bugs in his shorts

Obsessed as I am with stop-motion photography, I can't believe I've only just discovered the work of Wladyslaw Starevitch whose turn of the century (last century) animation is what computer animators attempt to imitate today.

A childhood passion for entomology inspired Starevitch to film insects. Under the heat of the only shooting lights available in Moscow in 1909, the insects died. But no matter. He used the bugs anyway, wiring the legs to the thorax with sealing wax and employing stop-motion photography to show them in action. After the British screening of one of his films, London journalists, convinced the insects were alive, praised not only the film, but the talent of the "unidentified Russian scientist who can train insects to act." (Those amazing Russians.) 

Starevitch also directed films in which leading actors of the day appeared, but he preferred working with dolls and (dead) insects because "actors never did what you wanted them to." In 1920, he moved to Paris to escape the Russian Revolution, anglicized his name to Ladislaw Starewicz and made over forty films casting inanimate objects, including dolls, branches, rocks, insects and puppets of his own creation. His The Tale of the Fox, a film that took him over ten years to produce, is still considered one of the best stop-motion films ever made.

In celebration of the season, here's a Starewicz short about Father Christmas. Entomologist viewers will note that the cast of insects include a Dung Beetle and a Grasshopper, not a Ladybug and a Dragonfly as indicated by the English captions which were added much later.

Other Starewicz films can be viewed here, including The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), a gripping drama about infidelity among insects.


Tip of the director's visor to Casey. 

friday flashback: this 1979 ad could run today

For Prius.  It was art directed and illustrated by Helmut Krone, legendary art director and Real Life Mad Man at Doyle Dane Bernbach (NY) who was one of the greatest designers ever to wield an exacto. He knew how to use image to define corporate personality long before "brand" was used as a verb--an etymological development Ad Contrarian blames for our industry being in such a muddle. (Read the book.)

friday flashback: warhol's 15 min as mr. whipple

Andrew Warhola started out as an illustrator for shoe ads, one of which won him an Art Director's Club Medal in 1959. He crossed from commercial world into art by exhibiting his shoe drawings in a NYC gallery but never lost his fascination with advertising and commercial culture.

In 1964, he staged an exhibit called "The American Supermarket", a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it—the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc.—was created by six prominent pop artists of the time, including the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500, while each autographed can sold for $6. (Imagine the regret of  shoppers who one day, too busy to go dinner-shopping, popped the top and threw away the can.)

Interesting to me that his philosophy still holds today:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Source

poster source

cheers from 1956

One thing you won't find on Ebay's "unwanted Christmas present" list is the 1956 Art Director's Awards annual I was lucky enough to receive this year. The 35th Annual cites awards in eight categories, including separate categories for Color Ads and Station Break Art Cards and Record Album Covers. (Hoagy Carmichael's won big that year.) This photo was honored in the Advertising Art category and was shown in the annual as most visuals were, without corresponding copy that mucked it up when it ran. The The photographer was Irving Penn. The art director was a guy named Hershel Bramson. Manuel Grossberg is acknowledged, perplexingly, as "Designer of Complete Unit." Stylist, you think? Anyway, here's to you and the breaking year.