Silhouette animation is a form of cut-out animation. The latter is familiar as the style used to give that extra-cheezy feeling to South Park. If you were to take South Park style cut-outs and light them from behind, rather than the front, so that surface colors and textures were eliminated leaving only black silhouettes, you would have silhouette animation.

Despite the crude image this analogy conjures up, silhouette animation can be used artfully and effectively, particularly if great attention is given to the detail in the silhouetted shapes. The oldest surviving full-length animation, in fact, is a silhouette animation called The Adventures of Prince Achmed, created by German animator Lotte Reiniger and released in 1926.

Today, it’s almost a lost form except in experimental shorts. An exceptional example of this is The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. This is a series of wonderfully done short animations that have been nominated for an Academy Award and already won awards at Annecy, AFI and various festivals in several countries.

Directed by Anthony Lucas and written by Mark Shirrefs, this “triolgy” (actually 4 episodes) follows the adventures of a Jasper Morello, airship navigator from the city of Gothia. The films are set in a somewhat dystopian world with a decidedly steampunk look and feel. It’s in the graphical representation of that world, full of arcane Victorian machinery, elaborate airships, cranes, gantries, gears and attendant intricate objects that the silhouette format becomes a brilliant choice. Though not strictly limited to silhouettes, the backgrounds can be rich with detail at times, the characters are all simply black cut-out shapes, with the eerie exception of one characters glasses. The detail in the backgrounds is handled with a subdued chromatic range and blended with the silhouetted characters to make a harmonious whole.

There is a site devoted to the films, The Gothia Gazette, done in period style and fun to explore. It includes a trailer and you can order all four stories on DVD. Much better than the trailer, though, in demonstrating how effective these stories are, is the availability now of the entire first short, Jasper Morello and the Lost Airship, on YouTube. You can see all three segments of that short pulled together on the Wired blog Table of Malcontents.

Given that the characters are simply black silhouettes, the piece is remarkably effective, and affecting, even if a bit gruesome. The design, drawing and production values of these shorts have a unique look and feel and enough atmosphere to put many feature movies to shame.

Link via Wired

Roberto Parada is an American illustrator who specializes in editorial illustrations with portraits of rock music luninaries, sports stars, movie and TV personalities and political figures.

At times his portrait images are quite straightforward, like his straight-on takes on John Stewart (above) or Michael Caine. Often, though, there is a nice twist or bit of wry commentary, like his portrait of Gary Shandling as Moby Dick (the whale, not Ahab), Jack Black as a Shakespearian actor in his Nacho Libre garb, or George W. Bush as Nero.

Parada can also be quite funny, and his paintings often make reference to art history, as in his “portrait” of Homer Simpson as a real person, as if painted by Andrew Wyeth, and his hilarious portrait of Canadian Billionaire Ken Thompson posed with his dog as a send-up of Da Vinci’s Lady With an Ermine.

Parada was born in a New Jersey suburb of New York and studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He started his career working in acrylics but gained the confidence to switch to oil by talking with illustrator Tim O’Brien.

Parada’s paintings in oil can be smoothly blended or, as in the case of the John Stewart image, quite painterly. (There is nice big reproduction of that image in the July 2006 Communication Arts Illustration Annual.)

In addition to the galleries, his web site features a selection of prints that can be ordered, and that section also includes images that are not seen in the other galleries. You will also find images painted from life in the Studio section.

In the About section of his site, Parada tells of his encounter at age 33 with a life threatening condition known as Severe Aplastic Anemia, or severe bone marrow failure. After undergoing drastic treatments of aggressive immune surpression, he was the fortunate recipient of an anonymous donor bone marrow transplant. The News page tells about his eventual meeting with the donor who saved his life.

There is a good chance that exposure to benzine, a toxic chemical found in paint thinners and other art materials, was the trigger for his condition. Parada still works in oils, but is vigilant about the use of non-toxic art materials, including his paint thinners, and has become concerned with raising awareness about the dangers of toxic art materials as well as awareness of bone marrow donation.

A personal note: Although I don’t have any first hand knowledge of bone marrow transplants, I am myself the fortunate recipient of a kidney transplant (14 years as of last September), and I encourage you to take a look a the links that Parada provides to the National Bone Marrow Donor Program and other resources.

You may have also noticed my constant links on the lines and colors right sidebar to the Donate Life site, and the Gift of a Lifetime site. The latter is a fascinating web documentary on organ and tissue donation. I was glad to be a member of the team, coordinated by FusionSpark Media, that created this site. I did the illustration and programming for the Flash module called The Interactive Body, which uses animation and interactivity to inform about the organs and tissues that can be transplanted. There is also information on the Gift of a Lifetime site about bone marrow donation.