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Surely you remember Cheers, if only from the sitcom’s syndicated reruns ceaselessly aired around the world. And if you remember Cheers, you’ll remember no part of it more vividly than its opening credits sequence, which broke from the well-established tradition of showing the faces of the series’ cast members.
Instead, writes Stephen Cole at Fonts in Use, the studio charged with creating the sequence “collected archival illustrations and photographs of bar life, culled from books, private collections, and historical societies. They hand-tinted the images and paired them with typography inspired by a turn-of-the-century aesthetic.”
As fondly as we remember their work, the art of bringing turn-of-the-century photos to life has come a long way indeed since Cheers debuted in 1982. Take, for instance, the short above: The Old New World by Russian photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov, who in just over three and a half minutes takes us right back to early-1900s America. “The photos show New York, Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore between 1900 and 1940, and were obtained from the website Shorpy,” writes Petapixel’s Michael Zhang, quoting Zakharov’s own description of the work as a “photo-based animation project” as well as a chance to “travel back in time with a little steampunk time machine.”
You can see a gallery of more of the materials that went into The Old New Worldat Behance. Just as those Cheers opening credits evoked the conviviality of old-time tavern culture, Zakharov’s film evokes what it meant — or at least, to all of us currently alive and thus without any living memory of that era, what we think it meant — to live in the headiest cities going in the headiest country going, places whose booming industry and culture held out seemingly infinite promise, even on quiet days.
Should Netflix picks Cheers as their next beloved sitcom to revive, they might consider going to Zakharov for a new title sequence. He’s certainly got all the pictures of Boston he’d need.
From the makers ofTitanic: Honor and Glory–a PC video game that lets you sail aboard a fully detailed re-creation of the RMS Titanic–comes an animation that lets you watch the sinking of the Titanic in real time. According to the web site Titanic Facts, the ship sank in two hours and 40 minutes in 1912. And that’s precisely how long things take to unfold in the video above. The animation narrates the events in a fairly straightforward way–nothing like the dramatic scenes painted in James Cameron’s 1997 fictionalized film. But it’s still worth the watch.
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This week, Blank on Blank wraps up its series “The Experimenters,” with an episode animating a conversation between Carl Sagan and Studs Terkel–two figures we’ve highlighted on our site many times before. But never have we brought them together. So here they are.
Recorded in October, 1985, as part of Terkel’s long-running Chicago radio show (find an archive of complete episodes here), the conversation touched on some the big questions you might expect: the compatibility between science and religion; the probability we’ll encounter extraterrestrials if given enough time; and more. You can hear more outtakes from their conversation here:
Other episodes in “The Experimenters” series feature:
FYI: Early last week, Colin Marshall gave you a heads up that Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, was preparing to release an open source version of the animation software used to create its films. This weekend, the software–called OpenToonz–officially became available for download. And we can now tell you where to find it. OpenToonz is available on Github, in versions made for both Window and OSX. This link will jump you straight to the download area.
If you make anything great with it, please share it with us.
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Earlier this week, we let you know about the animation software used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli coming out in an open source version free to download. While this makes available to you a piece of the technology used in the service of such masterpieces as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, it won’t, alas, get you any closer to possessing the artistic skills of the Ghibli team. To attain those, you’ve just got to engage in the same long, cyclical process of observation, replication, and refinement that you would when mastering anything.
Luckily, Miyazaki has provided plenty of examples to work with, and even, now and again in his long career, broken down his techniques for all to understand. Here we have four of his sketches, originally published in a 1980 issue of Animation Magazine (月刊アニメーション), which provide visual explanations of how to animate a character running — not an uncommon task, one imagines, for the Ghibli animators in charge of what the Creators Project calls “the constant running Miyazaki’s films are known for.” If you’ve ever tried to animate running yourself, you’ll know that what might at first seem like a simple, everyday physical action requires a great deal of subtlety to get right.
The early motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge gave the world a sense of this when he captured the mechanics of both men and horses running back in the 1880s, but to take those real-world observations and render them convincingly in animation — much less with the characteristic Ghibli smoothness — takes things to another level altogether. “Only Miyazaki man,” said animator LeSean Thomas when he tweeted these images. “Such effortless lines and silhouettes. Years of hard work & learning on display in these sketches!”
To those who wish to follow Miyazaki’s method of animating running in order to go on to making the kind of lavish cinematic stories he and his collaborators have, best of luck; to those who’d rather not put in the decades, well, you can still learn his method of making instant ramen.
By now we all know the name of Studio Ghibli, the operation responsible for such animated-feature-film-redefining productions as Grave of the Fireflies and Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. But unless we’ve paid a visit to the Ghibli Museum, seen the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, or taken part in the close scrutiny to which Ghibli fans subject the studio’s every public move, we won’t know much about their methods for crafting such visually and emotionally captivating stories. Soon, though, we’ll be able to use their tools ourselves. On March 26, you will be able to download OpenToonz, an open source version of the Toonz software used by Studio Ghibli.
“Included in the OpenToonz are many of Ghibli’s custom tools, specially designed to capture trees waving in the breeze, food that looks too delicious to eat, and the constant running Miyazaki’s films are known for,” writes The Creators Project’s Beckett , who quotes Ghibli’s Executive Imaging Director Atsushi Okui on why they started using the Italian-developed package in the first place: “We needed a software enabling us to create a certain section of the animation digitally. Our requirement was that in order to continue producing theatre-quality animation without additional stress, the software must have the ability to combine the hand-drawn animation with the digitally painted ones seamlessly.” Toonz, evidently, could pull it off.
Ghibli began using the software in 1995, during the production of Princess Mononoke, and has kept using it since. In fact, reports Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew, “the new OpenToonz is dubbed ‘Toonz Ghibli Edition’ because of all the custom-features that Toonz has developed over the years for the legendary Japanese studio.” With Miyazaki retired, at least from feature-film animation, and nobody quite sure whether 2014’s When Marnie Was There will be the studio’s last picture, as good a time as any has come for successors to the Ghibli tradition. If you’d like to throw your own hat into that enormous ring, you can download OpenToonz for free on March 26, 2016 (or, for a price, buy Toonz Premium) from the official Toonz web site.
Spend five minutes recording yourself recapping everything you know about Japanese history.
(International Studies majors and Japanese citizens, please sit this one out.)
Most of us will wind up with a pastiche that’s heavy on pop culture and relatively recent events. The average Japanese schoolchild should have no difficulty identifying the glaring holes and factual errors in our narratives.
If this idea amuses you, you’ll likely enjoy American History, above, South Park creator Trey Parker’s early animated short, a 1993 Student Academy Award silver medalist.
He also remembers the Alamo, proving one Reddit wag’s hypothesis: If there’s one thing people remember about the Alamo, it is to remember the Alamo…
And then….
Parker and another classmate, Chris Graves, his soon-to-be DP on Cannibal: The Musical, animated the results using the most rudimentary of paper cut outs. It’s easy to spot the fledgling South Park style, as well as Python animator Terry Gilliam’s influence. This may be American history, but the anonymous top hatted hordes bear an awfully close resemblance to South Park’s resident Canadians, Terrance and Phillip.
If the phonetic spellings of non-native speaker Nishimura’s pronunciation makes you uncomfortable, it’s worth noting that he not only worked as an animator on South Park, but also represented his country by playing “President” Hirohito on the extremely funny (and NSFW) “Chinpokomon” episode.
American History will be added to the Animation section of our collection,
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