Prepared insects

21 Jul 2005 » permalink

If you’re looking for something absolutely extraordinary to watch — look no futher. Just grab Starewicz shorts collection on a DVD. You’ll be amazed, I tell you.

Starewicz was a russian animator of polish origins (1882 – 1965) exploring the magics of the motion tape in the silent era. He was a pioneer of many animation techniques which are in-use even now. He had an absolutely wild imagination — the one that stays on the dark side. Most of his movies feature prepared insects — dried beetles, flies, spiders… he injected real animals with wire skeletons and animated them in front of the camera.

Despite this rather deadly cast his movies are vivid – sometimes funny, sometimes naive. It’s a world of weird fairy tales for adults. Highly refreshing.

Starewicz 1Starewicz 2

Starewicz 3Starewicz 4

You can find his works also on the eDonkey network.

In other news — I'm working hard on the timeline interface for DIVA. It’s all about a GTK widget implemented from scratch with a custom display subsystem to handle all the drags, adjustments, zooms, hints, etc. The last time I was doing this kind of low-level graphics stuff was in the MS QuickBasic days — programming games (we all did that, didn’t we?). At that time it was a cool achievement to do sprite animation without flickering (it wasn’t that easy to access the video pages, you know…)

Diva timeline