Comments on: Khoda

Khoda

dhruva — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:45:38 -0800

Khoda :"What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film."

By: Defenestrator

Defenestrator — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:59:57 -0800

Whoah. Impressive.

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:06:44 -0800

That varied from kind of cool to extremely cool over the course of it. Nice.

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:12:03 -0800

His "paintings" are hideous, animating them and layering effects over the top doesn't really improve them. Another example of compensation for lack of ideas and ability with plain old rote slog. This wouldn't even make an acceptable low budget nu-metal video.

By: hellphish

hellphish — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:17:15 -0800

Requesting link to your portfolio, fire&wings.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:20:10 -0800

Yeah, you can only evaluate art if you are a skilled artist!

By: defenestration

defenestration — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:21:46 -0800

In the comments, the creator explains that it was done by (painstakingly) painting over individual frames of a 3D computer animation. It took a student two years, but a group of pros—working in concert—could achieve this style with much more expediency. I'd love to see a feature done in this GCI-meets-painterly-rotoscope fashion. I dig. Particularly impressive as a student project.

By: defenestration

defenestration — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:24:02 -0800

Note: I'm not particularly fond of the style and aesthetic, either. Or a lot of the direction choices, for that matter. Wait, that really means that I don't really like the film itself. But the idea!

By: defenestration

defenestration — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:26:17 -0800

(that's a whole lotta really)

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:26:21 -0800

1 Second Film did it first.

By: chunking express

chunking express — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:29:17 -0800

People need to lay off the haterade. This is hype like DJ HYPE.

By: Saxon Kane

Saxon Kane — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:30:33 -0800

What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? You have an animated film?

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:31:26 -0800

That deeply satisfied an aesthetic hunger I didn't even know I had. I look forward to other executions of the same concept.

By: wastelands

wastelands — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:32:52 -0800

defenestration, isn't that exactly what Waking Life did?

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:33:20 -0800

This is a cool concept and I really love the running sequence. The narrative didn't really catch me, though... it felt like imagery the artist thought was cool jumbled together.

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:36:38 -0800

Waking life was like the squigglevision take on this.

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:38:08 -0800

Rotoscoping from wikipedia.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:39:29 -0800

wastelands, Waking Life was digitally rotoscoped live action footage. This seems like the opposite, kinda sorta: digitally generated footage, that is then duplicated with physical paintings.

By: defenestration

defenestration — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:41:04 -0800

wastelands: Yeah, sort of. It was shot on video, then rotoscoped. They also had some of the animation reflect what the people were saying, which was rather cool. But if you rotoscope over CGI, you don't even have to start with a representation of reality. Also, I meant a feature-length narrative film. That is done really well. Preferably by Pixar, cuz they gots style and the smarts.

By: Liquidwolf

Liquidwolf — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:52:23 -0800

Wow, nice work. Music could have been better, but great animation and look.

By: Science!

Science! — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:53:30 -0800

Heh. I read this as "every time you pause it you see a painting of a face" and spent the first minute pausing it over and over desperately trying to find a face somewhere in the frame.

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:34:22 -0800

His efforts are to be praised, certainly, but...I'm a little at a loss what makes this particular efforts different from traditional stop-action animated cells? Great job, sure, but I'm not sure what makes this particular film more worthy of FP status than...well, any old-school animated film, say.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:39:28 -0800

Awesome.

By: tybeet

tybeet — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:41:16 -0800

I was initially wondering how he could have possibly had the patience to paint and shoot, and piece together the frames, but they're all "digital paintings", which makes it markedly less impressive.

By: muymuy

muymuy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:50:07 -0800

...so does this mean he has 6000 like paintings lying stacked in a corner somewhere :s also i second the point that, as the haters have pointed out, this effect can be achieved much easier and to with better results to boot digitally without having to go through the process of making paintings with umm, actual gooey paint. though i'm sure its good practice!! >.> cuz i mean (to state the obvious), when its all said and done, you arent looking at the paintings anyways, you are looking at images of the paintings (one of this silly simulucrumbcakes i think :D :D :D ). i will go stand in fire&wings corner in stating that, the impressive time and effort put forth notwithstanding, it is aesthetically average at best and his basic technical ability, while not awful, is indistiguished. anyways, i hope his dad rests in pieces!

By: echo target

echo target — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:01:34 -0800

The story is meh, but I do like the style. Could be replicated more efficiently with the brush tools in Photoshop, of course. He's managed to control the squigglyness surprisingly well. I remember that Waking Life so disoriented me with its squiggling and boiling and vibrating and sliding and distorting that immediately upon leaving the theater, I walked directly into a pole.

By: RGD

RGD — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:18:25 -0800

I'd rather have Brakhage.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:38:02 -0800

By: azarbayejani

azarbayejani — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:39:26 -0800

Don't get the story, but the style is ridiculous. Just so you know, the title means God in Farsi.

By: Falconetti

Falconetti — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:59:56 -0800

Should have been called Kesafat.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:11:08 -0800

Art student unearths lost art of animation. Guy in black beret declares it "genius".

By: krinklyfig

krinklyfig — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:32:51 -0800

tybeet writes "I was initially wondering how he could have possibly had the patience to paint and shoot, and piece together the frames, but they're all 'digital paintings', which makes it markedly less impressive." Aw. I was hoping it was a whole bunch of canvasses. Though I guess that would get pretty expensive and consume a lot of space storing them all. It's probably faster than trying to do stop-motion animation with marble sculpture. That would be pretty cool.

By: cazoo

cazoo — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:47:44 -0800

Your favorite film student thesis project sucks.

By: Enron Hubbard

Enron Hubbard — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:24:06 -0800

The first thing that I thought of when seeing the film was how much it reminds me of Willis O'brien's fingerprints left in King Kong's fur during the stop-motion animation process.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:53:55 -0800

It's probably faster than trying to do stop-motion animation with marble sculpture. That would be pretty cool. posted by krinklyfig at 11:32 PM on January 20 Okay, now that would be art I would enjoy. Seeing a row of stone busts of a man sneezing in stop-motion would be impressive.

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:28:58 -0800

EmpressCallipygos, one big difference is that in traditional animation, they don't redraw the background for every frame. Also (not that this necessarily matters), it's my understanding that the "real" animators only draw one frame for every half-second or so, and the inbetween frames are done by interns and/or Koreans. I know that this was the case 20 years ago, but in the early days of animation each frame was indeed drawn by hand in just this way. It's a yeoman's effort, to be sure....I just wish the actual story held up a bit better, is all. It's like how I can respect the effort of someone who wrote an entire book typing on an Underwood with only their left hand, but if that effort only yielded a mediocre result, I'm not going to recommend it to people.

By: Joey Bagels

Joey Bagels — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:16:06 -0800

As Barack Obama might say, this is old school: "Eye Myth" by Stan Brakhage (I couldn't quickly find a YouTube version of "Night Music," which comprised hundreds of images painted directly on IMAX film stock, but you'll get the idea. Try to imagine it projected, on a fairly big screen.)

By: seagull.apollo

seagull.apollo — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:45:20 -0800

It seems to me that the people who dislike this are forgetting that this isn't really about making an incredible movie. It's about having an idea, and doing it, regardless of how long it takes. That's what makes it cool. Who cares if you don't like the art! Appreciate the thousands of hours of work put into it. To me, it's much like Monet at the end of his life. It's great that he captured every photon of light that was hitting those waterlilies, but the overall result is not to my liking. Still, the execution of vision is impressive, regardless. It's the intensity that counts, people, not the result!

By: krinklyfig

krinklyfig — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:00:35 -0800

seagull.apollo writes "It's the intensity that counts, people, not the result!" Ah, I must remember to put that on my resume.

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:01:53 -0800

If only my dvd player wouldn't go to sleep after 5 or 10 minutes this might make sense.

By: Mister Moofoo

Mister Moofoo — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:59:04 -0800

Wow. I'm gonna do something artlike as soon as I get home, because it's been far too long since I have.

By: seagull.apollo

seagull.apollo — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:15:57 -0800

Wow. I'm gonna do something artlike as soon as I get home, because it's been far too long since I have. One point for Khoda!