Thursday, August 29, 2013

Great Animation "will" about the wish from one father in the 9/11 accident

Great Animation "will" about the wish from one father in the 9/11 accident
The video "WILL" is a Great Animation about the wish from one father in the 9/11 accident,mirroring a tender story about the love between the fater and his daughter.

There are rays of sunshine emanating from California that are beaming over the online video world.
Streams of new animated shorts have been quickly arriving to virtual inboxes heralding the arrival of the year end CalArts projects. I've been watching many of these films, and want to highlight what to me is easily the standout of this year's crop. Unlike many of its brethren, this film is not full of sunshine however, it is deeply sad. It is a tearjerker—a deeply moving piece that is as devastating as it is beautiful. Using exquisite art direction and brilliant sound to heighten an already emotional subject, will is a tender, indeed heartbreaking, treatise on love, longing and loss.

It is a parent/child story, bookended by voicemail messages. In the chaos between the first World Trade Center crash and the second, a father wishes to connect with his daughter. Looking back over clippings of the disaster, a scrapbook of rememberence, the daughter wishes to turn back time. It is not strictly speaking a factual tale, yet, is there any doubt that among the thousands that lost their lives and for their families left behind that the story dramatized is "true"?

The film revolves around a central metaphor, the girl playing with a yo-yo given to her by dad. The falling of yo-yo mirrors her father falling out the window of the tower. A yo-yo however, can be pulled back up. If only her father's circumstances were the same. Into her imagination she retreats: the rising yo yo peeling back time, his morning routine in reverse until she can be safe in his arms again.

Reverse time is not a new trick,the video might be most famous to use it in an extended way, but to pair the technique it with circumstances so dramatic is bold and effective. Overall Song's juggling of time is exceptional. He uses a stellar match-on-action cut to transition between the present day and the flashback to the father from that morning. Color is also employed effectively to differentiate between the two timelines: burnt orange tones for the father, reflective of his fiery conclusion, cool greens and browns for the daughter.
Great Animation

Animated in a trendy minimalism, this decision helps the film greatly as well. In the ten year's since 9/11 there has been much written about the lack of great art born from the disaster. I feel it is difficult for narrative artists to touch on both the specificity of the event and it's overwhelming magnitude. But the less specificity in representation, the more empathy a drawing is able to engender. A story about a single girl, the film nonetheless feels more universal than that.

In a final note, the sound, designed by Paul Fraser and music performed by Julian Kleiss, is exceptional. Spare, like, the animation, they complement the film well. The most obvious and effective element however is the otherworldly, high pitched sounds that come in during the film's second half. A simple audio trick of playing sound in reverse, they mirror the action of the film perfectly, as well as well as the inhuman power it would take to move the world backward. An impossible wish, but one wish the girl can't be blamed for envisioning all the same.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Prix de la Reine Elizabeth pour les sciences de l'ingénieur

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Prix de la Reine Elizabeth pour les sciences de l'ingénieur
Five engineers who created the Internet and the World Wide Web have together won the inaugural £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for their innovations,
which have revolutionised the way we communicate and enabled the development of whole new industries. Today a third of the world's population use the Internet and it is estimated to carry around 330 Petabytes of data per year, enough to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over.

Engineers Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen were announced as the winners by Lord Browne of Madingley, in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal, at the Royal Academy of Engineering on 18 March 2013. The winners will come to London in June for the formal presentation of the prize by Her Majesty, The Queen.


The art of engineering lies in the efficient combination of technologies to deliver the most meaningful results for society. The international team of judges for the Prize considered that these five outstanding engineers epitomise this approach in the way that they designed and built the Internet and the Web.


Lord Broers, Chair of the Judging Panel for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, says: "Engineering is, by its very nature, a collaborative activity and the emergence of the Internet and the Web involved many teams of people all over the world. However, these five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the Internet and Web as a coherent system and brought them into public use.

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Prix de la Reine Elizabeth pour les sciences de l'ingénieur

"We had originally planned to award this prize to a team of up to three people. It became apparent during our deliberations that we would have to exceed this limit for such an exceptional group of engineers."


The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation has overall responsibility for the prize and the board of trustees is chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley. The day-to-day running of the prize is managed by the Queen Elizabeth Prize team at The Royal Academy of Engineering.