Skip to main content

Normally I do music on Saturday night’s, but normally Saturday is not Halloween. So this time around, a couple of classics in honor of the holiday. To make up for the schedule, music will be along very shortly, in honor of the new Abney Park album. The first Halloween video:

This is part of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series: The Skeleton Dance is a classic from 1929, not long after the Steamboat Willie era, and perfect for Halloween. In those days, this stuff was experimental state of the art, which tends to explain why Walt himself directed this one. The entire Silly Symphony collection was created from 1929 to 1939, and totaled out to 75 separate short animations, most of which were mini-masterpieces for their time. As evidence of this, the series won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times, including the first 6 times that award was ever given out. It was also a Disney test bed for new technology, of which the single most important piece (to my mind, at least) was Technicolor, a technology nobody else in the industry would appreciate until decades later.

The second Halloween video is a more modern classic: The 8 Bit version of Army of Darkness. It may have been the third film in the Evil Dead franchise, but it became the definitive horror comedy film of its time very quickly. It didn’t have a serious contender for that title until Shaun Of The Dead hit the big screen quite a few years later. I do kind of wish I could have played the game instead of just watched it, though. These CineFix virtual remakes are quite the hoot.

Pay attention; this might be the world we end up with if we are not careful. A Darwinian Future is not exactly a positive way to move forward through time, but it is one of the potential paths the human race might follow soon. I had to include the VFX Breakdown as a stream for this entry, so you could appreciate the construction. This was made by 3 folks: 2 Actors and 1 Camera person. When was the last time you saw a production pipeline that small that created a story you wanted to watch? As if that wasn’t amazing enough, all post production was done by one guy on a home computer. Meaning, you could create a movie this good yourself, at home, in your spare time.

The short film Harlequin is quite nicely done, and worth the time it takes to watch it. Pretty much a Batman variation, so it fits right in with the Comic Book Movies theme I enjoy sharing so often. It was created by Tara Alexis, who has some other interesting shorts to her credit, including some music videos (see the second one listed here, Haunted).

The award winning short film Somnium was created by Team Somium of The Animation School in South Africa, the team being Gerard Seymour, Riann Sholtz, Pieter Louw, Eben De Waal, Jasmine Morvan, and Greta Pepler. The award it won was the World Silver Award from the New York Festival’s International Television & Film Awards of 2014, and it only takes about 5 minutes to watch. I find it interesting but appropriate that they named it after the 1608 science fiction story Somnium by astronomer Johannes Kepler. Enjoy!