Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First of all, from the comments in one of my previous video posts (the super-headless-girl), you must check out Cutthroat‘s own amusement DIE DIE DIE video that he made messing around with After Effects (a product I’ve never used personally). Totally hilarious and as well done as some B-movies. That reminds me, he has a new sideshow DVD that you should also check out.

Anyway, here’s my latest doodle animation. I know I say this for all my animations, but I really did have fun making this. The software I used was Pencil for the animation and Magic Pic2Ani to automatically stitch the images into a video, and the music is from one of John Zorn‘s amazing Filmworks albums.

One of the things I really like when I post my animations is seeing the recommended videos that Youtube puts alongside mine, and I’ve gotten to check out all sorts of fun amateur and student projects, also along the “doodle animation” theme. For example, today I had fun viewing “Long Story Short“, “Funny Doodle Animation“, and “Artist Vs. Drawing” (and Part Two), which were presented alongside the above. Oh, and this one is not that good, but gets points for the enormous effort it must have taken to use a Magna Doodle as its canvas (and Windows Movie Maker to stitch all the photos together)!

Oh, and speaking of animation, Nefarious, Caitlin, Saira, and I braved the rainstorm which has turned the driveway into a canal and went to see Tim Burton’s 3D Alice in Wonderland. The storyline is a little too Disney for some people perhaps, but visually it really was incredible, so psychedelicly lush and full of the perverse joyful dreams that Burton always showers you with, and does a good job capturing both the original Disney version, and the 1865 book as well. I’m really glad we went, and Nefarious gave it top marks, and perhaps because of the film’s overly sentimental family vibe, she curled up in my lap fifteen minutes into the movie even though we were in a public theatre, and at the end gave me a big hug and said, “that was wonderful… thank you so much for taking me, daddy!”

And any movie that ends like that gets top marks from me as well.

There is no better experience for a father.

I was a little nervous as to how the 3D would turn out, because it wasn’t shot or animated in 3D at all, but instead was faked in post-production, essentially by people tweaking the images to separate different parts of it into “layers” which were positioned at different depths. I wasn’t sure if this would look like a weird sort of pop-up book, like the whole thing was cardboard cutouts, but it totally worked. I know a lot of people write the whole thing off as a gimmick, but I love 3D movies and it totally gets me back into the theatre. Personally I think it adds to ANY movie — it doesn’t have to be something that’s a visual spectacle. Hell, I might even line up for Gigli 3D.

Anyway, tomorrow evening Nefarious goes to visit her mother for much of March Break. I really want to go somewhere with Caitlin — probably staying inside Canadian borders though, to avoid the nightmare, albeit short-lived nightmare (which was part of the nightmare!), we had in Cuba — so I think I’m off to check out the travel deal sites to see what the options are.