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Animation innovator David OReilly describes his new game project as a "consciousness simulator/open-universe exploration game."

The post David OReilly’s Game Everything Will Be Released on PS4 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Filmmaker David OReilly reports on his experiences at the one-of-a-kind Georama animation festival in Tokyo.

The post David OReilly on Tokyo’s Georama, A Different Kind of Animation Festival appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The mind-expanding Georama returns to Tokyo next month for a new edition with some major American guests.

The post Bruce Bickford, David OReilly, and Don Hertzfeldt to Headline Toyko’s Georama Festival appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The innovative 29-year-old filmmaker will be the subject of a MoMA film event.

Computer graphics have evolved more than you think.

The Sundance Film Festival has announced the film and installation selections for their upcoming edition, which will take place in Park City, Utah between January 22 and February 1, 2015. Among the sixty short film selections are 13 animated projects, including new works by indie favorites David OReilly and Don Hertzfeldt, animation-to-fine-art-world crossover Takeshi Murata, and Réka Bucsi’s Oscar-shortlisted Symphony No. 42. Also worth listing are the installations in Sundance’s New Frontier programming. The New Frontier space is dedicated to exploring “the crossroads of film, art, and media technology as a hotbed for cinematic innovation.” The thirteen projects selected for the exhibition include numerous pieces that incorporate animation.

Tonight in downtown Los Angeles: Beyond 3D: The Animated World of David OReilly, a retrospective of work by the Irish filmmaker.

David OReilly, a blazing star of the contemporary animation scene, released his first game titled Mountain on July 1st.

McLaren’s Workshop is a free iPad app from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) that provides access to over fifty films by experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren and allows users to create their own films with animation techniques used by McLaren. I was impressed when I previewed the app last fall at the NFB’s Montreal headquarters, and now that I’ve had a chance to play with it more extensively, I can confirm that it’s a no-brainer download for anyone with even the slightest interest in animation.

The fifty-one shorts on the app include all of McLaren’s best known works such as Begone Dull Care, Blinkity Blank, Le Merle, Neighbours and Pas de Deux as well as plenty of rarities dating back to the early-1930s. The colors are vibrant and lush thanks to film restorations that were done in 2006 for the DVD set Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition. In addition to the films, there are eleven documentaries in which McLaren and his colleagues discuss process, an illustrated biography, and an extensive essay by McLaren documentarian Donald McWilliams.

The app points forward to a new way of learning animation history in the 21st century, in which understanding a filmmaker’s work isn’t done through passive activities like reading a book or watching a film, but rather by making films of one’s own. McLaren’s Workshop contains three separate programs that allow the user to create animation using digital tools that approximate the techniques of cut-out animation, scratch-on-film, and synthetic sound, the latter of which will appeal particularly to those with a music background.

The cut-out workshop is free, the other two workshops are each a $2.99 in-app purchase. While pinching-and-zooming on an iPad doesn’t create the same visceral, sensory experience of manipulating paper cut-outs by hand or scratching onto film stock, the workshops are elegantly designed for simplicity and intuitive usage. They provide an excellent entry point to McLaren’s animation techniques for students and novices, although as you’ll see below, the tools are robust enough for professional filmmakers to have fun, too.

A couple other features worth pointing out: firstly, the app allows users to store McLaren’s shorts for up to 48 hours of off-line viewing, and additionally, during the first two months of the app’s release, users can upload their own films from the program directly to Vimeo accounts.

Start your weekend right and download a copy of McLaren’s Workshop on the Apple Store. And to get a little inspiration for what can be done with McLaren’s Workshop, check out these films made by top indie animators using the new app:

I Am Alone and My Head is On Fire by David OReilly (scratch-on-film)

Day Sleeper by Don Hertzfeldt (scratch-on-film)

Bon App by Regina Pessoa (cut-out)

Five Fire Fish by Koji Yamamura (scratch-on-film)

Barcode Transmission by Renaud Hallée (synthetic sound)

Cyclop(e) by Patrick Doyon (scratch-on-film)

(Disclosure: The NFB is a sponsor of Cartoon Brew.)

Rhizome.org published a great interview with David OReilly about his recent Adventure Time episode “A Glitch is a Glitch” and the challenges of making convincing styistic glitch:

“In general, doing stylistic glitch is easy compared to doing good character animation. Mixing the two gets very tricky though. One of the hardest things was corrupting the scene near the end of the entire broadcast so that the earlier clip is superimposed over Finn & Jake to give them an idea (i.e., using glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard that idea, but making it work properly took a lot of grind…It was all generated from ‘real’ glitches—but since everything is run through compositing software and sort of controlled you could also say it was all fake. The glitches needed to begin locally—inside objects—then spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The local stuff was done by generating a ton of sprites that had random pixels move outwardly to create the colorful flourishes we associate with video compression. These had a decent amount of control—a blob of glitchy stuff could move around a scene, for example. Once the scenes were fully animated and rendered the global full-frame glitches were done. There was some jpeg corruption added on top of the battle scene at the end.”

In what may be a first for a major award-winning animated short, filmmaker David OReilly has released all of the character rigs from his short The External World. OReilly follows in the footsteps of filmmakers like Blender Open Projects and Nina Paley who have also released animation production assets for the educational benefit of the community. Says OReilly:

You can use and modify them in any way you like as long as it’s for a non-commercial purpose. Showreels, short films, indie games, all that stuff is cool – just give credit. If it’s web based – include a link to my site. I’m releasing these without a how-to (or support of any kind) but it should be very straight forward. They are extremely low-weight and easy to animate with, all are compatible with versions of Maya after 2010.

An exciting array of contemporary animation will screen tonight at the Synchronicity Space in Los Angeles as part of Floating World Animation Fest’s DMTV2. Watch the trailer above. Animators represented include Jacob Ciocci, James Connolly, Amy Lockhart, Duncan Malashock, James Mercer, Mirai Mizue, David O’Reilly, Yoshi Sodeoka, King Terry and Shinya Tsukamoto. It’s described as:

A collection of experimental and psychedelic animation from around the world. The emphasis is on non-commercial, personal work. We seek pure vision. Some of the films push visual noise and glitch to the limit while others reach a peak of ambient degaussed bliss.

Synchronicity Space is located at 713 N. Heliotrope, Los Angeles, CA. Screening starts at 9pm and admission is FREE!

Pictoplasma will stage the fourth US edition of their character design conference this weekend in New York City. The two-day conference (Nov. 2-3) will include artist talks, animation screenings and a roundtable discussion focused around the use of character design in contemporary culture. The full conference schedule can be found on the Pictoplasma website.

Speakers will include the standard mix of artists from the animation, illustration and design communities. The artists who will speak at this edition are Buff Monster, Gemma Correll, Jason Freeny, Mark Gmehling, Anna Hrachovec, David OReilly, Ryan Quincy, Julia Pott, Andy Rementer, Adrian Sonni, Olimpia Zagnoli, Steven Guarnaccia, Taylor McKimens and Mark Newgarden.

Online registration is $190 HERE. The conference will take place at the Parsons’s Tishman Auditorium (66 W. 12th Street, NY, NY).

The inevitable has happened: CG provocateur David OReilly has partnered with Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, whose mocap news recaps are at least as truthful as anything you’ll see in the mainstream media. The resulting short, Children’s Medium Used for Dissemination of Truth, is exactly what you’d expect of a collaboration between these two non sequitur aficionados in that it’s totally unexpected.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: David OReilly, Next Media Animation, NMA, Taiwan

Independent animator David O’Reilly (The External World) is hosting two animation programs next Saturday (7/2) at the Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles. Both are extremely intriguing and well worthwhile for our more adventurous readers.

1) Found Animation @2pm

From the deepest, most corrupt corners of David O’Reilly’s hard drive comes a collection of lost animated wonders, forgotten by time and YouTube, destined to break hearts, minds and sense of common decency. David says: “There will be work I found from now-defunct private torrent sites, old video tapes, friends & places I cant remember, gorgeous 3-D tentacle porn, footage of bizarre video games, and work by surrealist animation genius Charley Bowers (who was forgotten in his own lifetime and died in poverty). If you love Pixar, you will hate this!”

In other words, he’ll be running stuff like this:

2) The Agency @11:59pm (aka Midnight Show)

The world premiere of The Agency, which O’Reilly co-wrote with Vernon Chatman (creator of Wonder Showzen). He’s claiming it’s the world record for fastest created feature length animation – from conception to completion in one week.

It’s official: one of the most twisted new animated works we’ve seen in a very long time is also a new record holder. The film very, very loosely follows several office-bound characters as they plot their upwardly-climbing corporate destinies, continuously insult each other with non-stop vicious flair, and morph their reality with that of a duo of cute panda bear-looking creatures for whom the office dimension is just a dream…? This baffling slice of cough syrup-like comedy dementia was created entirely with “Xtranormal”, an online service that lets users make their own CGI mini-movies through a limited library of characters, sets and music, and with awkward text-to-speech synthesis — serving to produce a sublimely blobby experience that’ll sautée your cerebellum with love!

He made it with Xtranormal– an online service that lets users make their own CGI mini-movies through a limited library of characters, sets and music, and with awkward text-to-speech synthesis –and basically has them streaming dialogue of insanity, profanity, and other craziness.

This excerpt NSFW:

These programs are part of CineFamily’s 2nd annual Everything Is Festival, a festival of odds, ends and found footage. For more information, visit the Cinefamily website.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: David OReilly

The LA Film Forum presents Triumph of the Wild: New Experimental Animation curated by Eric Leiser. The screening, which presents recent experimental films from the US and Europe, takes place on Sunday, May 22, at 7:30 pm at the Egyptian Theater (6712 Hollywood Blvd.) Three of the filmmakers—Eric Leiser, Alice Cohen, and Gina Marie Napolitan—will appear in person.

Tickets are $10/general admission, $6/students and seniors, and free for Filmforum members. To purchase advance tickets, visit the LA Film Forum website.

Here’s the screening line-up:

These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us by Michael Robinson
(2010, USA, 13 mins)

The External World by David OReilly
(2011, Ireland, 17 mins)

Triumph of the Wild by Martha Colburn
(2009, USA, 10 mins)

Battery Cage by Studio Smack
(2009, Netherlands, 4 mins)

Mirror Moves for Private Eyes by Alice Cohen
(2010, USA, 13 mins)

Mastering Bambi by Persijn Broerson and Margit Luckas
(2011, USA/Netherlands, 13 mins)

Remisequenz by Xenia Lesniewski
(2010, Germany, 3 mins)

City of Progress by Justine Bennet
(2008, Netherlands, 11 mins)

Forest by Eric Leiser
(2008, USA, 3 mins)

Demons and Cathedrals by Gina Marie Napolitan
(2010, USA, 5 mins)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Alice Cohen, David OReilly, Eric Leiser, Gina Marie Napolitan, Justine Bennet, LA Film Forum, Margit Luckas, Martha Colburn, Michael Robinson, Persijn Broerson, Studio Smack, Xenia Lesniewski

If you find yourself anywhere near Chicago this Saturday, make sure to check out the inaugural edition of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, a one-day event featuring “abstract animation and unconventional character animation.”

The event, organized by Lilli Carré and Alexander Stewart, takes place at DePaul’s CDM Theater (247 S. State Street, basement level; Jackson stop, Red Line). There are two film programs—”classic shorts” which features experimental animation work from the 70’s-90’s, and “new shorts,” which is kind of self-explanatory. The trailer above gives a taste of what they’re showing. The third program will be a screening of animated films by animation hotshot David OReilly who will also be attending the festival. Admission is a super-bargain: $5 for each program, or $12 for the entire day. More details at EyeworksFestival.com.