keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Here's an interview with Bill Plympton, where he gives advice to independent animators.  The piece includes video clips.  And there's a link at the bottom to "4 Lessons in Creativity from John Cleese" that's also worth reading.

Salon has an interview with Bill Plympton .

Independent animator Bill Plympton is using Kickstarter to raise money to "resurrect" Winsor McCay's 1921 short The Flying House . Plympton is digitally cleaning the film, colorizing it, replacing word balloons with audio dialogue and adding music and sound effects. I am torn about this. On the one hand, the film is in the public domain. I personally think that copyright has become way too restrictive and that the public domain is a good thing for society at large, allowing past work to be re-issued and to inspire new work. What Plympton is attempting here is fully within the law and an example of how the public domain can feed contemporary creation. On the other hand, the historian in me believes that the past has value and to remake the past is to distort it. I was always against colorization when it was applied to black and white films. I also believe that there is great value in attempting to understand the past by immersing yourself in it. The world was a dif...

Independent animator Bill Plympton will appear at The Royal Theatre (608 College St, 5 blocks west of Bathurst) on Friday, Aug. 14 to screen his latest feature Idiots and Angels . The screening is at 7 p.m. The film, without Plympton, will continue to screen through Aug. 20.

I've always had mixed feelings about Bill Plympton. He draws beautifully. His short films always provoke a strong audience reaction. He is an inspiration as an entrepreneur, having developed his own market niche where he creates the films he wants to and makes a living at it. Where most independent animators produce shorts, Plympton has directed at least five features. On the other hand, I think that Plympton's animation is starved for drawings. While I understand the economic necessity of limiting the amount of artwork he produces for a film, the animation and stories often feel padded as a result. While Plympton is a strong draftsman, he has trouble portraying weight and momentum in motion. Perhaps my greatest reservation about him is the shallowness of his characters. This isn't much of a problem in his shorts, which tend to be very gag driven, but becomes a larger problem in his features. Idiots and Angels is Plympton's latest. I saw it screened at the Tor...