The iotaWeekly January 4-10, 2010
Happy New Year!
Clip of the Week
“White Noise” (2007) by Dennis H. Miller
Watch a clip from “White Noise” by Dennis H. Miller, animator, musician, Northeastern University professor and a major force behind the annual Visual Music Marathon. “White Noise” was created with Maxon’s Cinema 4D 3D modeling with the intention “to evoke reflections on the chaos and interruptions that permeate everyday life.”
A selection of Miller’s earlier work can be found on his DVD collection “Seven Animations,” available from The iotaStore.
For more information about the artist and his work, please visit his website.
Site of the Week
Animation World Network
If by some incredible twist of fate you aren’t aware of the most comprehensive online collection of information, articles, and features about the industry and craft of the multiple facets of animation, let this week’s “Site of the Week” close that gap.
Visit the Animation World Network host to archival material on visual music and ground-breaking artists like Jules Engel and John Whitney.
Artist of the Week
Mary Ellen Bute
(1906-1983)
In the mid 1930s, Mary Ellen Bute was the first American to make abstract motion pictures, and in the early 1950s along with Norman McLaren and Hy Hirsh was among the first to explore electronic imagery in film.
Starting as a Rosa Bonheur-style painter in Texas, she came east at age 15 to study painting in Philadelphia (where she first saw Kandinsky’s work); later she studied stage lighting at Yale (in the first class to which women were admitted); made a round-the-world dance and drama tour as a teacher-lecturer; worked with Joseph Schillinger on his mathematical projections and with Leon Theremin on his electronic musical invention. Her first attempt with abstract film was in collaboration with Joseph Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs on the unfinished Synchronization in 1932. Bute’s introduction to Ted Nemeth (who became her husband in 1940) led to a partnership that produced 12 short musical “seeing-sound” abstract films, several commercial TV ventures, a live-action featurette and a full-length film version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
–Cecile Starr, in Articulated Light
Bute’s “Mood Contrasts” (1956) recently screened as part of the November 17th iotaSalon. For more information about Mary Ellen Bute, please visit her iotaCenter profile.
original post by Derek haugen