I remember the early 1990s. You could go to Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation of Sick & Twisted, and various Computer Animation programs toured from groups like SIGGRAPH, and Liquid Television on MTV. The amount of animation, and especially computer animation, was growing fast. One film you could count on seeing at those programs was a wonderful Oscar-nominated short called "Technological Threat" that mixed computer animation and traditional animation. 

I remember watching this more than once, including recording Liquid Television and watching it again and again. It's delightful, influences from Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and just fun and funny stuff. I love the way the five minutes is so perfectly paced and the comedy is so much of the funniness!!!

You may recall my review of Streetkids United II - The Girls from Rio by Maria Clara (​http://klausatgunpoint.weebly.com/klaus-at-gunpoint---the-blog/contradictive-sunday-mornings) That was an impressively powerful look at young women from Brazil who excel at soccer (football, futbol, kicking sportsball, etc) and I got much the same feeling while viewing Brave Girls by Carmit Shlomi. The film follows a group of young women from Isreal who are competing in the Junior Woman's Euroleague Football Championships. The competition is tough, and it would seem that they are dedicated to their goal of proving that they deserve to be there, but that's not what struck me so hard about this -

This was a film about the lives of young, dedicated women. 

They have lives, they have school, issues like dealing with ADHD, and they expose their personalities in interviews that don't seem invasive, which is something that often bothers me about interview-based docs. This feels more like young women talking to us, to individuals, not an audience. The way it's shot is also both impressive and engaging, and the editing draws it all together. It doesn't feel like we're being sold on the team; we're being sold on the individuals, and to me, the young woman Noam is the star, as we get her view so beautifully, and she is so expressive. 

All in all, this is a powerful and smart doc, and it makes me want to watch a LOT more Israeli docs!

Currently, Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, and a review show called Life of the Party​, are playing in the Bay Area, and I was fortunate enough to interview him back in 2014! Here, he talks about The Wild Party and how an author of a musical interacts with the source material! 

Ego is the basis for so many wonderful comedies. We call it hubris, and it is almost universally hilarious... at least to those of us who have poor reality controlls. 

Lalutte, from Singapore's LASALLE College of the Arts, is phenomenally smart in how it plays with that idea, and the bigger point: that within a community, ego can only lead to the great fall. Here, we've got two trapese artists: one starts out as an egotistical show-off, and the young his young partner in the act. After a rather poorly executed first pass, things get messy, leading to some great conflict on th ebars, and eventually, a Warner Bros.'s cartoon-esque finish. 

It's strength is in the character design. These show touches of Pixar and classic computer animation especially. The setting is simple, which allows th echaracter design work to show especially well. 

Produced and animated by second year animation students Hong Gah Yain and Jasmine Lim Sy Shing, it shows all the markers of early work done by animators who will go on to do great things!

Every time I find myself with free time, such as if I'm trapped somewhere with my laptop but no WiFi (aka Millennial's Hell), I start to make movies. I have a lot of old footage on my laptop, and with Microsoft Paint, you can do very simple images that you can then manipulate a bit. I tend to create 70 or 80 individual images and then bring them into my editor and play around. 

Today, I'm showing off Smith Diamonds, a film I made maybe 6 months ago. It's a simple film, but for me, it's pretty complex in the areas it goes into. 

You see, I love the works of Harry Smith. I've talked about him before, and the images he would create directly onto film. the simple geometry he employed certainly plays in my head. I can't draw or paint, but using Paint, I can make simple, and very precise, geometric patterns. I started the series of images thinking I wanted to show the growth of these diamond shapes, eventually ending up at a square with the rotating colour patterns. 

Of course, once I had the simple images, I wanted to play with them. 

The original portion where I simply imported the Paint images is roughly 12 or so seconds, and the rest is repetition with various colours removed allowing for transparency to show a background. I have done this video with various films as the behind, and I think I hit the right one here with a decaying piece of film of an amusement park. Layering it behind the dimondas with all the black lines removed, and then adding colors that get removed, led to an effect that seemed to make the edges of the diamond shapes seem less distinct. That was something I was going for. 

So, here's an abstract film I made. There really is no meaning, per se, but it's something that I think expresses what I want to be able to do with video. 

It's Star Wars. What else do you need to know?

Vanessa asks Ophira about her favorite guest ever on Ask Me Another and she gives a wonderful, and completely expected, answer!