Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized animated film that also introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, was first publicly presented on November 18, 1928, at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City. Unlike all other iterations of Disneyland around the world,…
Most people think of each classic commercial American animation studios as having their own distinctive sonic style. Warner Brothers had the postmodern, action-driven sound developed by Carl Stalling. MGM had the classically trained Scott Bradley pumping out modern, occasionally atonal…
The practice of dubbing over European productions, as with all dubbed foreign language productions, risks a potential disconnect between the spoken language and opposing cultural references within the diegetic world, ranging from instances of untranslated writing to a specific international…
As a part of my PhD research, I recently did an interview with two young independent Slovak animators, Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová, who work together as a creative duo called Ove Pictures. When I studied their webpage http://ovepictures.com/ as…
Music informs images just as images inform music. This sounds simple enough, it is a manifestation of an essential (yet often overlooked) aspect of perception, that of “sense-giving” and of “sense-receiving” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, of course, Edmund Husserl, did brilliant…
Part two Part one of this two-part post on animated sound focused on the development of animated sound as a compositional tool. The second part of this blog post will outline a second type of animated sound, as developed by…
My first experience with a Jordan Belson film forever shaped my own direction as an artist. From the cool, dark theater arose the rumble of ambient sound coupled with intense mixtures of color. Such depth, such motion. His ‘story’ was…
Part One After observing the terrified expression on the face of yet another film student as I attempted to teach to them how to use a location sound mixer, it struck me that for animation and film students accustomed to…
Excerpt from: Optical Expression: Oskar Fischinger, William Moritz and Visual Music An Edited Guide to the Key Concerns By Cindy Keefer Oskar Fischinger is credited as the father of Visual Music, but what does this really mean? What were his…
Musicals and animated films, stylized and fantastical forms both, have displayed a mutual affinity since sound technology permitted their combination. Several live-action musicals have famously included animated sequences, most notably MGM’s Anchors Aweigh (1944), where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry…
