Studio/Artist Exploration

I decided to cover a few artists and compare them. Coincidentally, they're all from Europe. Many of us are probably familiar with the work of Jacquie Lawson, (England, U.K.), who creates flash driven e-cards for all occasions. Her beautiful work can be seen for free here. Just click on any of the examples and enjoy! This is a smart way of doing business, she allows you to admire her art, but to personalize them, you're asked for a membership contribution of about $8 per year.

Besides holiday and birthday e-cards she also developed a series about her chocolate labrador(mix) "Chudleigh", which are kind of cute stories. It seems to me that she rotoscoped her dog. The clickable picture hyperlinks to "Digging for Gold" to celebrate St.Patrick's Day on March 17, with a pint on us! (Slainte, by the way, is Gaelic for "Cheers!").

My favorite e-cards are Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, from Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky and a Happy Birthday card featuring musical teddy bears on music by Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". After watching these flash clips, I also understand better now how powerful and important audio is to animation. I always underestimated that, really! Jacquie Lawson's style comes across as classic, the flash movies are very well done, but they do not carry great glitzy pizzazz. However, it feels it will take me a great deal of time to reach even that level of skill.

When searching the web for exiting sites, I came across the website www.goober.nu and flash site of Goober Productions by Olaf Bergner from Sweden. I was intrigued by the country code .nu (pronounced "new-way"), which is the abbreviation for the Island of Niue in the South Pacific, near New Zealand. More about ".nu" here. There are such other popular country codes as .cc for Cocos and Keeling Islands (west of Australia), .to for Kingdom of Tonga, .tv for Tuvalu, both are also in Polynesia.

I was struck by the Art of Bergner, who strangely enough seems to have stopped his activities near the end of 2005. The Gooberstory (Claudia, what is it about Peanuts and the InterNut, err I mean the InterNet ;) is a fantasy presentation about peanuts, fish, and trees. Beautiful music, dazzling scenery (created with Photoshop) and sweet animations. And again the music score is so important to add power to the presentation.

A funny flash clip is Sumo, the bambooman. Watch the spooky African mask while the movie loads. Nostalgic is the Story of Nim, a hobbit of sorts who lives near the North Pole. Beautiful scenery and music will also be found there. Bergner has some nice links to other animators and flash sites, such as Surya Cosmetics (Brazil/Portugal), The Little Ninja, for those whole like animated "Kill Bill" stuff.

A third flash site, stephaneguillot.com (France) was presented by Ronnie Nadal in IMT230 last semester. I found it very impressive and wanted to also share it with you.

This artist uses fancy sound effects and music tunes to accompany his creations. I especially like the score and the quick animations made for a French ISP called NOOS, but there's a lot more to discover.

Happy Surfing!