Back in the day (this particular “day” being the 1980’s) I used to attend a lot of SF conventions. The absolute highlight of those cons of yesteryore happened in the screening room, between movies. To fill the time there, they used to run little short films (see how this cleverly ties in to Les’ recent post?). The best of these were the stop motion gems made by Mike Jittlov.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Jittlov
And the best of those wonderful little shorts, is the original Wizard of Speed and Time, which can now be found on YouTube…
The first half is kind of cute, the second half, after the banana peel, is amazing.
Remember, this is from those wonderful days before computer animation, when you had to do each of these shots frame by frame.
[Editor’s Note: Found his official home page here.]
Wonderful! That is certainly a lost art. Imaging how far this could have advanced if computers had not gotten involved.
I seem to remember seeing this as part of a movie in my youth by the same name. I think I remember it being about a comic book collector that at one point sells his collection and all his possessions in order to do something, but I can’t remember it, and I have to leave for work right now so I can’t look it up. I think the movie was made in the mid to late 80’s but I could be wrong.
Wow. Nostalgia’s kicking in. I seem to remember watching films like this in the early ‘80s, back when I was just a wee little girl. I really miss being so easily impressed.
Cool movie, KPG.
I don’t recall ever seeing this type of thing – either the oldtimers’ disease has kicked in or I’ve had limited life experiences.
Either way, I’ve a lot to look forward to.
A quick search for Jittlov at YouTube brings up a lot of his other shorts, too. All of them are worth a look.
stepson and I have discussed using the Movies game (which allows you to export your masterpeices in film (.avi I think), mixed with live action and stop motion to make our epic, stiching it all together with a movie maker program, then exporting to DVD. Be differenet for family film night. Having recently aquired Virtual railroad- trainset in your computer- which also exports .avi files of your trains going, this film will almost certainly involve a stream train, even if it is a sci-fi epic.
How did he get the shots for when he ran across the water? I’ve seen lots of stop animation but nothing like some of the stuff he did.
…it’s all well and good to chat about Mike’s amazing, eye-dance-worthy animations and his film and what has been, but it would be far more interesting to know where he is now and what he’s doing in the age of CGI and multi-million-dollar-worthy animations done with the equivalent of a toaster and six inches of string. Has he disappeared to Norway, as he seemed to want to? Does he want to simply walk away from being Mike Jittlov? Where is the man?
…to be honest, I miss him.