Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Michel Gagné + Jon Hooper

Two of my college friends, Jon Hooper and Michel Gagne, will be crashing at my house this weekend up here in the Great White North.


Jon is a animator/storyboard artist who is one of the creators of the popular website for animation resources ' Animation Meat '.


Michel has a huge following with his independent work.
He is currently very busy finishing work on a video game that is based on his original artwork :
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.


Below is one of Michel latest works, Sensology. Michel has always loved the way shapes move, the timing with the designs. I love his work. He has always had a huge passion for the arts and as you can tell, it very much shows in his work. It will be great seeing both Michel and Jon again.






Sensology is a short animated film that visualizes in abstract form, an improvised musical session by two leaders of the avant-guarde jazz movement, Paul Plimley (piano) and Barry Guy (bass).The music was recorded on November 9th, 1995, at the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada


The film was started in August 2006 and completed in July 2010. Many months of experimentation with various animation techniques lead to a grant from Art Partners in Creative Development and the creation of the live show Fixed Fragmented Fluid which will also make its way as a film at a later date.


Sensology was handdrawn (painted) with a Wacon tablet at first, and later, a Cintiq, using Adobe Photoshop. The drawings and frames were then composited and manipulated in a 2D software called Animo. There is no vector animation at any point in the film.


The animation was done stream of consciousness, one frame at a time at a rate of 30 frames per second.


Because a film needs to be 24 FPS in order to be submitted to the Academy, I had to create a new master which took quite a bit of creativity and effort in order to preserve as much of the animation as possible. Fortunately, the 24 FPS version looks good and nobody but me will ever see the difference. The version posted here is 30 FPS, as it is YouTube prefered film rate.


A 9-second teaser of Sensology was posted on line in the Fall of 2006 and resulted in Pixar contacting me to do the abstract taste visualization for the film Ratatouille.


The completed 6-minute short film, Sensology, premiered in Los Angeles at the Laemmle's Fallbrook 7 in West Hills, CA on July 30th, 2010, where it was shown for three consecutive days.

1 comment:

TheZealot said...

I've been a fan of Gagne's work since he released his "Prelude to Eden" DVD back in the day. It's amazing the amount of international attention he's garnered with decidedly non-mainstream work. Love it. Insanely twisted.