Children's books author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka talks about his way to becoming an artist at TED and also the need to use your imagination.

Here is a link to the talk.

This is one cool short I got a link to by a director when we talked discussed a project we are working on. Though it is in French you will have no trouble to understand it. Thanks Simon for the link.

Here is a link to the film.

Once upon a time there was an old man who found an old lamp out in the woods. It was dirty so he took it to the river to wash it. He rubbed it to get in clean. Old lamps tend to have a genie or similar inside them, which is awaken by rubbing. So was not in this case. This lamp was not old enough for that. The old man took the lamp in one hand and his stick in the other and walked back to his tent to study the fascinating object closer. He took his magnifying glass and with big wide eyes he looked at the peculiar items inside the light bulb. He searched for some form of keyhole or card slot without finding any. He tried with a magnet to see if anything interesting happened. Then he sat with the worthless item in his hand wondering what to do. Finally he sent it flying out in the woods again, totally unaware of that light bulbs hundreds of years earlier had been the major polluters of lead in nature.

Fiction writer Karen Thompson Walker explores in her talk at TED the connection between fear and the imagination. According to her, fear is actually a form of storytelling.

Here is a link to the talk.

I'm looking forward to review these somewhere in April. This is a Kickstarter project, and it is open for funding until the end of Feburary.



Another project in the same area is this:


Yes, this is will "just" be a beautiful tarot deck. But I think this could be useful as well. Never the less i found the art dazzling. You can get a copy here. Unfortunately it will not be ready until April 2014.

I really like the style of this short. It does not have the fragile and delicate appearance that is so popular in many short animations. In my opinion, however, it is too long and predictable, but the basic idea is terrific.

Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.

Here is a link to the film.

I've been thinking a lot about ways to tell a story. Do you remember Beatrice Coron's stories cut from paper? She said she cut away the part of the paper that didn't belong in the story. She considered her images stories, though they were one single image without any text.

Just as much as these toilet paper rolls above are stories.

But the stories are in the eye of the beholder. I cannot know for sure what the maker of the story intended.

If I write a story, it is read, and understood, as I intended. I know what I transfer. But is it really so? Lately I've become aware that it is not that simple.

Some of the stories I have written on this blog has gained very flattering responses. But it is not one or two especially well written that get all the attention, but everyone is favoring their favorite story, not one liking the same as another. Stories that stroke a cord in them, that I could never participate in, or control.

Just as an image could strike a cord. Something in a particular situation that makes you want to know more; maybe even causing frustration that you can't turn another page or ask the character in the portrait.

Stories are so much more than just good handiwork. But that "so much more" is something I believe is beyond any storytellers range to control. All you can do is tell your story the best way you can, and leave the rest to the beholder.

Once upon a time I lived in a flat in a high, high apartment building. There were many people living close together and there was a lot of peeking through the mail slot and the keyholes, everybody knowing everything about everyone. One day when I saw it was a sunny day I took my walking-stick and just left, never to return. It was kind of a gamble I know, but what do I really have to loose at my age? I wanted something new, something free. I walked to the L store and bought myself a tent. I crossed the river and on the green field I put it up. This was about to be my new home I thought. I was highly mistaken. The police came and put me in a house for elderly who lost their marbles. One could indisputably say that this home is not my idea of freedom. On the other hand, the poor fellows I now share my life with, hasn’t got wits enough to peek through any keyholes.

Visual effects specialist Don Levy talks at TED about the history about the magic used in movies. He shows us a film with effects from 1902's Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès up to today that I found fascinating.

Here is a link to the talk.

I’m a great fan of transforming classic fairytales to modern movie format. So it was with great hopes I started to watch Snow White and the Huntsman. The experience was however not entirely pleasant. Overall I would say that I have not much interest in watching it again.

In the classic Grim Brother’s tale princess Snow White outmatches her stepmother (the Queen) in Beauty, and then the stepmother sends her huntsman to kill Snow White in the forest. The girl is let go by the huntsman and Snow White ends up with seven dwarfs, hiding in their home. The queen has a magic mirror and finds out that Snow White is still alive. Twice she tries to kill her, and the third time is “successful” in the way that Snow White is apparently dead and placed in a glass coffin. A prince persuades the dwarfs to have the coffin, but as he transports it, it is shaken and the apple caught in the throat comes lose and Snow White turns alive. Snow White then revenges on her stepmother by letting her dance in hot iron shoes until she dies. That is the original story in short.

Now princesses, and women in general, from the fairy-tales are good, beautiful and innocent, incapable of doing anything on their own. Or they are evil witches.

So what do they do with Snow White in this movie? The narrator begins “Once upon a time, in deep winter, a queen was admiring the falling snow, when she saw a rose blooming in defiance of the cold. Reaching for it she pricked her finger and three drops of blood fell. And because the red seemed so alive against the white she thought, "If only I had a child as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as a raven's wings, and all with the strength of that rose." “

So they want a strong Snow White. That is fine with me. But still she has kept her purity and her innocence – which becomes some strange mix. And in the end it becomes a rather lame Snow White after all. At least until she has “died” and awoken by true love’s first kiss and goes to war with an armor on like a knight. All I could think of at that time was Jeanne d'Arc (a French folk heroine and war hero turning into a saint as she claimed divine guidance and burned at the stake for heresy at 19). Quite a turning point.

One other very strange thing in this effort to make a modern Snow White is every woman's need to have a man around. Snow White got her companion in the huntsman, the Queen got hers in her brother. Neither woman could manage on their own. They are dependent on their men. It's to ridiculously old-fashioned.

Then we have the world in which the story takes place. It is not properly set up with rules. Which makes a sort of “anything could happen and it will”-line of story. You need proper rules for your world when you make one up. The Queen can use magic, sure, but that does not mean that the rest of the world is full of magic. When Snow White and the Huntsman have met the dwarfs they walk into a magic world that belongs to the elves. The elves as it turned out has helped Snow White dressed as magpies. Why? We never find out. What are they? We are not told. What happens to them? We are left in wonder.

It is also a blunder not to set limits to the Queen’s magic. It is sort of annoying when a magically skilled person in a story can do some amazing things, and suddenly can’t do other simple things, without any explanation.

Personally I find it fascinating that Snow White needs to kill (murder) the Queen. As the setup was made, I thought it would be enough for Snow White to place some of her own blood on her stepmom. Once again I find that you can get away with murder as long as the person you kill is a bad guy. Not only is this very cliché, it is also a dangerous attitude that puts every person in a rightful judgment of their peers.

This movie could have been so much more. Its full potential never got the space to breeze and catch the audience. What was left was some bleak mix of “Lord of the Rings” and “The Story if Joan of Arc”

Yet another stop motion. The story is enjoyable, but with little depth. Pay attention to the end where you get a glimpse of how it was made.

Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation shot on a Nokia N8. from Nokia HD on Vimeo.

Here is a link to the film.

Once upon a time there was an old man afraid of monsters in the closet. It didn't matter how much his daughter told him that there were no such things as monsters, he was frightened never the less. He locked the closet door properly and blocked it with a chair, but then he just felt them watching him through the keyhole.  He closed his eyes and tried to count sheep to fall asleep, but his dreams were always nightmares. And so he became unhappy and sick.

His son, who lived abroad, got a call from his sister, asking him to come, because she thought the ending for their father was near. When the son arrived, he saw the blocked closet and asked his father about it. When he found out about the monsters he said:
"I can make them go away. Do you want to make a try?" The old man nodded, excited. The son brought out his cellphone and buttoned on it until he found the sound he was looking for. Then he raised it as a wand and to a woshing sound he expelled all the monsters from the closet.

The old man smiled, pleased.
"That's my boy" he said. "Could you do the same with the goblins under my bed?"

Artist Raghava KK shows us at TED his new children's book where you can shake the book - sorry, the pad - and change the perspective of the story. As he sees it, children will not be able so feel emphasis unless they have the others' perspective of the story.

Here is a link to the talk.

The Secret World of Arrietty is an animated feature movie from Japan. It is the first movie for Hiromasa Yonebayashi as a director, but he is one of the animators behind Spirited Away.

The first thing that struck me when I saw this movie is the beautiful artwork. The backgrounds are so very well painted that I could watch this for the artwork alone.

The story is about a family of small people, about four inches high, who lives in their home built under another (human) family's residence. They live a secret life, but are dependent for their daily needs on the household under which they live. Arrietty, the daughter of the family of mother and father, is discovered by the human family's sickly grandson.

If this had been a Western story, this would be a story about a daughter objecting to her father, showing him that the humans are not bad at all. But this is not. This is a daughter respecting her parents and trusting in their experiences of life. I would rather say that this is a story about humans who try to do good, but should have left things as they were. We humans - at least in the Western world - have fascinating idea of behaving like we know what is good for everyone. Well, in this story, humans may have good intentions but are proven to mess with things they don't know anything about, causing unnecessary trouble.

This week Coursera has started a course about The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color which seems interesting.

Coursera's courses are completely free and serious with qualified teachers. I've tested a few of them myself and am, of course, enrolled to this class as well.

The courses are built up around video lectures, quizzes and exams.

This is said to be in stop motion, but as a matter of fact it is a thrilling mix of techniques. Maybe a little big long a perhaps too cute, but the beauty of this short stays the same.

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.


Here is a link to the film.

The graphic novel The Recreators I'm working with will soon have its first pages published at theRecreators.net. To promote it I've done a trailer:

Hope you like it.

Once upon a time there was a sheep that was deeply unhappy. Every time she slept she saw big monsters attacking her. She called a wizard who told her to take command of her dreams and lock the monsters away and fly away to another place in the dream.