People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Today we are sharing the current Bonus Archive. If you are an annual member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Bonus Archive page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! You’ll get six new RefPacks a year. Sign up for a General or Student Membership and you’ll get access to the special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.
These downloads will expire March 1st.
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PDF E-BOOK:
As I See
by Boris Artzybasheff
Boris Artzybasheff was a well known book illustrator, but today he is best known for his magazine covers and advertisements. His illustrations appeared in Life, Fortune and Time magazine. From 1942 to 1966, he painted over 200 covers for Time, creating interpretive portraits of the most important people of the day. During this period, Artzybasheff also illustrated advertisements employing anthropomorphism to give life and personality to the products of such sponsors as Xerox, Alcoa Steamships, Parker Pens, Shell Oil and the Wickwire Steel Company. His interest in psychology led him to serve as an expert advisor on psychological warfare to the U.S. State Department.
In 1954, Boris Artzybasheff produced his most famous book, As I See where he organized his personal art and illustration work by thematic content… psychology, machines, warfare and fantasy. Like Salvador Dali, Artzybasheff employed surrealism in the Neurotica section to explore the depths of the subconscious. In the Machinalia chapter, he used his incredible draftsmanship to imbue inanimate objects with personality- anthropomorphism- a technique that Walt Disney also was well known for. In Diablerie Artzybasheff merged dysfunctional psychology with anthropomorphic machines of modern warfare to create a devastating comment on the futility of war. The last section, titled Escapades took a more lighthearted approach to fantastic subjects. Artzybasheff’s influence on Wally Wood and Basil Wolverton is undeniable, and the sinuous lines of his graphic work suggests a kinship with Al Hirschfeld.
As I See has been out of print for many years, and fetches high prices at rare book stores. Animation Resources was fortunate enough to obtain a first edition in excellent shape to digitize. This PDF e-book is optimized for display on the iPad or printing two sided with a cover on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper.
Adobe PDF File / 114 Pages / 299 MB Download
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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Cheburashka
Roman Kachanov / Soyuzmultfilm / 1971
The film we are sharing with members this time features the children’s character, Cheburashka. Created for a children’s story by Eduard Uspensky, the character is best known from a series of films produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio, directed by Roman Kachanov. Four films featuring the character were released between 1969 and 1984. Cheburashka is the second in the series, released in 1971.
The animation in this film is brilliant, and it’s well worth still framing through to study how the various personalities are put across through the walk cycles and gestures. The puppets limit the flexibility of facial expressions, but the animators more than make up for it through the way the characters move. The principles behind stop motion, hand drawn animation and CGI are all the same. We hope this film is useful to you. If you would like to see more of these films, let us know.
M4V Video File / 19:39 / 135 MB Download
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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Dental Hygiene Dilemma
From “200 Motels” / Chuck Swenson / 1971
In 1971, director Tony Palmer and Frank Zappa teamed up to create a film based on the music of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The film starred Ringo Starr and Theodore Bikel, and it utilized revolutionary editing techniques and avant-garde video effects- solarization, multiple exposures, layering, keying out colors, and speed manipulation. 200 Motels inspired many films that followed, most notably The Monkees’ Head and it is now acknowledged as being one of the primary forefathers of the rock video.
The film is a montage of impressions of a rock band’s life on the road. It consists of brief surreal skits depicting members of the band interacting with the citizens of Centerville, Ohio, “A nice place to bring your kids up”. Before the film began shooting, Zappa fired his bass player Jeff Simmons for insubordination and replaced him in the film by Ringo Starr’s chauffeur. Zappa hired animator Chuck Swenson to make a cartoon version of Simmons being led by his devil conscience to “quit the comedy band and become a rock star”. The cartoon starts out pretending to be an educational film on dental hygiene, but it quickly becomes a case study in the psychological pressures and clashes of ego commonly experienced by touring rock bands.
We present this film as an example of “bang for the buck”. The budget of 200 Motels was quite modest and the schedule was tight. Swenson, obviously inspired by the work of Terry Gilliam for Monty Python and the short animated sequences from Sesame Street, uses a variety of highly efficient techniques to build up to a chaotic ending. If you break down the animation, you’ll see how he uses key drawings with little or no inbetweening to great effect by following the rhythms in the voices and music. It isn’t the number of drawings or complexity of draftsmanship in animation that makes it good. It’s the way the drawings are used to describe the motion, and even more importantly, how they are timed.
M4V Video File / 06:18 / 305 MB Download
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Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!
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