants when he animates). The result of his enormous individual effort is some of the most personal, distinctive, and exuberant work being created in video or any other medium right now. I can’t think of another artist working today who is so good at combining 2D and 3D vocabularies, and who does such an uncanny job of merging real and imagined spaces.