12 Drawings a Day – 12 Dessins par Jour from Denis Chapon on Vimeo.

Recently, Schuiten has been in the news with new productions that are perfect examples of this “one extra step”. First, there was the stamp he designed for the Belgian Post Office to commemorate the centennial of the Titanic disaster. It wasn’t Schuiten’s first assignment for the Post Office – in the past he designed stamps commemorating information scientist Paul Otlet, designer Henry Van de Velde and the Belgian endeavours on the Antarctic continent. This time, though, he took it one step ahead, by designing two stamps as a perfect stereogram. When looked at using a special viewer (which is included in the package), the stamps melt together to form an exquisite 3D rendition of the ship’s final hours.

Schuiten’s most recent book, La Douce, takes this even one step further. The book is one long ode to the Type 12 Atlantic, a belgian-built locomotive that was used around the middle of the Twentieth Century. Five locos of this type were built, but only one survived the sixties, largely thanks to railway men who thought it was too beautiful a machine to just scrap. Schuiten discovered the locomotive while designing the Brussels Railway Museum, which is slated to open in 2014, and immediately fell in love with it. The problem with the comic format, though, is that you can only suggest movement, and a such, it is rather a limited medium to use for a celebration of a machine that was essentially built for speed.

For that reason, Schuiten collaborated with 3D visualisation specialists Dassault Systemes to embed movement and speed in the comic. Dassault created a number of splendid 3D animations, that the reader can call up by holding the book up to any webcam. Thanks to Schuiten’s eye for detail, though, the animations are not just some kind of DVD extra, but play an actual role in the story itself.

As that other great Belgian graphic designer, Ever Meulen, said so many years ago, “Use the mood of the past to rewire your brain for the future”. François Schuiten is doing just that.

The Titanic stamps are available from the BPost website; La Douce was published recently by Casterman, and costs 18 Euros.

THE EAGLEMAN STAG from Mikey Please on Vimeo.

I should also draw your attention to a new project by Mikey, Martyn Miller, a sculptor who finds no-one pays attention until he starts deliberately deforming his creations. Suddenly people are interested, so he applies this don’t-care attitude to other aspects of his life and finds more success in relationships and elsewhere – except with one side effect, he appears to be shrinking… Mikey has some funding secured but requires more to complete the film; all animation is time-consuming and therefore quite expensive, but working in stop-motion is especially laborious (although personally I love the results from stop-motion, as well as the fact when you watch it you know everything you see on screen was made by hand, touched and moved by hand). He has an Indie GoGo fundraiser running right now to try and get enough money to complete the work, so lend one of our gifted young (and award winning) animators some help if you can and spread the link around too.

“It’s an incredibly simple little tale. Yet it’s one of my favourite comics all year. This tale of a lonely little badger living all alone in his London flat is heartbreakingly, tearjerkingly sad. I sat there after reading it and was struggling to hold back the tears. It’s very easy to describe, but very difficult to get over the complete sense of sadness that saturates every page.”

The guys are looking to raise $5000 by 22nd June on IndieGoGo, with much of the work done (it has now moved into post production phase where the live footage, voice-overs and art are being brought together by animators and editors). I think given how much we’ve adored Howard’s Badger I’d recommend this for your support if you can just as a simple documentary on a fine Indy comics artist creating interesting work. But Annie and Helen have higher aims than just producing an interesting short documentary – given the way the comic addresses mental illness and how to get on with life despite those hurdles they are keen to bring the documentary to a wider audience, online, at film festivals and for relevant mental health groups and charities to have access to screening it, which I have to say is an idea I like a lot, not just documenting the creative comics process but using it and the subject matter to try and help others. From the description:

“So far, we’ve made the film with in-kind support through our colleagues and friends. To finish the film in the way we envision, we are currently fund-raising so we can pay for the post-production, animation and music.

We are eager to bring Badger’s story to audiences around the world. Apart from festivals and online distribution we are working with mental health organisations, local boroughs, and schools to organise screenings, talks and offer the film as a resource. If you are interested in the above, please contact us to find out more.

We are seeking to raise $5,000 by 22 June 2012 . We know that’s not a small amount, but we have wonderful friends (you!) and trust that the aim of our project is something you can get behind to spread the word.”

(art from Badger Now and Then by and (c) Howard Hardiman)

As I said I think it is a lovely idea to not only cover the work of a fine independent comics creator but to use his work and that documentary to create more awareness of mental health issues in an enjoyable, accessible form and make it available to groups to use as a resource. A very nice idea and one well worthy of your support, so if you can offer them up some help and, of course, please help spread the word.

And, as Wim blogged about just recently, a whole series of short animations featuring Nix’s dangerous comic book twins is planned for this autumn, so expect to see a lot more of the deadly duo!

Over on Audrey Kawasaki’s LiveJournal she extolls an often overlooked yet painstaking, time-consuming aspect of creating animation for film – the background artist’s work. While the moving characters in the foreground take most of our attention (as indeed they are meant to, after all) the background details are often just that, a background, which is a shame because I must admit I’m with Audrey on this, often admiring the level of details (and sometimes clever little artistic comments worked into them) in the background art of animated films (and indeed often in the carefully arranged to look natural background scenes of live action film too).

It’s an area where being able to watch, pause and zoom on DVD really lets you enjoy this aspect of the film when re-watching it at your leisure, and Audrey uses the excellent animated adaptation of the Tekkonkinkreet manga to illustrate this with some glorious background pieces which would go past behind the characters in the film in a few seconds and yet which clearly demanded much love and effort from the artists involved. Go and ogle a richness of animation art… (thanks to Ben Towle for the link)

“D” – animated short film from Closed Eye Visuals | DP on Vimeo.

Goody Two Shoes by Rutu Modan from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.

Skype interview Shaun Tan from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.