Saw this in the mid-80’s and thought “Hey, that looks computer-animated!” The credits revealed it to be so, and I wondered what the hell they could have used…
Probably output to a plotter, which uses a pen to connect data points. The software was almost certainly homemade, and not very tricky. The hard part would be encoding all the endpoint images.
I saw this as a kid when my boho babysitter took me to The Loft theater in Tucson for a showing of short films back in '77 or so. I never forgot it because it scared the living crap out of me at the time.
NFB does not dissapoint.
Weird normally I don’t get motion sickness. But the weird way the proportions keep skewing in this forced me to turn it off after about two minutes.
I’m an animation teacher and have been using this as an exemple in classroom for some reasons.
The computer generated transitions are very similar to a grotesque tween in Adobe Flash called “shape tween”, that was very popular around 1998/99, for similarities with the MORPH effect in video.
It proves even the most tired resources may find purpose when in good use.
The best material from the NFB, though, is still in the works of the great Malcolm McLaren, in special his works on drawing audio.
THe results are eerily similar to 8-bit music, given the geometric shapes he uses.
My very favorite is the tour-de-force Synchromy.
There’s clearly another meaning to “tween” that I am not aware of.
Sorry, AnthonyC. I hope you didn’t think it was anything too dirty. : )
It’s the interpolation of frames in an animation.
You set up initial position and final position, ande the “tween” is the transition made by the program.
In traditional animation, the animators draw the keyframes and assistants make the transition. In computer animation, the transition can be assigned to the computer. Adobe Flash calls it “tween”.
“inbetween”
That’s it!
Is this a kind of rasterised vector transformation?
Looks like each line segment persists through a bunch of transformations/translations until being deleted.
EDIT: Also, is this the same person as Cyriak? I mean, even the music is spookily similar.
Perhaps I’m being disrespectful to the animators who did it my hand, the hard way, but it seems to me that a computer could be programmed to spit out the tween frames for a object that needs to appear to move in a 3d space. along complex paths.
From Malcolm McLaren, I prefer this animation:
Fun fact! The morphing effect in this movie was the inspiration for the original 1979 version of Dali Clock by Steve Capps.
Pretty sure I remember this on the International Animation Festival on PBS hosted byJean Marsh. In addition to being on Upstairs, Downstairs she was married to John Pertwee before he became the third Doctor Who.
Indeed!
I wonder if I’m the only person to ever break into a rendition of “The Cat Came Back” during a viewing of Re-animator.
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