I absolutely loved this new animated short by Felix Colgrave, “Double King”:
It’s well worth the nine minutes to watch. Just stunning animation (and sound). It’s crafted with a level of precision, but also whimsy, that mesh in surprising and fascinating ways.
BONUS LINK: Felix Colgrave has an entire YouTube channel of prior work for ADDITIONAL HOURS OF ENJOYMENT
Today’s guest episode of Wondermark is by my comics colleague Christopher Baldwin!
Christopher is the talented artist of a number of comics, notably Spacetrawler (a sci-fi adventure strip) and Little Dee (an all-ages humor strip).
Thanks, Christopher! Check out his stuff!!
The Swedish short film “Ten Meter Tower” is really simple: what do people look like when they’re facing a high dive for the first time?
The film played at Sundance this year in the Documentary Shorts category, and the NY Times is currently featuring it in its rotating collection of “op-ed videos”. The filmmakers describe the project this way:
Our objective in making this film was something of a psychology experiment: We sought to capture people facing a difficult situation, to make a portrait of humans in doubt. We’ve all seen actors playing doubt in fiction films, but we have few true images of the feeling in documentaries. To make them, we decided to put people in a situation powerful enough not to need any classic narrative framework. A high dive seemed like the perfect scenario…
It’s fun without being entirely frivolous, and dramatic without being distressing. There’s no politics in it and there’s nothing complicated about it. I think it’s well worth 16 minutes of your time!
I really enjoyed this short film, The Reinvention of Normal, about the artist Dominic Wilcox.
Wilcox makes strange objects, such as a soccer ball that you can put fruit inside so it becomes a smoothie as you kick it around.
He makes a lot of things like that, and he describes in the film how making a lot of things quickly has helped him tap into his creative instincts in a clarifying way.
As a person who derives an immense amount of joy from puttering around in my own workshop, making a lot of stupid things that occasionally end up not always being stupid, I am quite drawn to this line of thinking.
“I enjoy the playfulness,” he says, over footage of a car he designed covered completely in stained glass. “and just doing things — even though they’re completely ridiculous sometimes. So what? Let’s do the ridiculous. And by doing the ridiculous, something else might come of it!”
Here’s another video, as well, of him giving a talk at a conference… The first seven minutes are the same video above, and then there’s another bit with him explaining and demonstrating some of the strangers things he’s made, like the stained-glass car, or a set of GPS-enabled bespoke-leather shoes.
“It’s always difficult to describe what I am,” he says in the talk. “I work between art, design, invention, technology, craft… Really, I’m just a person who’s trying to be as creative as I possibly can be.”