A great collection for Communication Designers

Chuck Jones: The Dot and the Line

Based on the book by Norton Juster from 1963, this 1965 short film won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Created by classic animation artist Chuck Jones, the story was inspired by a the Victorian novella “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” in which the protagonist visits a one-dimensional universe called Lineland, where women are dots and men are lines.

SAUL Bass  – Why Man Creates

Why Man Creates from Paracelso Zeppelin on Vimeo.

Why Man Creates from Paracelso Zeppelin on Vimeo.

Why Man Creates (part one, part two), the animated film by Bass and his wife/collaborator Elaine which won the 1968 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. An eight-part meditation on the nature of creativity, the film mixes animation and live action, using Bass’ advanced repertoire of optical techniques, to look at the issues surrounding how and why humans have, throughout the history of civilization, kept on making things. It begins with early hunters felling a beast and making a cave painting out of it. From that cave rises a tower built out of every major phase of human civilization: the wheel near the bottom, the pyramids somewhat higher up, the literal darkness of the Dark Ages as the camera rises higher still, ultimately capped by a heap of planes, trains, and automobiles. One wonders how Bass might, in an update, have stacked his representation of the internet atop of all this, but the sequence’s datedness costs it none of its virtuosity.

 Terry Gilliam – Explains the Secrets of Monty Python animations.

Terry Gilliam explains the secrets of the Monty Python animations. – Old school before Adobe. Gilliam, the sole American member of seminal British comedy group Monty Python, Terry Gilliam made a name for himself creating odd animated bits for the UK series Do Not Adjust Your Set. Gilliam preferred cut-out animation, which involved pushing bits of paper in front of a camera instead of photographing pre-drawn cels. The process allows for more spontaneity than traditional animation along with being comparatively cheaper and easier to do.

 Weather report animations used in the 1950s
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