March Favorites

This month's installment of favorite stuff! This month at school was incredibly busy, so I didn't really have time to do very much of anything, so I apologize for the small-ish and video-heavy list of faves.

Late Night Work Club

In my exploration of non-mainstream animation, I've stumbled upon an animation collective that makes beautiful, unique, independent, non-traditional animations. And I am utterly obsessed with them. I'm trying to make my final animation project look like their works, even though I lack the skill and the technical ability to make it work. But I'm trying.

A few of my favorite members are Caleb Wood, Charles Huettner, Alex Grigg, Erin Kilkenny, and Jake Armstrong. I'm sure I would love all the others as well, but I just haven't had the chance to look very much into their work.

Some Vimeo favorites:


Mountain Ash from jake armstrong on Vimeo.


Tower Block. Loopdeloop from Alex Grigg on Vimeo.


But I'm A Nice Guy from Scott Benson on Vimeo.


Little Wild from caleb wood on Vimeo.


TOTEM from caleb wood on Vimeo.


Phantom Limb from Alex Grigg on Vimeo.


The Jump from Charles Huettner on Vimeo.


Spit Ball from Charles Huettner on Vimeo.

I am obsessed with Caleb Wood. I was actually going to see his show at the Trylon, um, today, I believe, but I forgot that I would be on Spring Break. And I am currently in Colorado, so. It's disappointing, but I hope I get a chance to see him present his work in the future!

Emily Kai Block

I found her through Vimeo's feature on female filmmakers and animators (I am obsessed with Vimeo, as you can probably tell) and I fell in love with her almost immediately. She's primarily a music video director, and she's made some of my favorite videos from some of my favorite artists: Grimes' "Oblivion," Lorde's "Yellow Flicker Beat," Grizzly Bear's "Yet Again." I've always been very interested in music, which directly translates into my fascination with music videos, and I've always wanted to make art for musicians, be it T-shirts, album covers, or music videos.

I am jealous of her life and of her friendships with some of the most popular musicians of today, and I aspire to be her one day. I've seen the "Oblivion" music video probably 50 times, so here it is:


Grimes - Oblivion from Emily Kai Bock on Vimeo.

I made my first book!

It's called The Complete Encyclopaedia of Humanity and it's very ironic yet serious and modern yet vintage. Here are some photos of it:

This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.

Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.

Here's one of my favorite entries:

snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.

I know "bewonderment" isn't actually a word but I don't care. I ended up writing a lot about humanity and its powerlessness in the face of nature. I think I was influenced by Al Jarnow, who I gave a presentation on just two weeks before I started making this book.

Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.

my best friends as anime avatars

this is the most accurate

and this one is meee

Sound Sync Animation

We've moved on to making a fifteen-second animation that accompanies a sound clip that our teacher gave us. It was technically due today, but our teacher gave us a two-week extension, since so many of us had incomplete animations (mine included). I toiled away for literally 12 hours last night, working at this dumb little animation, but to no avail.

In any case, here's what I've got so far. I started off with creating T-shape character designs so it would be easier to animate limbs later.

Apart from the narrator (the little boy), I tried sticking with a limited color palette for cohesiveness. As for the animation itself, I was inspired by battle scenes in classic anime such as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Sailor Moon. Here are screenshots of the beginning and the ending:

Anyway, it's stupid. I can honestly say that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to animation, though I am utterly obsessed with it.