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A fresh and brilliant edit/remix of ApocalypseAnimated clips. This is why I love free culture.

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Talking about art and animation for a change.

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Today I was supposed to speak to an animation class via video. College I’d never heard of, teacher I’d never heard of, small thing, figured they knew who I was. Made plans, blocked space in my calendar. Barely an hour before I’m supposed to log onto their zoom link, I get this:

Full email thread pasted below, because it’s so typical. I will never accept another speaking invitation unless they promise not to do this.

I was invited to participate in a “Studio Process” for a graduate student’s thesis project, and here’s what came out of me:

After we art-ed, we were asked to write “witness statements” about what we’d made. I wrote this:

I laughed a lot making this.
I laugh looking at it.

I see a cartoon of a naked woman (obviously based on me) discovering and exploring a hole in her abdomen, in 8 sequential images.
Although you’d expect a hole in the Self to be cause for sadness and grief, this woman enjoys it the more she ...

I chose this Christian Crowdfunding platform because they claim to not cancel people (unlike this one) and because this particular project should appeal to Christians, as they are the Book of Revelation’s biggest fandom. https://www.givesendgo.com/apocalypseanimated

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In addition to the swell multi-frame animated lenticulars, I’ve also been working on fake quasi 3-D lenticular cards from a printer in China. These are much less expensive, but only allow 2 frames per card. I don’t use 3D software, so to achieve this quasi-3D look I move elements around manually. Here are my designs as 2-frame gifs; hopefully behind a lenticular lens they’ll fool the eye/brain into seeing depth.

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There’s now an APOCALYPSE ANIMATED APP! It lets you store the entire Book of Revelation with almost 300 animated loops on your own device(s). Never again rely on iffy internet for your Apocalypse needs! Engineered by Atul Varma, currently for iPhone only. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apocalypse-animated/id1610949716

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I just got my test batch from the printer and they look as good in real life as they do in this video. (One of 8 in the video was printed at the wrong orientation, so that one is not offered, but it leaves 7 which was my goal anyway). Order yours here: https://apocalypseanimated.com/store/

Currently unsigned only, to US addresses only. I will offer more expensive, signed and numbered sets of 7 later. These are cheaper (but still expensive! Sorry, custom lenticulars ain’t cheap) because they ship directly from the printer. I’m also working on ...

I’m exploring custom lenticular prints of loops from ApocalypseAnimated.com. I still don’t have them in hand; the first tests arrive in hand next week. Here’s a preview video from the printer of the design below:

But I’m so excited I’m already setting up designs for 6 more, to make a set of 7 lenticular prints (7 seems to be the most fetishized number in the Book of Revelation). Because I want to look at them adjacent to each other, I’m posting them here!

HUGE VIDEO FILE AT ARCHIVE.ORG

Compressed hi-res MP4 at Vimeo

After 4 tedious days of rendering hundreds of high-resolution video files, only to discover they seemed to be missing one frame each and so weren’t looping properly, followed by a few days of unhappy procrastinating, followed by 3 additional tedious and crabby days of re-rendering, I finally have all the animation of ApocalypseAnimated.com in Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixel) uncompressed Apple ProRes video for your remixing pleasure. Roughly in order, each loop in this gigantic, 20GB file appears exactly once. They can be cut apart and ...

I made this little “trailer” video for ApocalypseAnimated.com . It’s only 3 minutes long, while there are almost 12 minutes of animation (without even looping!) in the project, so this is but a mere sample of the wonders to find at the website. But this has music so people are likelier to share and attend to it.

There are some technical looping flaws that bother me. Apparently when I export HD video from Moho, it omits the last frame of the loop, causing a jerk in the seams. This doesn’t happen when I export gifs. To make my ...

“It is done.” — Revelation 21:6

I’ve finished ApocalypseAnimated.com! All 22 chapters are now illustrated. I will undoubtedly continue to fuss with it, adding and revising things here and there, but this is basically it.

I’ve been working on it all day every day since October.

Next I work on an app for it, and generate high-res video of all the loops for other uses.

Hope you enjoy it! Please share it if you do.

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I’ve revived my temporarily-abandoned Apocalypse project, which now lives at apocalypseanimated.com. Instead of a movie, I’m illustrating the Book of Revelation with animated gif loops, in the tradition of Medieval and post-Medieval Apocalypses. Except instead of being hand-lettered and painted on parchment, it’s all digital. Still, the gif is the 21st Century’s equivalent of the woodcut, as I discussed 6 years ago:

…the advent of the printing press led to the explosion of a unique kind of illustration: the wood-cut. Since…the internet is in many ways analogous to the printing press, I saw a ...

I made this to help collaborators generate animated fills for MysticSymbolic, but this E-Z technique can be used with pretty much any 2-D animation software.

This animated symbol is a stopwatch. It takes 6 seconds rather than 60 for the hand to complete a circuit.

This is the stopwatch moving straight across the screen left to right. It takes 6 seconds to do that.

This is the animated symbol above, replicated 6 times. Each instance of it is staggered by one second. Although it takes 6 seconds for one stopwatch to cross the screen left to right, this cycle is ...

Finally I can share this animated video I made back in October, in collaboration with Italian pop goddess Gala. I of course wanted to release it the minute it was finished, but the music biz doesn’t work that way, and I had to wait. The song is © Gala, but the art is Free Culture, baby!

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I asked Theo Gray to make me this 9.25 x 12″ acrylic peg pad (as opposed to peg bar) so I could do some quickie pencil animations on my glass drawing board, which I use as a cheap light table (see photo above).

Instead of the traditional acme animation pegbar, which requires expensive pre-cut animation paper or/and a $500 hole punch, I wanted 3 round pegs that would line up with a standard inexpensive 3-hole punch. I specified clear acrylic ...

I made these to illustrate the difference between shifting a Rohloff vs. conventional derailleur/cassette system in a velomobile going at speed. According to Doug Davis at Bicycle Evolution, some novice velonauts desire Rohloffs because they offer a very wide gear range, but the larger gaps between gears make them less efficient at speed. He has data about watts and gear inches and rotations per minute, but I merely tried to convey the drama of having to upshift too fast in a 60+ pound tub:

For contrast ...

Animating waves does not come naturally to me. I covet the skills of animators who do them well, so when I recently found myself staring at the animated gifs of Felix Colgrave, I thought, “I wish I could do that.” Then I thought – hey, maybe I can. Thus, using repeating waves as guidelines:

I made this:

It may not look like much to you, but for me, it is an achievement, promising more interesting possibilities to come.

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Today I made this little straight-ahead hand-drawn pencil animation on a little 3×5″ pad. I was trying to give myself a little break from screens. You can see some eraser shreds got caught in the scanner; hopefully they add folksy charm.

Update: Someone on Neenster.org asked,”If we run it backwards, is it a creation myth?”  You tell me:

Divine cycle:

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