The Film Work of Norman McLaren

The Film Work of Norman McLaren
Author: Terence Dobson
Publisher: JOHN LIBBEY PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

For half a century from the 1930s to the 1980s, the celebrated Canadian animator Norman McLaren made films at a prodigious rate - his output averaged about one film every year. The innovatory nature of his films won him worldwide acclaim, honours and prizes (including an Oscar"!. Curiously, there has been a dearth of serious literature that focuses on the film work of Norman McLaren. One reason for this has been the difficulty in identifying constants through McLaren's work. The very scope of McLaren's innovations together with the varied purposes of his films meant that McLaren's films appeared incongruent. There is, for example, the shocking violence of Neighbours and the gentle whimsy of Hen Hop; the didacticism of Canon or Rythmetic and the scintillating abstract energy of Begone Dull Care; the functionalism of Book Bargain and the sublime beauty of Pas de deux. By looking at the nature and span of McLaren's innovations, and by putting his work in the context of his own ambitions and of his era, Terence Dobson approaches the puzzles that are set by the film work of Norman McLaren. On the way, the encounter with McLaren's movies - which features a detailed analysis of some of his chief works - provides a pivotal view of one of the major film-makers of the twentieth century

Writing the Short Film

Writing the Short Film
Author: Patricia Cooper
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 113604857X

The short film is a unique narrative art form that, while lending itself to experimentation, requires tremendous discipline in following traditional filmic considerations. This book takes the student and novice screenwriter through the storytelling process- from conception, to visualization, to dramatization, to characterization and dialogue- and teaches them how to create a dramatic narrative that is at once short (approximately half an hour in length) and complete. Exercises, new examples of short screenplays, and an examination of various genres round out the discussion. NEW TO THE THIRD EDITION: new screenplays, a chapter on rewriting your script, and a chapter on the future of short films

Dessins de Norman McLaren

Dessins de Norman McLaren
Author: Norman McLaren
Publisher: Les Livres Toundra ; [Don Mills, Ont. : distribué par Collins]
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1975
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The Story of British Animation

The Story of British Animation
Author: Jez Stewart
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1911239724

A Sight & Sound Book of the Year Jez Stewart charts the course of this extraordinarily fertile area of British film from early experiments with stop-motion and the flourishing of animated drawings during WWI. He reveals how the rockier interwar period set the shape of the industry in enduring ways, and how creatives like Len Lye and Lotte Reiniger brought art to advertising and sponsored films, building a foundation for such distinctive talents as Bob Godfrey, Alison De Vere and George Dunning to unleash their independent visions in the age of commercial TV. Stewart highlights the integral role of women in the industry, the crucial boost delivered by the arrival of Channel 4, the emergence of online animation and much more. The book features 'close-up' analyses of key animators such as Lancelot Speed and Richard Williams, as well as more thematic takes on art, politics and music. It builds a framework for better appreciating Britain's landmark contributions to the art of animation, including Halas and Batchelor's Animal Farm (1954), Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968) and the creations of Aardman Animations.

Experimental and Expanded Animation

Experimental and Expanded Animation
Author: Vicky Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319738739

This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices. This volume addresses fundamental questions of form, such as drawing and the line, but also broadens out to encompass topics such as the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causation, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, and process as narrative. This book will appeal to cross and inter-disciplinary researchers, animation practitioners, scholars, teachers and students from Fine Art, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

A Reader in Animation Studies

A Reader in Animation Studies
Author: Jayne Pilling
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1998-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0861969006

Cartoons—both from the classic Hollywood era and from more contemporary feature films and television series—offer a rich field for detailed investigation and analysis. Contributors draw on theories and methodology from film, television, and media studies, art history and criticism, and feminism and gender studies.

The History of Motion Graphics

The History of Motion Graphics
Author: Michael Betancourt
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1479450235

Expand your knowledge of the aesthetics, forms and meaning of motion graphics as well as the long-running connections between the American avant-garde film, video art and TV commercials. In 1960 avant-garde animator and inventor John Whitney started a company called "Motion Graphics, Inc." to make animated titles and logos. His new company crystalized a relationship between avant-garde film and commercial broadcast design/film titles. Careful discussion of historical works puts them in context, allowing their reappearance in contemporary motion graphics clear. This book includes a thorough examination of the history of title design from the earliest films through the present, including Walter Anthony, Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Pablo Ferro, Wayne Fitzgerald, Nina Saxon, and Kyle Cooper. This book also covers early abstract film (the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna, Leopold Survage, Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye and Norman McLaren) and puts the work of visual music pioneers Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Thomas Wilfred in context. The History of Motion Graphics is the essential textbook and general reference for understanding how and where the field of motion graphic design came from and where it's going.

The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies
Author: Douglas Rosenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2016
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199981604

The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies offers a full overview of the histories, practices, and critical and theoretical foundations of the rapidly changing landscape of screendance. Drawing on their practices, technologies, theories, and philosophies, scholars from the fields of dance, performance, visual art, cinema and media arts articulate the practice of screendance as an interdisciplinary, hybrid form that has yet to be correctly sited as an academic field worthy of critical investigation. Each chapter discusses and reframe current issues, as a means of promoting and enriching dialogue within the wider community of dance and the moving image. Topics addressed embrace politics of the body; agency, race, and gender in screendance; the relationship of choreography to image; constructs of space and time; representation and effacement; production and curatorial practice; and other areas of intersecting disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies features newly-commissioned and original scholarship that will be essential reading for all those interested in the intersection of dance and the moving image, including film and video-makers, dance artists, screendance artists, academics and writers, producers, composers, as well as the wider interested public. It will become an invaluable resource for researchers and professionals in the field.

Mary Ellen Bute

Mary Ellen Bute
Author: Kit Smyth Basquin
Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0861969715

Mary Ellen Bute: Pioneer Animator captures the personal and professional life of Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983) one of the first American filmmakers to create abstract animated films in 1934, also one of the first Americans to use the electronic image of the oscilloscope in films starting in 1949, and the first filmmaker to interpret James Joyce's literature for the screen, Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a live-action film for which she won a Cannes Film Festival Prize in 1965. Bute had an eye for talent and selected many creative people who would go on to be famous. She hired Norman McLaren to hand paint on film for the animation of her Spook Sport, 1939, before he left to head the animation department of the Canadian Film Board. She cast the now famous character actor Christopher Walken at age fourteen as the star of her short live-action film, The Boy Who Saw Through, 1958. Also, Bute enlisted Elliot Kaplan to compose the film score of her Finnegans Wake before he moved on to compose music for TV's Fantasy Island and Ironside. This biography drawn from interviews with Bute's family, friends, and colleagues, presents the personal and professional life of the filmmaker and her behind-the-scenes process of making animated and live action films.

An Auteurist History of Film

An Auteurist History of Film
Author: Charles Silver
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016
Genre: Auteur theory (Motion pictures)
ISBN: 9780870709777

From 2009 to 2014, The Museum of Modern Art presented a weekly series of film screenings titled An Auteurist History of Film. Inspired by Andrew Sarris's seminal book The American Cinema, which elaborated on the "auteur theory" first developed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, the series presented works from MoMA's expansive film collection, with a particular focus on the role of the director as artistic author. Film curator Charles Silver wrote a blog post to accompany each screening, describing the place of each film in the oeuvre of is director as well as the work's significance in cinema history. Following the end of the series' five-year run, the Museum collected these texts for publication, and is now bringing together Silver's insightful and often humorous readings in a single volume. This publication is an invaluable guide to key directors and movies as well as an excellent introduction to auteur theory. -- from back cover.