MUTO: A Wall-Painted Animation
May 21, 2008 YouTubes Share/Save
Why is this piece so amazing? It’s not just the “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” style intersection of imagination and reality. Don’t get me wrong; that combination gets me every time. It’s what fascinates me so much about computing – the way that such abstract patterns become part of what we call real life, without any kind of physical grounding.
But it’s more than that. It’s the sense that the work, like so many great things, comes from a big question. Not a philosophical one, not some kind of discourse or analysis, not a commentary. Just a big “Holy shit! What if I….?!”
Talent + wide-eyed willingness to explore. Does it ever fail to produce good work?
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:10 am
This quote from Roger Ebert on the new Indiana Jones movie says it better than I could:
“Spielberg at heart will always be that kid who sneaked onto the back lot at Universal and talked himself into a job. He’s the kind of man who remains in many ways a boy. He likes neat stuff. He thinks it would be fun to have Indiana and friends plunge over three waterfalls, not one. He knows that we know what back projection is, and he uses it blatantly (Indy arriving in frame as if he had jumped there, while the background rolls past a little out of focus). He knows back projection feels differently that perfect digital backgrounds — it feels more like a movie. He likes boldly-faked editing sequences: We see the heroes in medium shot at the edge of a waterfall, we see a long shot of their boat falling to what would obviously be instant oblivion below, and then he shows the heroes surfacing together and near the shore (no rapids!) and spitting out a little water. The movie isn’t a throwback to the Saturday serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s what they would have been if they could have been.”
There’s nothing like a talented kid who likes neat stuff.