Category Archives: animation

happy new year

To all my family & friends,
I am so insanely lucky to have you in my life. A blog post feels massively inadequate for expressing my gratitude, appreciation, and love for all of you, but to not use this space to say something seems wrong. Because of you, I think it is fair to say that I have had the most exciting, educational, and life-affirming year of my life. I hope that your 2007 was wonderful too, but more importantly, that your 2008 is even better. May the new year bring you peace, health, love, growth, and happiness.

To Marjane Satrapi and Vikram Seth,
Thank you for making art. Marjane, thank you for reminding me how powerful and beautiful animation can be. Vikram, thank you for writing a novel about San Francisco in verse. To both of you, thank you for demonstrating the importance of not compromising as an artist, for giving me a reason to look forward to tomorrow’s cross-country flight with a 2 hour layover, and for helping me view life with some reverence (the good kind). May the new year bring you success and inspiration, and may your work influence our culture.

To the weather,
Thank you so much for snowing today in Cambridge. I really needed that. May the new year keep you safe from global warming.

Love,
Rebecca

csssa pals venture into the cosmic altered mind

During summer 2004 I spent 4 weeks intensively studying & making animation at CalArts through CSSSA (ambitious/masochistic young animators, check it out). This past week I got news from two of my favorite people from that summer. First, my friend Winona found me on myspace after a couple years of lost contact. I’m very happy because in addition to being able to catch up with her, she has a fanciful website and blog full of her beautiful art. And she’s working on a new film about “witches, love, and adventures into the cosmic altered mind!” Goodie!

girls
We’ll trim their trees but not our own by Winona Regan

Then I learned that one of our instructors, Stefan Gruber, finally updated his interactive-animation experiment of a website, Fantasy Pleasure Complex. F.P.C. 10 features four new films, including Anaelle, which I remember him working on at CSSSA when it was hundreds of tiny little drawings in thick flip books. Petting Zoo (1) is also great, like a wonderful nightmare.

anaelle
Anaelle [mov] by Stefan Gruber

petting zoo
Petting Zoo (1) by Stefan Gruber

rolfcon!!1!

Tim, Christina & co are up to some craziness back in Cambridge. On April 25-27, they will attempt to open the hellmouth:

This is the ongoing record of an effort to assemble every famous internet meme or celebrity to come to Harvard in the spring of 2008 to attend a conference.

Presumably, they’re going to talk about fame online.

:::ROFLCon:::

So far the guest list includes xkcd, dinosaur comics, the oneredpaperclip guy, and others. They get goatse and I’m buying a plane ticket.

To get you psyched:

Internet People


Internet People

Animation by Dan Meth
Music by Dan Meth & Micah Frank
From MethMinute39, CC-BY-NC-SA

Suggested Reading: The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

October Update: California, Lampoon, Creative Commons…

Its been a while since my last post, but not for lack of things to say. Instead, my bandwidth for online activity has been consumed by two other endeavors. First, I gave the Harvard Lampoon website a complete redesign using Drupal. Its still very much a work in progress, and considering my attention span, it may stay as such for a while. But check it out, as we plan to update the content quite frequently (including comics illustrated by yours truly).

However, despite what my recent contributions to the Lampoon may seem, I am not back in Cambridge. My love affair with California is still going strong and I’ve decided to stay in Berkeley for the semester. Peace out, Puritans. Hello, beautiful hippie people.

And what have I been doing out here? Besides making lots of friends, art, and sourdough, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been hired as a Business Development Assistant for Creative Commons, the awesome organization I interned with over the summer. I blog for them a couple times a week, so that’s definitely been eating into the energy I have for this site. More to come on what else I’ve been working on there, but for now I should mention that we just launched our Annual Fall Fundraising Campaign, and along with it, a slick site redesign. Those of you already familiar with the great work CC is doing, consider making a donation!

Support CC - 2007

For the uninitiated, this video is a pretty good introduction to what Creative Commons is all about: