Michael VanPutten

A friend shared a really neat video with me today: an intro to the 7th annual helpmann awards 2007, where Raymond Crowe, a talented shadow puppeteer, did a fun presentation over Louis Armstrong’s “What a wonderful world”.

Another ‘winter break re-discovery’ from my archived bookmarks: back in 2003 I came across Nina Paley’s “Sitayana Sings the Blues“. Nina did a wonderful job of animating gorgeous characters from the Indian epic of Ramayana to songs sung by Annette Harshaw. It does not look like Nina ever finished publishing this animated feature (or it […]

In November of 2003 NewsForge published an article titled “First Internet Digital Film Debuts“. The article explained how Robin Rowe was working with the Library of Congress and the George Eastman House museum to restore early films including the 1903 George Méliès film, Tom Thumb et Dum Dum. The restorations were done using CinePaint (a […]

A new Transformers Trailer was released this week. This trailer features the first samples we have seen thus far of the CG robots. There has been concern expressed online that the new movie will not play well because Michael Bay, director of the film, decided not to utilize the established style/characters of the classic 1980(s) […]

Thomasz Baginski wrote and directed a short animated piece titled ‘Fallen Art‘. The piece was created by Platige Image, a Polish visual effects company.
Fallen Art is a story about generals, soldiers, and a very special project (watch the video — I will not ruin the surprise for you!). Baginski uses sound to weave this tale. […]

On May 18th, 2006 a team of six people released a beautiful animation under a creative commons license titled ‘Elephants Dream‘. By May 29th, over 500,000 visitors had downloaded the animation. Over the months that followed remixes of the animation began to appear online. A ‘making of’ video was released by the creators of ‘Elephants […]

I received an invitation from a friend to see Matthew Barney’s new film “Drawing Restraing 9″. Barney has become well known in the art and culture community for his Cremaster series. Based on what I have read online it appears that most of Barney’s work revolves around building complex and expensive things and filming visually […]