But consider the bear, man - consider the bear. Poor Ursa Major… trapped in a time loop, endlessly climbing the stairs and getting nowhere. His entire existence a Sysiphian joke, presented for our entertainment.
What does he imagine awaits at the top of the stairs? What goal motivates his endless quest? A maiden? Christopher Robin and a bowl of hunny? A rug, guaranteed to tie the whole room together?
I dunno, man, I dunno… I need to get out and score some more half & half, 'cause I feel the serious need for another White Russian coming on.
How exactly it was “painstakingly” modeled, if it was a 3D model, and not a high-poly or a textured one to boot?
I think in the stop motion aspect. It wasn’t computer generated animation.
More stairs and
stares
poor tired white bear
New incarnation of the “replacement” animation technique from George Pal’s Puppetoons.
It wasn’t “painstakingly modeled” it was painstakingly (modeled, printed out and filmed over four weeks). It was the entire process that was “painstaking,” although the phrase I would have used is “utterly, gloriously pointless,” considering there’s not even a clue that it exists in the real world. As it is, they missed a step, in that they then really should have scanned it and turned it back into computer geometry that they rendered as an animation.
All that effort seems wasted when it just looks like CGI. I’d like to see it in person as a zoetrope.
With the increasing sharpness of CGI, and ability to replicate hand-drawn / stop-motion textures and feels, I wonder if we’ll see the rise (maybe its already here…) of a #noCGI tag parallel to the #nofilter…
Immediately reminded me of this old chestnut: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx
Although I suspect this was a more deliberate exercise in redundancy.
Oh, Bother
Silly bear. He’ll never get all the way up to Bowser without 70 stars.
I especially enjoyed staring at this while listening to the Alexandra Streliski piece linked yesterday.
Needs to remake the animation doing a 360 spin around the bear. Make that seamless too so we get a spinning bear climbing an endless set of stairs.
In a similar vein, a few years ago Toys For Bob (the people behind starcontrol) did a 3D-printed stop-motion animation as part of the opening sequence for Skylanders. 
This is more like a bear climbing up the down escalator. Poor drunken bear.
This is an unexpected solution to the “That’s crappy CGI” complaint: making reality look more like crappy CGI.
Disney’s California Adventure theme park has a pretty awesome 3D zoetrope with all the main characters from the Toy Story movies. It’s hard to appreciate in video form though.
Not sure why they bothered with the 3d printing when they modeled it for animation in the design process. You do have to feel kinda sorry for the bear. I had the same feeling when I set up this walking cycle animation. It just screamed for music. There’s something about walking through the darkness, never getting anywhere, but still walking. http://youtu.be/RAy5MgVIn8g
