Zack Snyder

Snyder’s one of my favorite directors, as I find his unique film style very interesting. Due to his use of conventions such as slow motion scenes during combat, vivid colours, and highly stylised visuals. He also successfully makes use of green screen regularly in his movies, allowing him to easily place his characters into any setting that he wants. This method of filming really interests me, because it allows the writer to easily transport the character into worlds that otherwise would be impossible to create in the real world.

The way he creates his film worlds is clearly unrealistic, but they are made with such detail that still makes them believable. This is the thing I love about films. They can take you to places that do not exist; they’re an escape from the world you’re in now, and this is what Snyder’s films do.

He even mocks his films with how over the top they are when he says: “It’s kind of fun that the most realistic movie I probably will make is a movie called “Superman.” Which shows how crazy my other movies are.” (Roth Cornet, 2011)

Reference List:

Roth Cornet (2011) Available at: http://screenrant.com/zack-snyder-superman-interview-rothc-106951/ (Accessed at 23^rd April 2012)

Peter Lord and David Sproxton

http://thegeekshow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/pirate-captain.jpg

Peter and David are the founders of the British animation studio “Aardman Animations”.

They produced animated classics including, but not limited to, “Wallace & Gromit”, “Creature Comforts”, “Morph”, “Chicken Run”, and their newest addition “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists”. With their unique style of models, high quality production and entertaining stories, they have become a household name with many of their series.

Peter Lord has said that “The concept of Englishness is very important to Aardman” (David Jenkins, 2012), making the films in keeping with the English culture, such as our silly sensibility. Speaking about the main character in their newest film “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists”, Peter Lord goes on to mention how “he approaches it all with a rather charming optimism -- a totally unfounded optimism, which is delightful to watch, I think. I think it's very British. We kind of like characters at a disadvantage. It makes us laugh.” (David Jenkins, 2012)

Reference List:
David Jenkins (2012) Peter Lord. Available at: http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/interviews/peter-lord-18391 (Accessed 23rd April 2012)

Run Wrake

Run Wrake is a very talented and award winning animator and illustrator. Probably most famous for his animation “Rabbit” which won a length of awards across the world as well as being BAFTA nominated.

Run states that the Rabbit is “a very simple morality tale about greed - the dangers of greed and exploring nature” (Pingmag, 2006). And it is pretty similar to a child’s fairy tale, however, it deals with more gruesome themes and so it is clearly aimed at a more mature audience.

The visual style that he uses is also very unique, as in Rabbit, he got the idea when he rediscovered some 1950’s educational stickers for kids that he had picked up from a junk store years ago (Pingmag, 2006).

His themes and style in all his animation work tends to be slightly dark and surreal, such as his character “meat head” who Run says represents how “Underneath of the skin we all are meat. Whatever the color of the skin is, we all the same. One heart, two lungs and veins” (Pingmag, 2006).

Reference list:
Pingmag (2006) Run Wrake: Involuntary Darkness. Available at: http://pingmag.jp/2006/09/19/run-wrake-involuntary-darkness/ (Accessed 23^rd April 2012)

Alan Becker

Alan Becker is a young artist, who is most famous for the animated "Animation v.s Animator" series, which he has created using the program Adobe Flash. It’s famous throughout the internet, to the point where other users have ripped his video of the animation and uploaded it under their account just so they can milk views from it, with the videos reaching millions of views on each of the videos on sites like YouTube.

It was seeing this seemingly simply (yet very detailed) stickman animation, when I was younger, that really inspired me to move into animation. After seeing this animation online, I looked into other ones that other people had made, and then began experimenting with making my own.

Since then, I have progressed and improved my skills, moving from stickman animations to more detailed typical 2D animations, but still sticking with Adobe Flash. So in a way, regardless of all the animations and cartoons that I watched as a kid, it was this animation that made me believe I could do something like this, and made me pursue this path.

He is not just an animator though; he is an extremely talented and versatile artist, with a portfolio boasting many different high quality pieces of work.

Terry Border

Terry Border runs “Bent Objects”, and has a very unique style. He gives everyday objects anthropomorphic characteristics and positions them in witty and humorous ways. I have yet to see anything else like it, and he does them very well. He uses wires to build these objects into things that resemble real creatures/people, and varies between giving them small props to make it look like they’re in their own little world:

http://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bent-objects-main.jpg

Or situates them within a real life setting, giving them a life-like appearance similar to Toy Story:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfkZ8V9COYFlHyEXhPhxvxIdxBj5mLuSsq1fpqBK5pLFpS93xVPfPgIjBEBp1ziQW4oxuml_Qto5erUHnuxmQXCAPzTqv1OdJKfhk2Eyi4a0i9YTT_EiYI75JSWeohdWjEGodBqmY34-o/s1600/bachelor's+nightstand.jpg

He has even created an animation using a similar style to his photographs made before.

It is this sort of simple creativeness that inspires me in my work, because if this is what can be done with some small simple things, then imagine what can be done with a lot more.

Lotte Reiniger

 

Lotte is seen as the mother of silhouette animation, as she was the person who took the style and developed it and brought it to the cinema and to the masses.

This method of animation requires a lot of intricate work and a ton of patience, and I admire her for this. The idea itself is simple, you cut out your shapes, and shine a light from underneath them to create a silhouette and then move it gradually, taking pictures each time and then assembling them together to give the illusion of movement. However it is far from that easy.

The level of quality of her work is outstanding, and perhaps the most intriguing thing is that it can be done by anybody, as no specialist tools are required at all in the process of making these types of animation.

In fact, she is one of the most important people in any aspect of animation, as she created the first length animated film to the cinema, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed”. Her work is often overlooked, and I think it is a shame that she is not as well-known as she should be.

Martha Rosler

Martha is an American artist, famous for her “cut and paste” photomontages.

Her works consist of compositions made from bits of multiple images placed together in a contrast, to highlight some issue.
She used to work with paint, but she says that she moved onto her photomontages after looking at newspapers and magazines and how “on the one page you could have a picture of some terrible atrocity of war and on the next page there would be an ad for a sofa, and I got the idea to put them together” (NYTimes, 2008).

Her works highlight how we try to block out the bad things with advertisements and other trivial rubbish.

http://hapstancedepart.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/martha-rosler-bringing-the-war-home-ladiators-2004.jpg?w=614

Such as this image, which brings together an idealised living room that looks like it could be bought straight out of a catalogue with scenes from war, in an attempt to bring these horrific happenings into the home where people lock themselves in and try to forget that we ever do anything like this. But ignoring it and forgetting it wont solve the problem

Reference list:
NYTimes, (2008) Cut and Past: Martha Rosler. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/05/arts/rosler-audioss/index.html (Accessed 23rd April 2012)