Visited the Barbican gallery with Ellen,(http://elmosketches.blogspot.com/) on 25th August, and saw some realy cool stuff. they had all the famous animations in history playing and we walked through watching one after the other. I saw a few stop motion animations aswell including the great pioneer Willis O'brian, whos early work, 'The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy' was being played. The film is a 1917 American silent animated comedy that premiered in 1915, and is one of O'Brien's only wholly animated films.

They had a replica armature of O'brians 1933 King Kong figure, along side a Skeliton armature from Ray Harryhausens' 1963 Columbia Pictures fantasy feature film 'Jason and the Argonauts'.


Not sure where which aniamtion these replacemnt heads are from :/

I saw a fantistic animation that i havent seen before. 'The Tale of the Fox' is a French stop-motion animation by, pioneer, Ladislas Starevich. Its was his first fully animated feature film, based on the tales of Renard the Fox. Although the animation was finished in Paris after an 18-month period (1929-1930), there were major problems with adding a soundtrack to the film. Eventually, funding was given for a German soundtrack by the Nazi regime (Goethe had written a classic version of the Renard legend) and this version had its premiere in Berlin in April 1937. The film was released eight months before Disney's Snow White, it is the world's sixth-ever animated feature film, and the second to use puppet animation.

I also saw the puppets which would have been used for this aniamtion but was unfortuantely let down by the rubbish quality of my phone camera, i never take my SLR to a museum because its much easier to get away with a phone camera, i did have a Soney Ericsson W995 which has an amazing 8mp camera, but my rubbish up grade gave me a 3mp camea on a Sony Erricsson Xperia x8. Part of me wants to go back and take the photos again on my old phone. never the less, amazing armatures with incredible detail.

This was an amazing thing to just stop and look at for a good 15 mins, its very rare that you get to see a prefeshionals work like this. This is the Were-Rabbit armature replica from DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Animations, first feature-length Wallace and Gromit film, 'Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' 2005. Realy annoyed that the photographs came out so dark!

Also visited Tate Modern

There was some preety cool stuff, alot of it is kept in for quiet a while so I've seen it before. Thought these red stairs were preety well done, made entirely out of netting and wire, looks kind of like x-raying a house :D.