This seventh annual conference on comics will focus on issues of globalization and reception. Comics are, now more than ever, an international phenomenon, but scholarly accounts of comics are often limited by an exclusive focus on examples from a single national or continental comics industry. This problem is exacerbated by the scarcity of translations. Furthermore, one of the many obstacles facing the emergent discipline of comics studies is the difficulty of communication between scholars working in different national and cultural contexts. This conference is intended as a small step toward meeting these challenges. The goal of this conference, therefore, is to consider the history and reception of comics on a global level. We are interested in papers that focus on international comics and animation markets, cross-cultural reception of comics, and the differential status of comics in different cultures (e.g. as a children's/mass medium or as a mainstream form of literature). Here we are using "comics" in its broadest sense, embracing animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some "fine art." In addition to theoretically grounded work, we encourage submission of archival and historical research.

Special guests will include Susan Napier (From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West), Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Matt Madden (99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style) and Sara Cooper (Founder, MLA Discussion Group on Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Production).

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

* The reception of comics outside their original cultural context, both by fans (e.g. manga fandom in the United States) and by creators (e.g. American comics' influence on the development of manga and BD, the "nouvelle manga" movement).
* Connections between comics form and cultural status. How have views of the cultural position of comics (e.g. as a children's versus an adult medium or as a mass-cultural versus a literary medium) evolved differently in various cultures? What does this have to do with the formal properties of the medium, such as sequentiality and hybrid image-textuality?
* Comics as a global market: migrations of talent between multiple comics industries (e.g. the Spanish and Filipino "invasions" of British and American comics in the 1960s and 1970s, the Korean influence on U.S. animation) and cross-national collaborations (e.g. mangakas working for Marvel and DC).
* Comics studies as a global discipline. What barriers exist to the study of comics from a global perspective and to collaborations between comics scholars from different cultures? How might such barriers be removed?
* The impact of the internet on the global comics market. How have scanlations and filesharing helped or hindered global comics industries?
* Canon formation and expansion. What happens when works from unfamiliar cultural contexts (e.g. Persepolis and Epileptic) enter a national comics canon?
* Comics and travel/tourism, e.g. in Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage.
* Comics and issues of postcolonial identity, e.g. in Abouet & Oubrerie's Aya, Baru's Road to America, Horrocks's Hicksville.
* Translations of comics, both official and unofficial, e.g. scanlation. What are the unique difficulties and advantages of comics translation as opposed to prose translation? What are the unique difficulties and approaches to translating comics from different cultures? How, if at all, do "official" and "unofficial" translators approach comics translations differently?

Abstract submissions should be approximately 250-500 words in length. Presentations will be 15 minutes with 5 minutes of question and answer.

The deadline for abstract submissions is December 1, 2008. Abstracts or questions should be submitted to Aaron Kashtan at akashtan@english.ufl.edu or Tania Darlington at tdarlington1@ufl.edu. See the conference website for schedules and additional information.

Tania Darlington
Department of English
University of Florida

Email: tdarlington1@ufl.edu
Visit the website at http://global.comic-studies.org/

Yes, it is irreverent.  It is edgy. It pushes the limits.  It is hilarious ( Ok, sometimes a couple of the jokes miss)!  Yet, since Family Guy premiered in 1999, I have been a fan.  The  somewhat dysfunctional but lovable family that is Peter, Lois,Chris, Meg and Stewie Griffin and their talking, cocktail drinking dog, Brian has been a regular staple of my viewing pleasure on TV.

Despite all its silliness, series creator Seth MacFarlane has developed an intelligent piece of animated comedy that is a real mirror on popular culture.  He makes us laugh at all the absurdities of life, while at the same time, he embeds into his comedy something for us to think about. For me, Family Guy has given me  real time to just laugh and let out all the stress of daily living by seeing the antics of my favorite family from Quahog on television.

I have posted a few clips below to give you a taste of this show that airs on Fox on Sundays. Watch an episode or two and become a fan.

Official Family Guy Web Site: http://www.familyguy.com/

METAMORFASE 2

Art's Experience

➢ von Artista auf YouTube

✦

Chemogramm

Chemogramm – digital solarisiert

digitale Montage

➢ betrifft BK

The Ars Electronica Campus Exhibion's Internetional Conference we went is titled Crossing the Boundary Between Art and Technology. Here is some of the talks given in the conference:

• Marika Hayashi - Flesh, skin, and tactile sense of robots
  
  She is the one working on the project on a robot, which have dynamic movements with its flexible body (You see the picture, Helen was hugging the robot, see so soft and warm it is).
• Ryuma Niiyama - Artificial Musculoskeletal System for Bio-Inspired Robot
  
  The one talk about some project like making a jumping robot or as the photo, simulating muscles (the white things).
• Tiago Martins - User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Gaming
  
  He is the speaker we are going to interview tomorrow, so we talk about his work later.
• Peter Gassner - Fingertip: Applications for Vibrotactile Touch Sreens
  
  Personally I like this project very much. It is implementing sense of vibration on touch screen. It make touch screen's weak feed-back much better.
• Jeremy Stucki & Christoph Schmid - Retype: New Text Entry Methods for Mobile Touchscreen Devices
  
  I think this one is useful. They redesign the text input method of iPhone-like devices, so that the input penal would not get too much space on the already too small screen.
• Risa Suzuki - Proposal for Slow Interactive Media Art
  
  Her works are quite interesting that have a lot of focus on the use of bubbles in installation. The one that exhibited here in Linz is that one use bubbles and wind to make musics through electric devices. (And we have got an interview with her)

And the animations showing near OK Centre are really great stuffs. That kinds of animations or VFX can only be done by a lot of great people and with a lot of efforts. Spider Man 3 and I am Legend were also shown, so you know how high the technical standard of the overall movies shown. Moreover, not only the technical skills, there are deep meanings inside some of them. Also some of them are reflecting the dark (or bright) side of this world.

Hope there will be more exciting stuff to see tomorrow. BTW, don't forget to have a look to our album.

Andy

Waltz with Bashir

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy coat the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

- Walter de la Mare

When i came across this poem - which I did with my y5's, I couldn't help to send it to Wipneus as she loves space, planets-stuff and always shows us great pics of outer space taken with her magic camera that zooms to the fine surface of any planet! lol! I couldn't resist blogging it tonight as it's such a great poem! written by a great poet! And enjoy this very short film, which I also used with my y5's during Literacy. We did some drama  too and had a great time with this unit. Do enjoy this brilliant animation!

It's an animation of an Old Man whose Life and memories just go past him. He remembers stuff that is sad but the end is really great and happy.

http://www.ericluhta.com/ and http://www.chicop-animation.com/index.htm

As for me, I am working on finishing up the exporter, (done) validator, (done) and importer.(not done)  Looks like it should be smooth sailing after this initial pipeline process gets done!  I'm quite excited to begin work modeling and animating characters.

Well, here it is. After 3 months of hard work fun our “Coming Soon” page has finally been replaced by a brand new website. The coming weeks we will be posting a series of “Making of” articles about our use of Papervision3D, Vectorvision, 3D Physics, Photography and more. Today a few lines on the general concept of the website. 

The vision for the panorama view came to us in november last year while we were brainstorming on another project (the one for which we prototyped a spherical video panorama). We would stand in one of Amsterdam’s many beautiful scenes with everybody around us walking by going about their business. Around us our portfolio work would be hanging in the air in the form of paper flyers. Envisioning viewing that with 3D glasses being able to move around us, filled us with excitement. We are already familiar with viewing photo’s and movies with 3D glasses, but I can’t really say I had had an interactive experience using 3D glasses before. 

By creating a 360º panorama from a stop motion video rather than from multiple stills stitched together, allowed us to capture the movement of the subjects in the scene. The price to pay however was much bigger file size. To make up for the wait while the video content preloads before being granted access to the panorama view we thought it would be cool to revamp the traditional Pong waiting game into a solitary 3D version that could also benefit from viewing with 3D glasses.

But the added file size was worth it. When we first reached the point in development that we had a placeholder 360º video panorama overlaid with a badly keyed-out test shoot of us taken in from of a purple screen (yes, we hadn’t ordered the green screen yet), that we realized just how interesting it actually is to gently turn the 360º and observe the many people, boats and occasional “motor agent”, as they call them here in Holland, pass by.

The location was almost an automatic choice. Besides the fact that it’s beautiful, it’s right around the corner from our studio. But this is mearly the first panorama to feature on the site. As it’s simply a question of modifying some XML to change the panorama in the website, and, well, shooting the new footage of course, we plan on adding new panoramas to the site in the future, probably starting with a new shoot this fall.

the link autoplays with sound:

Time For Some Campaigning

warning: the tune is a bit catchy and might get stuck in your head

Wall-E er den nyeste af Pixar's animerede film. Den er utroligt flot. Så flot, at det til tider kan være svært, at skelne computer-grafik fra virkeligheden. Endnu mere betagende er det, at man har klaret at lave en interessant film, uden at bruge ret meget tale. Således går de første mange minutter af filmen, helt uden at der bliver ytret et ord.

Wall-E er på mange måder klassisk Disney. Der er mange af de her "ha ha ha ha - årrrhh" øjeblikke. Hver gang der er noget sjovt, er der også noget sødt... Hver gang der er noget skidt, er der også noget sødt. Der er altså rigeligt sødt i filmen. Det er dog ikke for meget, og det er ikke upassende. Filmen giver på intet tidspunkt indtryk af at være mere eller mindre end den er. Med sin halvanden time bliver den ikke for meget og ikke for lidt.

Den er lige tilpas og anbefalelsesværdig!

click on image to activate

Letzten Monat bei unserem Ausflug wollten wir den schönen Tag verewigen und haben uns gemeinsam fotografieren lassen. Leider sind unsere neuen Zugänge noch nicht darauf, weil sie an dem Tag das Programm im Club aufrecht halten sollten (was sie auch sehr gut gemacht haben).

Werde auf jedem Fall diese Woche ein neues Teamfoto machen lassen und es auch wieder in diese Seite stellen. Doch erst kommt unser "privat" Teamfoto vom Bergfest.

So sind wir wenn wir unter uns sind! :)

Je vous présente le studio de production Sparx. Ils sont français et travaillent avec les plus grands dans le domaine du cinéma et de la télévision!

C'est un studio de création français spécialisé dans l'animation 3D  vraiment incroyable.

Découvrez son univers au travers de différentes de ses créations :

Igor

Gazoon

Robota

Chasseur de dragons

Bonnes découvertes! ;-)

Peanuts’ animator Bill Melendez at 91 decided to leave this realm of animation to a great realm of Animation.

I've always known him from my favorite christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas, When I was a child even up till this age when the Christmas season arrives I search the tv guide to find out when A Charlie Brown Christmas would appear on tv. When it ended with the scene below---------------

The kids then start humming the traditional Christmas Carol, "Hark The Herald Angels Sing." When Charlie Brown returns, he demands to know what is taking place. When he sees what they have done with the tree, he cannot believe his eyes, and all the kids shout:
MERRY CHRISTMAS, CHARLIE BROWN!

At this point, the kids, now with Charlie Brown, begin singing "Hark.." as the end credits roll... and the snow again begins to fall.

and tears are rolling down my face and I feel this great feeling of joy and peace in my heart: Which reminds me when my mom ask me what I wanted for christmas last year and I told her I just wanted A Charlie Brown Christmas DVD! :D and she got and I was like a little kid in the candy store!

Bill Melendez not only did the animation of Charlie Brown and the characters but he was also the voice of Snoopy ohhhhh soo cute! He also did other numerous famous animated films such as  Bambi, Fantasia, and Dumbo the list goes on and on working nearly over 7 decades ..........http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Melendez ..........

I would usually be writing this sort of thing at my Withoutabox blog, but something's messed up there so I guess I'll start talking about the movie business here. Enjoy.