December 2011
6 posts
12 tags
WatchI’ve been watching a bunch of Queen videos on youtube lately and I told my friend about it. Today when he came over he said, “Did you just draw Freddie Mercury?” Um, wow, yeah, I guess I did.
Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if you leave...
9 tags
WatchAnimation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if you leave more than one because sometimes what you think is the perfect message might simply be impossible for me to animate in one day. This project is only as good as the messages that you leave me, so if you feel so...
11 tags
WatchI used some new techniques with this one. The last scene has three layers, the image, a mask of the person walking and a still image of another painting. I haven’t really used a lot of post-production in the past, but it was nice to try different things and layer the images.
Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get...
8 tags
WatchA little light on the color, but sometimes I feel like I rely too heavily on color and sometimes I need to just make something with a simple line and little or no color.
Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if you leave more than one because sometimes what...
15 tags
WatchElectric Literature had me do one of the Single Sentence Animations for them. They give you a sentence from one of their stories and then let you do what you want with it. The sound is a high school show choir singing a rendition of Surfing USA, it’ll make more sense if you read the story.
7 tags
WatchClassic Pat and Vannah, on Vannah’s first day at the office. Does Pat say something greasy?
Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if you leave more than one because sometimes what you think is the perfect message might simply be impossible for me to...
November 2011
1 post
4 tags
WatchI know this isn’t so much using the chalkboard, but sometimes it’s fun to switch it up a little bit and try something different.
October 2011
5 posts
13 tags
WatchI was thinking I should edit this down but after listening to the message a few times I really couldn’t cut out any of the message. She is so sincere and so excited and thought that to edit anything would be taking away from the beauty of the message.
9 tags
WatchI believe the ethnologist and engineer Raine Borg said it best with his statement, “A key is a symbol of all forces that open and close, bind and release. It stands for liberation and incarceration.”
WatchI didn’t stick to the narrative on this one and instead just drew images of a traditional holiday meal. I forgot the pumpkin pie though.
WatchThis is the fifth of the HSI animations. I finished it a few days ago but then I wasn’t happy with the scale and the rotate at the same time, but then I went back and tweaked it a little bit and now I think it looks better. I don’t do a lot of movement in post, I try to do it all in camera, but I thought this one would work. Maybe it is like trying on a new pair of pants that you know...
WatchMy parents had a light blue VW bug for the first five or six or seven years of my life. I remember climbing in the very back, that little spot behind the back seats and under the rear window.
September 2011
3 posts
6 tags
WatchThis is the third in the series of HSI animations. I was trying to think of what a comfy coat would look like and there was this one coat I used to wear fifteen years ago that was similar to this one. It was the warmest, most comfortable winter coat I’ve ever worn.
7 tags
WatchThis is the second of the HSI animations. I used some old footage off of archive.org for the people standing in line. It was actually an old PSA produced in 1945 by the Office of War to promote how the United States peacefully elected a new leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
8 tags
WatchThis is the first in a series of twenty animations I’m doing for Housing & Services Inc. to be screened at a fundraiser in December. They will be celebrating twenty-four years of housing and management programs for lower income households and New Yorkers with special needs. Their mission statement reads, “We believe everyone needs a home.” They are being totally awesome and...
August 2011
2 posts
12 tags
WatchThis is another of the ‘hint fiction’ stories. I’ve gotten about twenty of them so I am going to try to do as many as will work. I’m not going to post a comment about not posting but I will post a blog about posting comments about not posting… sorry.coryarcangel.com/ Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, published by W. W. Norton and available...
WatchI’ve started working on the ‘Hint Fiction’ anthology animations. I decided to use Robert Swartwood’s story first because he put the anthology together, but also because I thought this one was hirarirous. I was going to draw an old senile toothfairy bumping into the walls, but then about half way through the animation I decided to give the narrator dementia instead. I think...
July 2011
12 posts
12 tags
WatchAnimation for Longshot Magazine. They called at about 3PM yesterday asking if I could get them an animation ready for 3PM today. I told him he was crazy, then I told him yes. The topic was easy for me because I have an intimate relationship with debt.
Longshot is a 48 hour magazine, where they sent out the theme this afternoon, then they get all the stories in tomorrow by 3PM, then they edit...
WatchFinally the rains came and the heat subsided. My studio isn’t air conditioned so it was really difficult. I kept having to take baths to cool down. Jeff Roth left me this message. It’s a lot longer than this, but the frame by frame rotoscoping takes a really long time, so I edited some out of it. I’m going to add a Muybridge horse to the middle of it, but this is what...
4 tags
WatchIt’s so hot outside. It’s so hot outside. It’s so hot outside.
5 tags
WatchI posted a new animation last night at 11:11, but thought I would post an older one this morning again, you know, summer reruns. This is also one of my favorites. I feel like it says so much in just a few words. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this or not yet, but ‘Prayers for Peace’ did end up winning the Next Great Filmmaker Award. It has helped so much. Thanks for everyone who took the time...
WatchThis one was a strange animation to do. Similar to the person telling the story, I don’t know a whole lot about Islam or Muslims and aside from most of the negative stuff I hear in the news. Of course I know better than to believe what I hear in the news, but it still raised a bunch of questions for me. Then I started to worry that maybe I’m not allowed to draw anything referring to...
WatchThis is an animation I did back in February, but I thought it would be nice to post it up on the blog so it gets shuffled back to the top so more people can see it. I like this one so much just because it is dripping with sensuality, even though nothing even remotely sexual was mentioned. The student, the teacher, a bar, shouldn’t be dong this, but, I have an excuse this time. I...
7 tags
WatchI wanted to make this ten times longer, with them staring and her and her showing off her tattoo, so long that it starts to get uncomfortable, but short is good too. I still haven’t got that cable, but I was able to renew the Muybridge book, so I’ll hopefully be starting those again on Tuesday. Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail...
9 tags
WatchI don’t know what is going on here, I guess it’s a lion on a park bench with a mustache. Kinda reminds me of Colonel Mustard in the Lounge with the dagger. It also reminds me of a creeper guy in the park, although he’s not that creepy. And lastly it reminds me of Cheryl’s facebook profile, rrrow. It takes a really long time to make one of these so I have a lot of time...
WatchI spent the day building a case so I can start using a projector again, which means I can start doing those Muybridge rotoscopes. Yay! Jeff Roth sent me the projector so I’m going to do a bunch of horses for him as soon as I get it to work. I still need to get the cables though, it has a funny connection, and not ha-ha funny. In answering you question, more of my friends and family call...
WatchThis one was a sort of an experiment. I’ve been story-boarding everything lately, which is something I never used to do, but today I tried to just do something spontaneous without a storyboard and without a narrative. On the one hand I don’t think it turned out all that great, but on the other hand without experimentation the whole project will get stale.
14 tags
WatchThe first time I did the animation I used all of KK’s underwear, but I realized that she would get really pissed if she went online and saw all of her underwear in this animation. So instead I used a pair of mine. They’re clean, I checked. I figured out that if I do one a day and only take two days off, I can still hit the goal of 100 of these by mid-August. I did the red, white and...
12 tags
WatchI don’t know if this is what Delphine had in mind when she left this one. I think she was most likely thinking about some diner food, and that was what I was going to do, a little girl getting hungry and angry, but then as I got into it I thought this one was better. Plus I was listening to Radiohead and they always forge rebellion. Animation Hotline is a series of relatively often...
June 2011
2 posts
11 tags
WatchJerry and Bob were the first people I asked to leave messages when I first started the project. I might have started the whole project just cause I wanted to animate their voices. Jerry gave me three poems. “Bird on a Branch” was one of the first animations I did, then this one is a poem he wrote for Summer Solstice, which oddly enough I used today, and the other poem I’m going...
WatchI’ve been trying to use these Muybridge photographs, which means I’m rotoscoping everything, and I had forgotten how time consuming rotoscoping is. Even the most simple images are taking two days to do. I have a re-found respect for anything rotoscoped.
Animation Hotline is a series of relatively often animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a...
May 2011
14 posts
WatchI went to the Museum of the Moving image in Queens the other week and I was watching all the Eadgear Muybridge photographs and I really wanted to start using them in my animations. I just got a book from the library yesterday and it was this amazing 800 page archive of thousands of his photographs. This was the first of the experiments to use his photos in the animations, so it didn’t come...
13 tags
WatchEven though this one doesn’t have anything to do with Peru, it is the same guy (or at least sounds like the same guy) that left that message, and I’m guessing that it is the same girl that he’s talking about. Hopefully he will leave the conclusion to what happens, or maybe they fell in love and ran off to Maui, because Maui is for lovers. Also, I’m trying to figure out how...
11 tags
WatchSummer’s Dance
Weee! This one was pretty fun. I used the clock that is down the street from me, and then when she talked about advice being 5¢ I was thinking about using the Peanut’s reference, with Lucy sitting in the box, but then I took it one step further, and used Theodor Reik, a notable psychoanalyst who emigrated from Germany and eventually ended up in New York in 1938. Morton...
9 tags
WatchThis was supposed to be a haiku animation, 5 seconds, 7 seconds, 5 seconds, but it ended up that it just worked out better like this. I was also going to cut the dialogue up so that it fit into 5-7-5 syllables, but it just took too much away. I spent the weekend submitting the micro-animations to the gigantic syndicates, like King Features, United Media, and Uclick. I won’t find out what...
Watchtrue story.
14 tags
WatchThe Steven Alan sample sale is only two days away so I think I was thinking about that while I was drawing this. One year I got a $450 sweater for $50. I know, great deal, even though the sweater was still $50, it was on crazy-sale. I’m not really a shopper, I rarely, if ever, buy clothes, but twice a year I like to go to this sale. It is like when mom used to take me to the...
7 tags
WatchPG-13 Alert! Although, at the same time it is a touching story about a father and daughter. I didn’t do this one a while ago because I know my mom watches these and I sorta felt the same way that the girl is feeling, but in the end I don’t think it’s really that bad, it’s life. It’s a message that someone left, I’ll animate whatever. Animation Hotline is a...
WatchI’ve been trying to do this one for a while, and knew how I wanted to put it together, and even started it a time or two, but trying to draw those princesses and the fear of Disney lawyers made me set it aside. My hat goes off to those animators at Disney, drawing those princesses to perfection every single time. Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on...
WatchThese have been really hard to get back to doing. After stopping for a while, I remember how easy they were getting to do and I want to just jump right back into that mode, but unfortunately, I’ve stopped for so long that it is like I am out of shape. It would be like if a marathon runner stopped training for a month and then tried to just jump right up and run a marathon. I’d...
3 tags
WatchHappy Mother’s Day Mom, sorry I wasn’t able to see you this year, but I’ll be home in December. (note: this wasn’t my mother who left this message) Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. When you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if you leave more than one because sometimes...
7 tags
WatchI was working on some character animation about princesses but just couldn’t get into it and decided to do this default animation instead. I think it turned out pretty good though. If anyone gets a chance, please give me a story about your Mom so I have something for Mother’s Day. Please vote for Prayers for Peace for the Next Great Filmmaker Award contest. I’m one of five...
4 tags
WatchWhoa! Finally the fingers are dirty again. It took so much energy to get started doing one of these. I was working a freelance animation job at Thornberg & Forester, then I went to the Petaluma Film Festival, then I went to see Ursi and Tom’s baby, baby Bali, out in Grass Valley. When I got back to the house I felt like I needed to clean, so I spent a few days cleaning and then...
3 tags
Next Great Filmmaker Award →
Please vote for Prayers for Peace for the Next Great Filmmaker Award contest. I’m one of five films that have been selected for the contest and if I win I’ll get $5000, which should will finance the Animation Hotline for a few months. It’s easy to vote, just follow the link, plus you could win an iPad2 just for voting. How awesome is that?! biffma.com/nextGREAT
April 2011
2 posts
WatchWords of Malcolm X
Finally! I haven’t posted in so long and it feels so good to get a new one up. I’ve been working this freelance job and it’s pretty awesome, I’m learning a lot of new stuff, but it’s sort of squashed all of my time and energy. When I get home I have a hard time doing anything other than going to bed. Anyway, the job ends tomorrow, so...
Animation Hotline at dorkbot nyc tonight! →
I’m speaking Wednesday, April 6 (tonight) at dorkbot nyc at Location One (20 Greene Street @ Canal) about the Animation Hotline. I haven’t really spoken publicly about it, so it might get a little meandering (like that first sentence), but I’m going to play a few of them and tell where the idea came from and where I would like it to go. So if you want a better insight into the...
March 2011
18 posts
WatchI haven’t posted in a while because I got a job for the next four weeks working ten hours a day and it has been really hard to get motivated to do anything when I get home other than check the emails and go to sleep. Especially because it is a new job, so I have to learn all this crazy stuff. The project that they have me working on is pretty cool though. If you are planning on leaving a...
WatchI did this entire video very differently the first time, but I wasn’t happy with how it turned out, so i took the “one world” part out of it and redid the whole thing. I like this one a lot more. Animation Hotline is a series of daily animations where I use messages left on my voicemail for content. when you get a chance please leave me a message, and honestly it’s best if...
6 tags
WatchI did a little commercial today. It’s for the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Chelsea. I haven’t ever shopped there, but Gary, used to go there and said it was a good one. I guess they were closed for a while and now they are reopening. I was a little conflicted, the whole art vs. commercial work but I’ve been listening to a bunch of NPR lately, and they don’t have...