Electronic Theater

The Electronic Theater ain't what it used to be, IMHO. It used to mainly be student animation work mixed in with research result videos supporting papers. There's still some of that (research paper work got squeezed in to one clip) but it has mainly been supplanted by advertisements and movie trailers. If you click the link and look at the list of animations, you'll see what I mean: the first animation is a TV commercial for insurance, there's animation for Sears tools, movie clips for Spiderman 3, Children of Men, etc. A few gems sprinkled throughout, but they're really in the minority. The pic is from "Burning Safari". I'm not sure if this is student work or not, but it was one of the funnier episodes. YouTube has it here. Actually, they have their own web page: burningsafari.com.

Speaking of student work, the best of show "Ark" looked pretty amateurish. Why is it that SIGGRAPH always picks some lamentable animation for this award? I mean, what's with the head shaking, depression, and dementia? You see this quite often in student films: there's some character that's got some major problem. Maybe they're old, crazy, or schizophrenic. (Come to think of it, I don't recall a schizo animation; I bet that would win the award—any of you animators happen to be reading this?) In this clip the main character is literally insane, thinking he's on this ark sailing in search of an uninhabited island because the mainland is infested with disease. But it's all a dream (oh big surprise there) and he's actually in an asylum. There's plenty of "no this isn't right" kind of head shaking in this piece...

There were some decent films though. The farting squirrel was funny ("Vigorsol: The Legend"), "Portal" was also well done (how to use portals in a video game).

"The Itch" was also brilliant as the Brits say (it was made by Joel Green from the UK). Here, this little man with a cane starts tapping the leg of the main character. The main character narrates the whole thing. In the beginning he politely tells the tapping guy to stop. Then he punches him in the nose. Nothing helps. The tapping continues, and it goes on everywhere, even in some uncomfortable places (on the crapper). The narrater goes on to say that eventually he got used to this tapping as it went on for seven years. So eventually you see the two characters doing things together (riding a motorcycle for example). Then one day the tapping stops and that's it. Ok, so it's probably "you'd have to have been there" kinds of descriptions, but it was a good clip. Update: you can find the clip on YouTube here.

"Equilibrio" and "Raymond" rounded out the good ones for me, and that was about it. Sure, you also had "Lifted" and another Scrat clip, but these were pretty well polished entries from well established houses (Blue Sky Studios and Pixar, resp.). And that's about it. The remaining 90 minutes of stuff was composed of commercials and movie trailers. Like I said, ain't what it used to be.