Watch video: Download MP4, YouTube, subtitles at Dotsub.

Boing Boing Video proudly debuts a new piece from the "great god almighty could it get any more awesome?" N.A.S.A. music project, this one from two personal music heroes: Tom Waits, and Kool Keith. The track is called Spacious Thoughts, and you can pick it up on the project's debut album, Spirit of Apollo (Amazon link.)

NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).

The music video embedded above was created by Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill, and I asked collaborators Mark Lomond and Johanne Ste-Marie a few questions about how all that crazy magic came together. Below, and after the jump, are their replies.

BB: Tell me a little about Fluorescent Hill? Who are you guys, where are you, what do you do?

Fluorescent Hill: Well, we're a very small collective of artists, basically myself (mark lomond) and johanne ste-marie. we started working together while in school here in Montreal, along with some other friends. So we've been together for almost eight years. We do design, illustration, animation, live action, basically anything artistic, but with a primary focus on film.

BB: How did the NASA video project come together, and what were your first thoughts when you learned what track and what musical artists would be involved?

Fluorescent Hill: We got an email one day describing the entire NASA project, the musicians involved the visual artists involved and it just blew our minds. As soon as I saw the list of musicians, deep in my brain I already was hoping to work on the Kool Keith and Tom Waits collab. They're two artists that I go way back to my early tape buying days with. So when we finally got on the phone, and they said it was this track "Spacious Thoughts" a small peice of my brain exploded. Then when they sent the track I was absolutely just ecstatic.

We've Got Some Work To Do Now by Travis Pitts

Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again.

Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)

'we've got some work to do now' alt. version

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Noam sez, "There are so many things to love in this world, so just to point a few of them I've animated the xkcd comic xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel. Singing by the amazing Olga Nunes."

I Love xkcd (Thanks, Noam!)

Animator Nick Cross created this fantastic funny animal cartoon featuring geopolitical bullying, social unrest, worker revolt, and some tasty yellow cakes. I'd kill for a yellow cake right about now.

According to the youngsters, the Toys"R"Us Christmas catalogue featured "outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive", according to a statement from Ro.

The group's teacher explained to the local Smålandsposten newspaper that filing the complaint was the culmination of more than two years of "long-term work" by the students on gender roles.

Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication.

"Small girls in princess stuff...and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It's obvious that you get affected by this," he told the newspaper.

"When I see that only girls play with certain things then, as a guy, I don't want it."

Animator/illustrator Giles Timms, whose short films we've featured on Boing Boing Video before, has just released a new video with a song by Ceri Frost.

The short version? "Enchanted by a pixie, a child called Yorick enters a magical kingdom, but when Yorick returns he finds his world ravaged by time." The video is set in a hand-drawn pen-and-ink world inspired by Edward Gorey, animated in a "paper cut-out" style.

Dead All Along (YouTube).

Dookie-Poo is not the smartest of all the Poos in Pooville but he tries real hard and he has good intentions. Dookie never quits because he's just too dumb to do so. He tries way beyond the point of all reasoning. Dookie doesn't think much about anything. In fact he almost never thinks at all.

Here's the conclusion to 500 Pound Planet, the cartoon I made with Josh Dolgin. I really hope you've enjoyed it, and would love to hear some reviews/criticism/impressions.

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Two

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Three

Professional animators script, record, and "lock" audio before animating a frame. Josh Dolgin and I are not professional animators.

We wanted 500 Pound Planet to have a loose, improvisatory feel. So we decided on a general plot outline, a handful of settings and scenes and a cast of characters. For each character, we animated a number of facial expressions, hand gestures and lip-positions, so that we could figure out what they're saying at any point and drop it in.

This "worked" in a sense, but also made for a lot of crazy, since everything was infinitely malleable. We could always record more, tweak a line, second-guess a plot point- whatever. The process became so maddening that we bickered constantly over every detail and bit by bit, that's what the film became about- our spiteful, imploding "marriage", which we kept alive for the sake of the children- our deformed, clay puppet kids. Enjoy!

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Two

The best part of making 500 Pound Planet was that it turned life into a big scavenger hunt. Our mashup style let us animate using clay, stop motion puppets, photo montage- anything! In this chapter, we actually manipulated a piece of raw chicken.

As a result, wherever we went we were always collecting material. We drove from Montreal to New Orleans and sifted through dozens of thrift stores along the way, two grown men searching for Barbie clothes. Josh voraciously photographed Montreal for our backgrounds (much of what he captured is now gone). Even conversations were useful- we'd secretly record our friends talking and then beg them to let us "sample" the best parts in our cartoon.

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude (link)

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One (link)

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Adam Shecter makes whimsical, clever, stupid, pretty little blips of cartoons. He's been doing it for a while and has slowly amassed a fantastic Saturday Morning Cartoon broadcast from another planet. Have a look!

Adam's website (link)

Germans! Adam Shecter is exhibiting right now at the Bielefelder Kunstverein (link). UPDATE: New Yorkers! Adam is also exhibiting right now at Eleven Rivington (link).

Yesterday I posted the prelude to 500 Pound Planet, the cartoon I spent a few years making with my buddy Josh Dolgin when I was younger. Here's chapter one, wherein we meet our "heroes", Spencer and Blue, voiced by me and Josh.

Josh and I were your typical college film geeks at the time; we had just been exposed to Italian Neo-Realist cinema, Film Noir, Cassavetes- all that stuff. But we were also comic book/animation geeks.

We were curious about how much of these styles and techniques could be applied to animation. We came up with rigid "naturalist" rules for 500 Pound Planet: all music had to come from actual sources in the scene. Characters would talk like normal people talk- stepping over each other, mumbling... The camera would be a fly on the wall, intruding as little as possible. We played with Orson Welles' "deep focus" technique. In our minds we were visionaries, auteurs, pioneers! In reality, we were pretentious nerds.

Previously: 500 Pound Planet: prelude (link).

When we got out of college, my buddy Josh Dolgin and I set out to make an eight-minute cartoon. We figured it would take us three months. The plan was to use the cartoon to get a TV show and become rich and famous. None of this came to pass.

Instead, we spent three years making a 45-minute weirdo sci-fi hiphop buddy film. We nearly lost our minds and our friendship in the process. The resulting cartoon (we were told) was too strange for TV and too long for film festivals. The whole thing amounted to nothing: a fiasco, a waste of time. Had we spent three years playing with Lego and poking each other in the gums, it would have been just as productive. We ended up selling a 25-minute cut of the thing to the CBC, who never aired it, and then we got as far away from each other as possible. Josh went on to international success as the Hiphop-Klezmer weirdo Socalled, and I became a public radio host.

The other week I watched 500 Pound Planet for the first time in five years. I was afraid it would make me cringe, but it didn't. I like our cartoon! It's messy and ambling, but I think it's got soul and does a pretty good job of capturing what our lives in Montreal were like at the time. Instead of feeling guilty about wasting three years making it, I now feel guilty at having abandoned it. Parents should treat their kids better than that, even if they're deformed. Especially if they're deformed.

So enough preamble. Here is part one of our bastard cartoon, 500 Pound Planet. I'll post the rest, a chapter a day over the week. Hope you like it, feedback welcome!

The most creative guy I knew in high school was this kid Ba Blackstock. He drew hilarious cartoons, directed theatrical adaptations of Dan Clowes comics and made crazy short movies.

Later, he spent years of his life making this cartoon. He went old-school, penciling by hand over a light board (he's entirely self-taught). Then he inked and colored it and added 3D stuff digitally. Of course, he nearly lost his mind in the process.

The resulting cartoon speaks for itself.

NOTE: this is just one chapter. I recommend watching the whole 14 minute thing (link.)

Here's a cartoon I made starring my adorable little cousins. The person they're beating up is me.

The fine folks at Flux will show the animated short "Logorama" in their screening lineup at the Hammer museum tonight.

The entire universe of this film, even the characters within (a talking "Pringles" man, and a villainous Ronald McDonald), even the city of Los Angeles itself -- are all composed of repurposed corporate logo art, all of which is used without permission.

If you're in LA, you really must head over there tonight. There's a great post (with video clips) about the making of Logorama over at Creativity Online.

Jonathan Wells of Flux tells us,

The short was created by directors within H5, a French graphic studio renowned for its CD front covers (Superdiscount, Air, Demon...) and artistic direction (Dior, Cartier, YSL...). Members François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain directed many music videos (Alex Gopher, Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Röyksopp...), and are regularly invited to exhibitions for their artistic talents (2007 Nuit Blanche, Beaubourg, MoMA). Logorama is their first short film, and premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Kodak Short Film Discovery Prize at the 48th Critics' Week. The short was *four* years in the making, and features a voice cameo by filmmaker David Fincher as the Pringles man.

I love this little animated short by Mike Stern, and I'm delighted to see that he was part of the online school Animation Mentor, which I've reported on before. Watch: Distraxion, more at sternio.com (thanks, Joaquin Baldwin!).

Norman McLaren is well-known to Canadians as the creator of the Oscar-winning anti-war animation Neighbours (which seemed to air every hour past midnight on public TV when I was a kid). But the NFB's extensive and amazing archives contain a wealth of other McLaren creations- including the following piece of terrifying WWII propaganda: Were there Nazi spies in Canada during WWII or was McLaren a paranoid propagandist? I am completely ignorant about this period of Canadian history- can some BoingBoinger educate me?

Strangpork sez, "Boing Boing fan art created with Quartz Composer, using appropriate iconography." Nice work! Love the repurposed Boing Boing video art!

Boing Boing Iconography / Plaid TV (Thanks, Strangpork!)

The winner of this year's "oldskool demo competition" at the Assembly 2009 (a festival of low-level assembly programming) is this sweet animation, "3½ inches is enough" by Unreal Voodoo, which is apparently running on some kind of monochrome 68K classic Macintosh.

3½ inches is enough by Unreal Voodoo (via JWZ)

It's 1936 and 27 year-old Harry Warnow has it all -- a beautiful wife, a hit record, a recording company, a publishing company, his very own swing orchestra and a new name: Raymond Scott. But in 30 years he would be virtually unknown. Secluded in his home studio, he would spend his time writing commercials and inventing futuristic music machines. Unbeknownst to Scott, however, his music had become imprinted on the minds of millions. For years, the animators at Warner Bros. had been scoring their Looney Tunes cartoons with Scott's life's work. This would be his legacy -- and he never knew. Due to its success, both critically and at the box-office, it's been granted an extended run in the Fringe Encore series.

Here's the book-trailer for Leviathan, the first volume of YA superstar Scott Westerfeld's kick-ass new steampunk alternate WWI series, featuring chimera-splicing Darwinist Brits fighting the clanking steam-mecha of the German side. Total gilliamfab!

Leviathan Trailer (Thanks, Scott!)

A commenter mentioned that Timberg's daughter Pat Timberg had recorded and released a CD of Sammy Timberg's Max Fleischer classics called "Boop-Oop-a-Dooin'," and Pat was kind enough to send me a review copy. We've been playing it around the house for a couple weeks now and again, the kid and I have been totally rockin' out. I love hearing some of my favorite Popeye songs, like "Clean Shaven Man" as well as Flesicher classics like "An Elephant Never Forgets" and, of course, Betty Boop's flirty, silly little songs.

The vocals, provided by Timberg's granddaughter Shannon Cullem and Richard "Mr Tin Pan Alley" Halpern are spot-on versions of Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop and the other Fleischer favorites. The orchestration is lively and sprightly, and my daughter, who's just starting to sing and speak, loves the songs as much as I do.

BOOP-OOP-A-DOOIN'

Email Pat to order your copy

Nina Paley, creator of the wonderful and copyright-fraught animation Sita Sings the Blues writes, "All the Flash authoring (.fla) files I used to make Sita Sings the Blues have just been posted on archive.org, under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Want to know how I got a certain animated effect in Sita Sings the Blues? Open up the .fla files and find out. Want to put flying eyeballs and demons in your next music video? Now you can. Want to make a 'Sita Sings the Blues' video game using all the assets? Go for it. (But I strongly suggest you negotiate my endorsement if you want to actually market the end product.)"

"Sita" Source Files now on Archive.org (Thanks, Nina!)

Louis Armstrong meets zombies in this machinima clip that sets the brilliant zombie game Left 4 Dead to the "What a Wonderful World."

What a Wonderful L4D (via Wonderland)

guard dog
quimby the mouse
my paper mind
cyriak
the brothers mcleod
we got time
disney templates

previously on web zen:
animated zen 2008
animated zen 2007
animated zen 2005

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

(Video above contains adult content, NSFW).

I've been editing this blog post for the past couple of hours, and was going to start off with the fact that today, the third season of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! came out on DVD, and that you should go pick up a copy because I think the show is wonderful, but then I had to add the thing about the recent Vanity Fair interview which does a fine job of illuminating their particular brand of creepyfunny, and then all of a sudden, LOL and behold, I saw this: a new music video for Major Lazer's track "Pon De Floor," directed by Eric Wareheim. I think it may just be the greatest music video ever. It's hella NSFW, just like Dance Floor Dale. The Village Voice called it "ToeJam & Earl + Donnie Darko + The Sims + a Japanese game show + straight-up pornography." Fader calls the performers it features "malfunctioned, horny and frightened Sims." I follow Tim and Eric on Twitter, you should too: @timheidecker @ericwareheim. Okay, I think that's about it, I'm going to publish this post now.

We've debuted a number of these wonderful N.A.S.A. videos (not to be confused with NASA) on Boing Boing Video, and this latest release on YouTube is no less spectacular, starring Sri Lankan street diva M.I.A..

N.A.S.A. "Whachadoin?" feat. M.I.A., Spank Rock, Santogold, & Nick Zinner. (Squeak E. Clean Productions, Dir: Jimena Oddi & Jorge Jaramillo; Producers: Susan Applegate & Tito Melega. DP: Santiago Mellazini) N.A.S.A.'s debut album: "The Spirit of Apollo."

An article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about men in Japan who are in love with anime characters is online now. The print version will be in this coming Sunday's magazine. I should point out that this phenomenon is not unique to Japan, or to men, but I think it's safe to say that that is where it originated. In the interest of space the editors and I had to cut out the sections about 2D love in the US and elsewhere, and among women.

Nisan didn't mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter -- at a comic-book convention that Nisan's gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo -- was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan's bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver's license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west -- to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends' couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. "I've experienced so many amazing things because of her," Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan's leg warmly. "She has really changed my life."

Nemutan doesn't really have a leg. She's a stuffed pillowcase -- a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or "big brother," a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix "tan" to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she's not real, but that hasn't stopped him from loving her just the same. "Of course she's my girlfriend," he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. "I have real feelings for her."

Love in 2D [New York Times Magazine]

Animator David O'Reilly (Twitter), whose work I've featured on Boing Boing's original video program many times, has created this lovely music video for a little-known band from Ireland called "You Too." What's that? Oh I've been corrected, "U2." I think this great little video will really help them get somewhere and make a name for themselves! The song is "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight."

During a viewing of Disney's animated film Cinderella (1950), one author (AI) noticed a dog having nightmares with dream-enactment that strongly resembled RBD. This prompted a study in which all Disney classic full-length animated films and shorts were analyzed for other examples of RBD. Three additional dogs were found with presumed RBD in the classic films Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Fox and the Hound (1981), and in the short Pluto's Judgment Day (1935). These dogs were elderly males who would pant, whine, snuffle, howl, laugh, paddle, kick, and propel themselves while dreaming that they were chasing someone or running away. In Lady and the Tramp the dog was also losing both his sense of smell and his memory, two associated features of human RBD. These four films were released before RBD was first formally described in humans and dogs. In addition, systematic viewing of the Disney films identified a broad range of sleep disorders, including nightmares, sleepwalking, sleep related seizures, disruptive snoring, excessive daytime sleepiness, insomnia and circadian rhythm sleep disorder. These sleep disorders were inserted as comic elements. The inclusion of a broad range of accurately depicted sleep disorders in these films indicates that the Disney screenwriters were astute observers of sleep and its disorders.

An MTV International promotional spot created by Universal Everything starring a Mister Furry with whom I would like to cuddle. (Via Copyranter)

Water Brain Complete Edition（16：9） from Johann.Poo on Vimeo.

Jason sez, "I did a short post today on a "Chinese steampunk animation" I found the other day. It's a 15-minute 3d animation with some great visual combos of traditional Chinese symbols/icons/patterns with the steampunk aesthetic."

Chinese steampunk animation (Thanks, Jason!)

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

This week's Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker had an amazing piece about a series of mysterious youtube videos of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Vaslav Nijinsky is known as the best male dancer of the twentieth century. Unfortunately Nijinsky died retired at 29, and left behind no known footage of his dancing. Yet about a year ago videos of Nijinsky dancing began appearing on youtube, such as a clip from "Afternoon of a faun" seen below.

If there is no known footage of him, where was this archival footage coming from? From the New Yorker article:

"Because it turns out, these aren't films. They are computer-generated artifacts, made by Christian Comte, a French artist who has a studio in Cannes. Reached the other day, Comte acknowledged his authorship. "These films are animations of photographs, achieved thanks to a process that I invented," he said. "I work as an alchemist in animated cinema." He uses still photographs and, by employing a computer to alter them--tilt a head, move an arm--fills in the gaps between successive shots."

Link to the New Yorker Article, Comte's youtube account of the strangely mesmerizing videos.

You didn't think they just popped up on screen themselves, did you? Commercial animation by South Korea's WooDUS, who are also behind this vaguely Bubble Bobble-esque title animation.

Discuss this on Offworld

Above, a stop motion music video for the We Have Band track, "You Came Out". Created by the W+K creative team Ida Gronblom & Fabian Berglund and Blinkink director David Wilson. About the making of:

The face paint animation film is made up of 4,816 separate stills. Each and every frame was hand-painted, shot, wiped off and redrawn, slightly differently for the next frame in order to create a seamless sequence. This time-consuming process involved the band members lying still for two consecutive days in a studio.

In order to animate the singing bit, lip movement was created by animating a painted mouth on the singer Dede. This involved breaking the lyrics into phonetics and giving each sound a specific mouth shape. To make this as realistic as possible all the mouth shapes were painted on Dedes face individually and then shot.

Here's an animation for the song Kashmir, used as a performance backdrop by Led Zeppelin for their reunion concert. Animation by Steve Scott. (via Arthur mag / thanks Richard Metzger)

(Download MP4 / YouTube | Warning: NC-17, cartoon nudity/ultraviolence)

Boing Boing Video proudly presents the world-premiere of a third video, above, from the N.A.S.A. music project (here was our first, here's the second) -- "A Volta," featuring Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx. Video by Logan, with art by The Date Farmers. Executive Producer: Susan Applegate.

NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).

Buy the album, The Spirit of Apollo, here. More than 40 music artists are featured, including David Byrne, Kanye West, Ghostface Killah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and Nick Zinner, M.I.A., Santogold, E-40, Tom Waits and Kool Keith. Music videos for the project involve a similarly diverse team-up of visual artists and directors.

Logan, the folks who directed the video for this track, create TV commercials and music videos, content for video games, and experiment with animation and visual effects. We caught up with Alexei Tylevich of Logan for a conversation about how this unusual music video -- kinda like GTA: Juarez -- came together with the Date Farmers.

The text of our interview follows (+ more after the jump).

Video #2, embedded below (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): Logan's mockumentary web-film about the making of this NASA video.

[Q] XENI JARDIN / BOING BOING VIDEO: When I was struggling to explain your "A Volta" video to others, I found myself referring to it as an "8-bit narco nightmare." What's the story we're seeing here?

Dave Cooper's one of my most favorite artists ever. He just did this unbelievably awesome video for one of my most favorite bands ever, Danko Jones. Check it and be thrilled.

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

Today's Boing Boing Video episode is an ambient animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc and the band Plaid (Warp Records). Best enjoyed with stereophonic supersonic headphones, so you can appreciate the shift from one channel to another, while you watch thousands of starlings take flight in a burnt sunset sky.

Bob Jaroc explains how this lovely, evocative avian work took form:

They were real starlings, not digitally-generated. They were filmed over a few winters here in Brighton. I was lucky enough to have access to the then-abandoned and now destroyed West Pier, and got them down on tape as they were coming in to roost. I then extracted them from the background and edited them to the track, often going back and trying to capture a certain motion to go with a certain bit of audio.

RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic)