Pixar - 20 Years of animation exhibition

The National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street, Edinburgh is currently hosting Pixar: 20 Years of Animation. Celebrating the most famous exponents of big-screen computer animation the exhibition, as the name suggests, has material from just over two decades of Pixar studios work, from the very early shorts such as the animated desk lamp (still seen on the studio’s logo at the start of each movie) through Toy Story, Finding Nemo, the Incredibles and Cars right up to concept art for the forthcoming Ratatouille.

As you would expect for this sort of exhibition there is a lot of art on display, from preliminary sketches and storyboards (looking at the storyboards makes it clear these animators were all big comics fans as kids and never grew out of it - good on them!) through to finished works, models and maquettes (there is a cracking series of head models from the Incredibles, each showing a different expression on Bob’s face, like exhibits from the world championship of gurning) and short videos showing of different aspects of Pixar’s work. There’s a chance to get interactive with touch-screen presentations allowing more access to behind-the-scenes looks and information while the museum is running a whole series of related events, from lectures on animation, showing Pixar movies every Sunday in the lecture hall, storytelling events inspired by Pixar movies, showcases on Scottish animation and more (the NMS site has the full details).



While all of this was highly enjoyable the standouts of this exhibition are two mini-shows. The first is shown on a wide screen. Actually, a very, very wide screen. A wiiiiiiiiiiiiiddddddddeeee screen. The sort you have to swivel your head from left to right to follow movement. It takes the form of a wall of art from the Pixar crew; as the camera pans across the gallery wall (some of the pictures static, others animated) it periodically moves into a particular picture and the viewers are treated to a new animation playing on themes from previous Pixar movies, all on this enormously long screen; it is big and it is clever.

Oh but there is even better than this. There is the Pixar Zoetrope. You remember those wonderful Victorian toys for children, where a form of lampshade has a series of slightly different characters printed on it, with slots cut - spin the shade around a lamp and the figure ‘moves’. We’re all familiar with it - it is after all the basic principle all animation, from the most basic outline drawings through Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creatures right up to the most cutting edge CGI cartoons work, a sequence of still images flickering before our eyes at 24 frames per second until our eyes and our brains interpret them as movement and static cartoons come to life. Pixar’s Zoetrope is designed to explain this basic concept in the most incredibly fun way - it makes a cartoon come to life in 3-D. Victor Navone, an animator for Pixar, has a short looped video of the Zoetrope taken from the earlier show at MoMA in NYC, although, as he says himself, it simply doesn't do justice to how it actually looks when seen with your own eyes, nose pressed up against the glass.



In a darkened room there is a large, glass case. Inside the case is a very large disc, with several rings of models of different Toy Story characters, all in slightly different poses. The disc begins to rotate slowly, speeding up; as the characters being to blur before your eyes as the frequency increases a strobe light comes on and suddenly something magical happens - the models come to life. Seriously, the illusions is utterly magical; Woody rides his horse, Buzz Lightyear balances on a ball while endless toy soldiers leap from the top of the bucket o’ soldiers, parachutes blossoming into life as they leap down. It is for all the world like having a real, solid, 3-D cartoon right there in front of you. The fact the exhibition shows you exactly how it works doesn’t detract from the magic in any way whatsoever; frankly it was worth the price of the exhibition for the Zoetrope alone. It did what a lot of the finest animation does - it makes you feel as if you are five years old again, standing with big wide eyes open in wonder. I’m still buzzing from watching it (actually watching it several times, it kept drawing me back); I saw this with my dad, the man who ensured I was raised as a Seventh Day Cartoonist, and we both emerged with smiles like Cheshire Cats to my patiently waiting mum (with them both retired now and me off this week we were having a very nice day together, food, drink and sightseeing).

The Edinburgh exhibition runs through until May 28th at the National Museum of Scotland, along with a raft of supporting events, with full details to be found on the NMS site. And when you come out one of the other exhibitions on at the National Museum currently boasts a huge, shiny rocket straight out of a Dan Dare comic (a Black Knight rocket from the aborted 50s British space programme, which is pretty much the same as Dan Dare in so many ways) and an actual NASA Gemini space capsule on loan from the Smithsonian.

Diagram prize

Each year the Bookseller run the Diagram prize, one of the more unusual literary awards; while many mainstream literary prizes can, if we're honest, be a bit up their own arse, the Diagram accepts nominations from booksellers and librarians for the daftest genuine title. This year's shortlist is out and comprises of (and bear in mind this is not me off on a mad make-up-something-silly jag, these are real books):

How Green were the Nazis? by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

For the journey

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about the gorgeous animation for Lloyds TSB bank - it doesn't make me want to switch banks, but the animation is lovely, following a couple on their train journey which is also a compressed version of their life as they meet, fall in love, marry and have a child. The style of the animation from the looks of the long-nosed characters, tall skinny buildings and raised railway line is obviously influenced by the wonderful movie Les Triplettes de Belleville, which is not a bad animation to borrow from. There are a series of them, apparently, with the second running on TV now (these sorts of adverts are often the main source of income for struggling animators); YouTube has the first one up now:



Someone left a comment on the previous post on this subject (sorry there was no name on the comment I think) asking about the lovely music which goes along with the adverts. I did a bit of Googling and found on the Boosey and Hawkes (very famous musical name) that the music is a version of Eliza's Aria by Elena Kats-Chernin, composed for the ballet Wild Swans, based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen - according to the B&H site it will be getting a new release on CD along with other work including her Piano Concerto No 2 and Mythic. There's a link on the B&H site to where you can order the disc - I may pick that one up myself. Meantime someone else has uploaded the music to YouTube as well:

Walking in the glen

I went off with Gordon and Bruce the greyhound (with his head stuck out the car window as usual) to Roslyn, just outside Edinburgh, for a good wander around the woodland walk around the glen, then up to the remains of Roslyn Castle and finally a walk past Roslyn Chapel.



Starting from the carpark down in the glen, we crossed the river and started up the steep slopes. The greenery you can see all over the hillside is not grass - it's wild garlic, masses and masses of wild garlic. The entire area is virtually carpeted with garlic plants and even early in the year like now you can smell the pungent aroma - another month or two and it will be much stronger. There's more garlic here than every Italian and French restaurant in the whole of Edinburgh combined.



After walking up the steep, wooded slopes, ducking low branches and clambering over roots and moss-covered rocks and fallen trees we came to the bass of Roslyn Castle and decided to do a circuit. This is the approach to the stone bridge linking the road to the castle.



Looking up towards the bridge above us; this doesn't really do the sense of scale justice, it is a fair old drop from up there, then on the far side yet another drop down to a low river valley where you can see walls of stone eaten out by millennia of water erosion.



On the other side of the stone bridge, looking up; I love the way some of the base stones are just huge boulders with the edges trimmed by stonemasons, then higher up the structure is of more conventional stone blocks cut to shape. Looks several stories up on the left and you will see glass and curtains - this part is still occupied and we'll come round to it in a moment





Roslyn has quite a history, including being attacked by Oliver Cromwell; old warty face stabled his horses in nearby Roslyn Chapel to show his disregard, although at least he didn't destroy the chapel. Much further back Sir William Wallace has associations with the castle and further along the forest walk than we went today is Wallace's Cave. All across Scotland there are sites named for Wallace and associated with folk tales of our hero - I grew up near Wallace's Well on the outskirts of Glasgow and used to cycle to it, it's supposedly the spot where he was betrayed to the English and finally captured to meet a gruesome end. There are far fewer such places now, but they still number in their hundreds, probably a hangover from a pre-literate time when the common folk wanted to remember their hero and so named spots for them and associated them forever after with a tree, a rock, a cave, a well... It may also derive from a deeper, older Celtic heritage and the association of the hero with the land itself.



Reached the summit now and this looks very much like a lovely old Scottish rural cottage, doesn't it? Actually this is the top of the building you saw earlier - the back of this drops down several stories as you saw two pictures back; quite deceiving from this angle though, isn't it?



Another view of the still habited remains of the castle; between the location and the fact it is surrounded by great swathes of wild garlic growing all over the hill and glen it must be the single home most protected against vampire attack in the entire kingdom.



On top of the stone bridge pictured earlier, leading up to the remains of the castle.



Just walking past Roslyn Chapel, which as you can see is still covered in scaffolding and a temporary roof as it is repaired and renovated. As Wallace is associated with the nearby castle so the Bruce is with this building, with a stone carving within said to be a death mask of the greatest of King of Scots. Of course the Chapel is also associated with the Knights Templar, several of whom pledged their service to the Bruce and fought for him at Bannockburn in 1314, where a vastly outnumbered Scottish army shattered a vast, well-armed English army and secured the independence of the nation, changing the future shape of Great Britain as they did so, although they would not have known it at the time. Far distant ancestors of my own clan, the Gordons, also fought alongside Bruce at Bannockburn and this is thought to be where they started their rise to prominence in later Scotland, being granted extensive lands by the Bruce for their services.



Another view of Roslyn Chapel, covered in its repair structure. Somewhere deep within this small structure is said to lie the Holy Grail itself; certainly one of the functions on my new camera was set off today, the special function which lights up in the display to warn you that you are close to an ancient and mythological device (it also works on Arthur's sword and other ancient relics, but I don't use the function much). Seriously though, I have no idea if the Grail is buried within the Chapel at all (Dan Brown includes Roslyn in his pile of second-hand nonsense in the Da Vinci Code) but the carvings within it are of astonishing quality and intricacy.

It is also linked with another mystery, that of early visitors to what we now call America; the Sinclair family who were instrumental in building it were also known as sailors and they hired navigators to sail from the Orkneys westwards. Some local traditions from native tribes in Canada and eastern America tell of their visit, long before that idiot Columbus took a wrong turn. On the roof of the chapel is carved the 'bounty of God's Earth' and among the fruits and vegetables is a representation of the crop of maize, then unknown here, being a New World crop. Does it mean they made their voyage and came back? No-one knows for absolutely certain, although some circumstancial evidence leans in their favour; I'd like to think they did. Next to the chapel is a fine old house which used to be an inn, which saw visits from Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Boswell and Doctor Johnson and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. However, lest we get carried away with mythology, history and nostalgia, I loved this advert one of the local farmers had placed, cashing on on the Dan Brown associations while also pretty much showing what he thinks of it all:

Eruption

The BBC site had this astonishing photograph taken by the New Horizons space probe. This is Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, a world so large its collection of moons around it are like a miniature solar system (in fact it is reckoned if the gas giant Jupiter had been a bit bigger it would have reached the threshold to ignite the nuclear fires at its core and become a star, just as the sun did billions of years ago). Io is one of the Galilean satellites, one of the four larger moons first seen through an early telescope by one of my great heroes, Galileo, when he turned his new optical device on the king of planets. I've seen Jupiter through a large telescope at the University of Glasgow's observatory myself, in enough resolution to see the coloured bands and even the mighty, centuries-long storm of the Great Red Spot; on either side of Jupiter's glowing disc I saw two bright points shining like diamonds on black velvet and realised they were the moons Galileo had seen centuries before.



Io itself is a world which looks like an old-fashioned view of Hell, a surface covered in decaying yellows from sulphur, constantly reshaped by a continual series of volcanic eruptions as the enormous gravitational power of Jupiter twists the core of the little moon keeping it geologically active when most worlds that size would long have become inert, like our own moon. As well as tremendous gravitational tides the space between the moons and Jupiter is often filled with enormous amounts of high energy radiation - a beautiful but very inhospitable place; it increases my admiration for the skills of those who designed and operate these missions that these little probes can even function in such conditions. At the top of this image, almost on the terminator line separating dark from light, is an eruption from the volcano Tvashtar; this eruption is actually shooting out some 180 miles into space.

It reminds me of the triumphant Voyager missions years ago, when one woman noticed an anomaly on shots taken of Jupiter as the little probe left the system to continue its grand tour of our solar system (still the greatest voyage of discovery in human history to date). The data from those incredibly early computers was slow to process, even before taking into account the time taken to transmit that information to Earth over the vast distances. She noticed something strange and was at first unsure what she was seeing. Only slowly did she realise that one shot had, quite by accident, caught an eruption shooting right out into space from Io; a fluke shot and a chance find by that scientist to come across the first volcanic eruption humans had ever seen on another world. I'm just disappointed that all the promises of my childhood of holidays in space by the time the 2000s came around still hasn't come to pass. When I hear idiots complaining about the money being spent on space exploration and how it could be better spent on problems on Earth (that bloody Davina McCall was the latest, showing her incredible ignorance) it infuriates me. As a percentage of budgets we spend very little on this actually; don't demand cuts to exploration, cut the money on bloody massive weapons programmes, then we would have the budget for Earth bound problems like hunger and disease and to explore new worlds and learn more.

Unscheduled bus stop



As usual I had my nose buried in a book on the bus to work this morning and it took me a few minutes to realise that the bus hadn't actually moved for a while. Look up - hmmm, doesn't look good, all I can see are the roofs of other stationery buses. Several minutes go past and nothing moves; infuriatingly I am less than a a third of the way to work. Assuming the endless roadworks that have been screwing things up so often are in play once more I give up, get off this bus and find a pile of exasperated folks doing the same from a score of other trapped buses, start walking. By the time I reached the West End of Princes Street I realised that the traffic backed up to Haymarket I was stuck in was just one part of the jam - there was a bunch of fire engines and a hydraulic lift working on a crunched double decker right at a major junction, so in four different directions everything was stuffed (and of course I felt a bit guilty for cursing road works etc when it was actually an accident).

It turned out that the bus at the back of this pic I snapped as I walked past (the one with the crane arm above it) had been hit by a truck carrying a crane which had ripped right through the roof just two or three minutes before - couple of minutes later and it could have been the bus I was on; scary how quickly and simply the everyday trip can turn into an accident. Some people were injured, but fortunately no-one was killed; the fire brigade used the hydraulic lift to rescue some injured folks rather than trying to get them down the narrow bus stairs. I walked most of the way to work, my thinking now changed from "I left earlier than usual to get a good start for this, dammit???" to "gee, it is a lovely sunny morning and I ain't been harmed in an accident, life is actually good and hey, it was a nice morning for a walk anyway, eh?".

Bugs and moons and cats and cushions

I got totally floored towards the end of last week with what I presume was a bug; started as a bit of a headache, noticed it was a bit harder focussing on the computer screen at work, popped a couple of Anadin and didn't think too much of it till I got home, couple of hours later my arms and legs feel like lead and my head feels like a mix of cotton wool and space dust, so I crawl into bed ridiculously early. Cue very sleepless night waking up either roasting and drenched in sweat (I don't mind being sweaty in bed, but for the right reasons only) or shivering so badly I shook myself awake (very weird, don't remember the last time I shivered). And all through it weird, linking dreams where I seemed to be walking through scenes of classic black and white movies (I think I was looking for Louise Brooks but she proved as elusive in my confused dream state as she was to most in real life). Interestingly even when half awake the dreams kept running. Add in some nasty dizziness and fatigue and you have yourself a nasty bug that seemed to come out of nowhere; fine in the morning, feeling iffy in the afternoon, utterly screwed by evening.

Next morning it felt like a very bad hangover, the sort you wake up from and find you have the hangover plus you realise you are still a bit drunk and crashing around, stumbling with no co-ordination and still either too hot or too cold. Found out since then that a couple of my family got hit with the same thing from nowhere, so presumably there is a nasty virus going round (that will teach me to juggle those ducks on the canal). Still a bit tired and feel the odd little resurgence of it, but not too bad now; forced myself off with a mate for a very long walk (yes, with Bruce the greyhound too, all excited as ever when he sees us putting on jackets "oh boy, oh boy, we're going for a walk!!!") to try and get the blood circulating before going off to check on Dizzy while Mel is away visiting her cousin in Norway. Naturally Dizzy took advantage of me feeling a bit drained still today to curl up next to me and use bits of me as a pillow. And talking of pillows, I got one of my photos of Dizzy looking incredibly cute and slumbering in the sun on a rug out in the garden and had it printed onto a big cushion last year for Mel's birthday. I have been waiting patiently for her to curl her little furry form up next to it and stay there long enough for me to get a picture of her with it; naturally whenever I have seen her in front of it she has moved by the time I get the camera to take a snap, but after months and months of waiting I finally got that picture and here it is, Dizzy with the Dizzy cushion!



I also managed to get out for a little while on Saturday night and saw some of the lunar eclipse - amazingly we had a pretty clear sky for once in Scotland (poor Mel didn't in Norway, clouds spoiled the show). There was a reddish-pink tinge to the moon for a while, it was a fascinating sight, must have been terrifying to people in the pre-scientific period of history (which is most of it, really) - one of my Fotolog friends, Foxglove, has a cool image on her flog here. Would have been a great night for doing a virgin sacrifice, although the only Virgin I wanted to slice up on a pagan altar as the moon was swallowed by Those Who Cannot Be Named would be sodding Richard Branson's Virgin who have been busy posturing against Murdoch's Sky this week which is great for them but a real pisser for their customers who suddenly found out they'd lost access to a bunch of their favourite major shows literally overnight (thanks for the advance warning, Branson, you numpty).

One company blames the other of course, both give contradictory reasons why talks broke down, all I know is I was with Telewest for years and subscribed to them because it was the only way to see certain import shows. Branson's "we must be involved in every industry that exists" Virgin company takes over and a few weeks later the biggest entertainment channel is gone and a lot of folks will miss the next eps of their favourite shows this week while Murdoch and Branson engage in a pissing contest instead of looking after their customers, which is a poor way to run a service. I also notice that despite losing the biggest channel Virgin hasn't offered to cut my bill to reflect this and actually boasts they are offering us more choice through a programme on demand service which gives us access to old programmes instead; that makes up for losing the latest new import shows like Galactica, Richard, thanks. Twonk.

I'm no fan of Murdoch but since his Sky has some of the programmes I want to see I need access to that and since I paid for that (and am still paying the same amount) but having it cut at no notice by Branson who has a long-standing personal and ongoing really ticks me off. And the fact he is still charging me the same amount for less proves that customer care is not on top of his agenda. Jeez, to think someone is willing to pay 100K to fly into space on one of this arsehole's rockets when they get going...