GAME OVER is a brilliant video performance project created by the Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, using stop-motion (pixelation) technique to visually reproduce classic arcade games, pixel by pixel.

It consists of a series of collaborative animation movies which revive some of the very first video games. The pixels are replaced by a group of real human-beings that are moving from seat to seat in a theatre during about 4 to 6 hours. Each "pixel" has its own rules and decides what s/he wants to do for each picture. Once all these pictures are turned into a short animation movie, a giant human-scale video game unfolds "live".

The project started with video performance of Pong. The second video was Space Invaders on June 24th 2006, followed by Pole Position on February 11th 2007, and Tetris on November 24th 2007. The videos demanded a lot of time to be shoted, planned, and the result is great. However, two more reasons to watch them: the special effects and the soundtrack all made with voices only. Watch Tetris bellow.

Continue reading "Game Over Project" »

Posted by Bibi on January 23, 2008 09:15 PM in Animation, Fun, Fun, Games, Video ||

L'âme Seule (The lonely soul) is a touching animation created by three talented students from EESA (Ecole Européenne Supérieure d'Animation): Cédric Berthier, Jean-Sébastien Leroux et Maximilien Royo. The short-film (4min) tells the story of a lonely character and the discover of what is missing in its life. The making-of shows part of the process of this a stop-motion animation and the creation of the characters with plasticine. The music was composed by SoH-So, who also made the site.

Continue reading "L'âme Seule" »

Posted by Bibi on October 1, 2007 06:27 PM in Animation, Video ||

Möbius transformations revealed is a neat a short video by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, and it's shared under a creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. It depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity.

The video was a winner in the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The video (bellow) it's also available on the site to download in high resolution (130 MB). It was built primarily using POV-Ray and Mathematica, and the soundtrack (from Schumann's Kinderscenen, Op. 15, I) is performed by Donald Betts and distributed by Musopen.

Posted by Bibi on October 1, 2007 04:55 PM in Science, Science, Video ||

There’s Something In The Water is a blog, and part of a clever campaign to promote V Water, an English flavoured water with vitamins. The themes keep calm and don't stress are emphasize in the cheerful animated film created for it. The video reminds the Max Fleischer's animation News Sketches, made in the 1940's. (via Blogeek, merci Bertrand!)

Posted by Bibi on September 24, 2007 12:14 PM in Animation, Food, Food, Video ||

The Root of All Evil?, directed by Russell Barnes, is Channel 4 series about religion with Richard Dawkins. Aired in January 2006, it's divided in two parts: Episode 1 - The God Delusion, the same name of Dawkin's book, and Episode 2: The Virus of Faith.

The God Delusion explores the unproven beliefs that are treated as factual by many religions and the extremes to which some followers have taken them. Dawkins opens the programme by describing the "would-be murderers . . . who want to kill you and me, and themselves, because they're motivated by what they think is the highest ideal." Dawkins argues that "the process of non-thinking called faith" is not a way of understanding the world, but instead stands in fundamental opposition to modern science and the scientific method, and is divisive and dangerous.
In The Virus of Faith, Dawkins opines that the moral framework of religions is warped, and argues against the religious indoctrination of children. The title of this episode comes from The Selfish Gene, in which Dawkins discussed the concept of memes.

The blog El catoli-cinismo uploaded the two episodes at Google Video with Spanish subtitles: The God Delusion (47 min) and The Virus Of Faith (47 min). I blogged about them at Videos with Bibi, and that means one more place to watch them, or watch the first episode, The God Delusion, embed below. (via Naranjas de Hiroshima)

PS.: this post is a homage to my Chris Cynical-C Blog, who is back from yet another vacation in Las Vegas, and loves blogging about Richard Dawkins.

Posted by Bibi on September 22, 2007 10:35 PM in Culture, Video ||

Once more it's time to celebrate the International Talk Like a Pirate Day. And I will do it on my way, sharing links, since I don't have any pirate costume.

Catster and Dogster users are also participating of this special day, submitting the pictures of their furry fellows dressed as pirates, with the tag "pirate", on Dogster and Catster.

Getting to Know ... International Talk Like A Pirate Day: an interview with Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summer and John "Ol' Chumbucket" Baur, the founders of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Many Books has a nice collection of Pirate Stories of digitalized books in the public domain to read on-line or download, available in many formats.

Photos from International Talk Like A Pirate Day on Flickr. Explore all the previous images or go directly to the 2007 photoset.

Pinup Pirate illustration created by the deviantART artist agrivaine (ChrissieA).

Pirate Pinup: the picture above is a self portrait by the Flickr user Danielle.

Pirates Of The Caribbean 1 and 2 in 30 seconds and re-enacted by bunnies, presented by Starz Bunny Club Exclusive, created by Angry Alien Productions.

Polite Dissent made a great list of comic-book pirates (and pirate comic books) to celebrate the day. (via Pen-Elayne on the Web)

Post Like a Pirate is a pirate translator which also posts directly on Twitter, Myspace or send by email the translated text.

Réunion de piratesses: a collection of illustrations created by several artists to a contest created by the French illustrator Delfine, on her blog, which theme was "fille de pirate" (daughter of pirate). Take a look at the illustrations and on the Hors concours illustration of the contest if you speak French.

The Pirate Pin Up Arrr Mates, the Sexiest Pirate Pinups 'n the Seven Seas. Sexy picturs of pin-up dressed as pirates, or something like that. The picture on the top is from one of those girls, Molly Roger.

Watch the classic silent film The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks at Videos with Bibi, and the special "Talk like a Pirate Day" films Dancing Pirate and Captain Kidd.

WordPress users can Piratify Your Blogs using the Text Filter Suite Plugin. It turns yer blog into pirate-speak on Talk Like a Pirate Day! (via The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire)

The YouTube profile Offcial Wench hosts 23 videos of Cap'n Slappy and Ol' Chumbucket. The last video added, Pirates of the Burning Sea, introduces the video game, "Pirates of the Burning Sea" for the release party in Seattle, Washington on September 19th. You can watch their video Pirates And Ninjas bellow.

Pictures of The Pirate zombie pin-up model. As a good pirate she has a parrot.

And the original Talk Like A Pirate Day site. It has some cool stuff, games and many other links.

Previous posts with pirates:
Devout Dolls
Talk Like A Pirate Day
Courts métrages Annecy
Piratical and Privateering Books in English

Posted by Bibi on September 19, 2007 08:55 PM in Animation, Books, Cinema, Culture, Events, Fun, Fun, Photography, Photography, Pin-ups, Video ||

Musicotherapie is a funny schizophrenic French animation presenting the director of a mental institute neurotic with all kind of noises. To make it worse, the insane patients start to compose a music with noises and fuss in the kitchen. This very well done short-film was realised by Amaël Isnard, Manuel Javelle and Clément Picon, students of SupInfoCom Arles. The film music (and noises) was composed by Nicolas Baloche and Benjamin Fournier, FX Musik - Tambour Battant. (via NicoSite)

Posted by Bibi on September 15, 2007 06:33 PM in Animation, Fun, Fun, Video ||

If you love animations, you should be a reader of Videos with Bibi. I have been posting there since February and the video blog (vlog) contains, until now, hundreds of videos. There is a bit of everything: documentaries, silent melodramas, horror films, musicals, avant garde films, action, film-noir, ephemeral videos and much more. But I'm here to sell my fish to those who want to watch cartoons and animations. And I think the best way to convince you is showing a list of good reasons. Here it is my list:

- Alexandre Alexeieff pinscreen animations and Animated Commercials. The commercials aren't so wonderful as his pinscreen animations, but still being too beautiful to be just commercials.

- Betty Boop Cartoons: 1932, 1933, 1934 - 1935, 1936 - 1937 and 1938 - 1939.

- Cheburashka and Krokodil Gena: a classic! Cheburashka is probably the most adorable Russian character of all time. It's impossible not look at him and think "aww so cute".

- Dave and Max Fleischer animations: short animations I, short animations II, short animations III, short animations IV, The Cobweb Hotel and Gulliver's Travels.

- Felix The Cat Cartoons: Felix The Cat Cartoons I, II, III and IV.

- Ivo Caprino Short Stop Motion Animations I and II. The great Norwegian puppet animatior is most know for his adaptations of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's tales.

- Jan Svankmajer Short Films I, II, III, IV and V. Watch them fast, before all them disappear.

- Jirí Barta Animations: the Czech animator plays with stop-motion, classic animation and experimental animation. Bellow, one of his animations, Riddles for a Candy (8min).

- Jiří Trnka short stop-motion films - I, short stop-motion films - II and The Emperor's Nightingale. The Czech Trnka was a master of stop-motion animation. Must-see.

- Leonid Nosyrev Short Animations and the film Laughter and Grief by the White Sea, also by Leonid. The cartoons are all in Russian, but the dialogues aren't so necessary. The last cartoon, a tale about a tiger and a sunflower, is superb.

- L'Idée: directed by Berthold Bartosch, it's an adaptation for Frans Masereel's Die Idee. Very poetic.

- Norman McLaren short animations I, II, III. McLaren dismiss any presentations, right?

- Superman cartoons: all the superman cartoons already blogged here can be watched directly on four posts.

- The Cat Who Walked by Herself: beautiful Russian film based on Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Cat that Walked by Himself".

- The Tell-Tale Heart: a marvellous Edgar Allan Poe's based cartoon from 1953.

- Warner's Private Snafu Cartoons I and Private Snafu Cartoons II were created as educational films for the soldiers during the WWII.

- Winsor McCay animations: Animations I, Animations II and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

- Wladyslaw Starewicz: : short stop-motion films. Those animations are from the first two decades of the 20th century.

- Yuri Norstein's animations: a master of Russian animation. His wonderful animations are like poetry.

Posted by Bibi on September 12, 2007 07:00 AM in Animation, Blogging, Blogs, Video ||

The Whiskas® product line Oh so... was released with a brilliant campaign created by the agency TBWA London. The print ads for Oh so... products are beautifuly clean, composed by coloured infinite backgrounds and origamis of each variety of food: beef, lamb, pork, chicken and fish.

Maybe I'm wrong, since we don't have those new products here, but the TV ads for them don't follow the same line: there are no origamis. Check the TV commercials for Whiskas 'Oh So Fishy', Whiskas 'Oh So Meaty' and the Australian ads for them on the Australian Whiskas site. You will notice that even not using origamis like images of animals, the ads
still been cute, because that's the real strategy to sell cat products to their "owners". You know we aren't the real owners, don't you?

Posted by Bibi on September 12, 2007 04:23 AM in Animals, Cats, Media, Video ||

The animator Antoine Antin studied in the renamed French Gobelins school of image and have been working with animation since 2002. His portfolio includes many drawings, some videos and films. In the last years he has been working at BiboFilms, creating short animations, feature films, commercials and series. The site contains tons of videos to watch (in Quick Time).

Antin's short animations are wonderful. Monsieur Carré is almost a fable, telling the story of a sad lonely square in the middle of a round group. It's adorable and full of sensibility, but you need of some French to understand it. Le Papillon (Butterfly), directed by Antin and Jenny Rakotomamonjy, shows the story of a samurai. The marvellous animation won many prizes in festivals.

Posted by Bibi on September 12, 2007 03:07 AM in Animation, Video ||

To release the album Dylan: His Greatest Hits, a brilliant marketing idea was created: making a site with a Dylan message generator. You can go to the site and create a video message in up to "ten cards" to share with anyone you want. Designed by Ten4 Design, the generator uses the classic Bob Dylan video clip for the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", in which one he appears holding up cue cards for the audience, with selected words and phrases from the lyrics. The video is available to watch on the site too. (via Yahoo! Picks)

Update: there is now a Facebook app. I tested it on my Facebook profile and it works fine.

Posted by Bibi on September 11, 2007 07:28 PM in Media, Music, Tools, Video ||

Two years ago I was very impressed when I read about the amazing work of the Dutch artist Theo Jansen. In the last 16 years he has been working on those incredible kinetic sculptures, the strandbeest (Beach Creatures). They are built to move and survive on their own.

His newest creatures walk without assistance on the beaches of Holland, powered by wind, captured by gossamer wings that flap and pump air into old lemonade bottles that in turn power the creatures' many plastic spindly legs. The walking sculptures look alive as they move, each leg articulating in such a way that the body is steady and level. They even incorporate primitive logic gates that are used to reverse the machine’s direction if it senses dangerous water or loose sand where it might get stuck.

Jansen was a speaker in the last TED, showing how those creatures are created, move and can survive in the beaches for generations. The video of his talk is available on TED and you can watch it below too (8 min plus ads). BTW, there is a documentary in production about his work and its weblog.

Posted by Bibi on September 11, 2007 06:10 PM in Animals, Art, Video ||

There are directors that like to say that remakes are homages. My experience shows that those "homages" are a way to spoil the memory of a good film, in general. A few cases are exceptions. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht and Shadow of the Vampire are good examples of what a remake or a homage film should be - both for the same film, Nosferatu. Another example of homages is parodies. I think parodies are usually better than usual remakes, presumably because they don't take themselves too seriously.

I also enjoy when the director pay a "small" homage to a classic in a scene, specially when the reference is subtle. This isn't the case of The Battleship Potemkin. The Odessa Steps sequence is one of the most reverenced sequences in the film history. That wonderful scene was re-enacted several times, in almost every gender of film, and that made it so well known to us. Unfortunately, that's also the reason why it loses its effect when quoted.

All this talk of scenes, homages and parodies is but a way to introduce a hilarious film: De Düva, also known as The Dove. Don't be fooled by the title: it sounds Swedish, and "duva" really does mean "dove / pigeon" in Swedish. However, it's an American film. The film, directed by George Coe and Anthony Lover in 1968, was all made to look like a Bergman's film. It's a brilliant parody with strong references to The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Insegletand) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället).

The film is silly and fantastic. It has the tabus, which Bergman masterfully worked; it has a joke with the chess match scene from The Seventh Seal; it starts like the Wild Strawberries; the mise en scène looks like a film directed by Bergman; and it sounds Swedish. I bet the screenwriter had a lot of fun making up words.

The dialogue, seemingly in Swedish, is actually a Swedish-accented fictional language based on English, German, Latin, and Swedish, with most nouns ending in "ska".

That's probably what makes it so funny and why I highly recommend it. The quality of the video on-line isn't the best, but since the video is rare and isn't available in DVD, it is worth it. Madeline Kahn, better known for her films with Mel Brooks, made her debut in the cinema with this film. Watch it below, or at Videos with Bibi (bigger video image), or directly at Google Video. (14 min)

Posted by Bibi on July 28, 2007 08:53 PM in Cinema, Fun, Fun, Video ||

The 2007 Fantasy Filmfest, a German festival of science fiction, horror and thriller films, has a delightful trailer: Monster Party. I'm a huge fan of the monsters of horror films, even the bad films, and this excellent stop-motion animation has (almost) all the classic characters. I chose the shoot of my favourite, Murnau's Nosferatu.

The trailer was directed and edited by Frank Vogt, from MagnaMana. The animation was "realized by Juergen Kling, from Weirdoughmation, and by Susanna Jerger, helped by Christiane Rvmer and Daniela Smets." Watch the video at Weirdoughmation, with Flash at Videocommunity or bellow. No fat clips has four options to download the video and some interesting bonus, specially for animatiors.

Posted by Bibi on July 25, 2007 02:59 AM in Animation, Video ||

Sometimes I'm not sure why I blog some things. This is a good example: Terror Tour 2007, an appropriate name, is a set on Flickr with photos of Kentuck Ventriloquism Museum. That's the kind of place I won't visit in any occasion, never, ever. The set contains creepy images of ventriloquist dolls and dummies, but this is a redundant information, since those "creatures" are always scary. (via ectoplasmosis)

That's why I ask to myself why am I posting this. I'm probably trying to face my fears. Or I'm trying to scare my readers. If you don't have any problem with those dummies, read also Ventriloquist Dummies and "Dead Of Night" and watch The Great Gabbo with Erich von Stroheim, at Videos with Bibi. It isn't his best film, in my humble opinion, but it has Stroheim playing a ventriloquist going down into madness with his wooden dummy Otto.

Posted by Bibi on July 24, 2007 10:41 PM in Cinema, Photography, Photography, Video, Weird, Weird ||

There are posts that need a special moment to be written. This is one of those: that's the moment.The last video uploaded at TED is a hilarious presentation by the storyteller, writer and slam poet Rives called "Is 4 a.m. the new midnight? Enjoy the next eight delightful minutes.

Folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o'clock in the morning. This elusive hour, both very late and very early, appears often in art in literature as a way to describe the most extreme states of affairs. Rives -- aided by a nimble mind and extensive online research -- reveals 4 a.m. as an iconic moment, drawing hilarious historical connections.

PS.: the Alberto Giacometti "The Palace at 4 A.M." at the MoMA site for the curious.

Posted by Bibi on July 21, 2007 04:00 AM in Fun, Fun, Video ||

The American artist Al Hirschfeld studied painting, drawing and sculpture in Paris and London. Back to the U.S. he started working at the New York Herald Tribune, but he gained fame by illustrating the entire casts of various Broadway plays. This partnership started in 1926, when he published his first theatrical caricature.

Hirschfeld's work represents an uncommon synthesis of the emerging vogue of caricature as a form of experimental portraiture, the evolution of advertising and illustration, and the personal journey of the artist. His art has passed through the crucible of modern design of the 1920s, which was relentlessly urban and decidedly energetic, but is not the consequence of some passing fad or the limitations of his abilities. Rather it is a sustained consolidation of Hirschfeld's own eclectic experience.

In 2002 the Library of Congress organized an exhibition with his works: Al Hirschfeld, Beyond Broadway. The exhibition featured twenty-five original works donated by the artist in honor of the Library's Bicentennial.

His official site, has a great gallery with his images art woks, biography and more things. There are several drawings and lithographs of his caricatures in limited edition to take a look. I specially enjoyed those with references to the film universe and the comedy. They are fantastic.

And last, two interesting videos. The video bellow is Al Hirschfeld...The Line King, filmed by Susan Dryfoos. It shows the artist when he was 99 years old, drawing a cartoon of Paul Newman filmed. The other video is NY Big Voice Vlog #11 is a rare and wonderful visit to the artist studio of the late Al Hirschfeld [...] his widow, Louise, takes us on the tour.

Posted by Bibi on July 21, 2007 12:33 AM in Art, Illustration, Video ||

Throw me the first paper ball who never built a paper plane. Folding paper airplanes in an A4 paper sheet is one of several artistic abilities I have, which also include drawing stickmen ("bonecos de pauzinho" in Portuguese) and very easy paper craft models. The Online Paper Airplane Museum gives me the chance to improve my incredible talent, with links to more than 810 airplane designs, links and list of books. From classic models with images step by step to complex cut and fold models. (via Make)

Sometimes, even images with step by step aren't enough, and you want a video. That's easier: a simple search at Google Video will return thousands of videos. The video below, called "The best paper airplane", is one of the most popular videos and it's also available in steps with pictures here.

Posted by Bibi on July 20, 2007 07:27 PM in Craft, Toys, Video ||

While most of directors who stayed in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's were working with the Nazi State and doing propaganda films, like Triumph of the Will, there are also few examples of those that were subverting those rules with intelligence. That is the case of Hans Fischerkoesen, also known as Hans Fischerkösen.

Fischerkoesen started working with advertising films, something he seemed perfectly suited to. After all he had an irrepressible sense of humor, a good sense of rhythm, and a charming, flexible cartoon style. During the war years he realised three amazing animations: Verwitterte Melodie (Weather-beaten Melody) in 1942, Der Schneemann (The Snowman) in 1943 and Das Dumme Gänslein (The Silly Goose) in 1944.

My first contact with his wonderful animations was through Weather-beaten Melody: it was love at first sight. It's a cheerful animation with amazing graphics in a time when there were no computers to render them. It's almost a fable who tell us to enjoy the life. William Moritz wrote a brilliant essay about Fischerkoesen: Resistance And Subversion in Animated Films of The Nazi Era: The Case of Hans Fischerkoesen. Part of it it's available at Animation World Network. An example of why I'm suggesting this reading for any one interest in animation and film history:

The opening sequence of Weather-beaten Melody (1942), his first film made under the government edict, demonstrates a bravura mastery of both the multiplane and stereo-optical processes--and a meaningful use of depth, f