damaged people dot com

This is amazing....

Doll Face

Our jaws are agape after experiencing the artistry of Andrew Huang, a fine arts major and animation minor at USC, whose Doll Face video gives us a postmodern look at the futility of vanity.

This guy's a student? Looks like he should be the teacher. Somebody hire him, quick! His animation is perfectly convincing, the sound effects are first-rate, the editing and compositing are smoother than a baby's butt, and the social commentary is ironic bordering on profound. Outstanding work.

I ran across that as well today. It's very cool!

That made me sad.

miftah wrote:In the interest of full-disclosure, I should tell you that I will be spending the next 12 months or so of my life trying to find a teaching gig, teaching video art.

Well, I really tried to hold my tongue on this one.

I hate to piss all over something that clearly took a lot of work and that people clearly like, but the idea that this guy should be teaching a class is a little misguided. The piece, while well crafted, is neither ironic nor profound. In fact, its sort of literal, melodramatic and trite (seriously, there's been work making this statement since the beginning of the feminist movement). The truth is that while its a great piece for getting a job at Pixar, its not quite in the sphere of fine art. It lacks ambiguity and originality, two very important components in fine art.

Being as the last major argument I got in here was over what is and isn't fine art (a category far less subjective than people think), I'm not telling anyone here that you shouldn't enjoy this, and your taste is not suspect. The whole point of my responding to the quote from the site above is just that while it certainly is affective, no one should go to fine art expecting work like this. Fine art is trying to do something altogether different. This is more a great animated short film. If you go and look at the animated short films that were nominated last year (which I believe are all available on iTunes), you'll see this has much in common with them.

I wholeheartedly agree with that entire post, Miftah.