Worth Sharing #9
May 23, 2016
TIE Fighter, Anime-style Short Film
Drawn and animated by yours truly over 4 years' worth of weekends.
I love seeing this kind of relentless obsession. TIE Fighter is a short Star Wars anime film drawn in detailed ’80s style. I’m not an anime fan but I loved Transformers and Star Wars as a kid. I remember making my mom take me to the theater in 1986 to see The Transformers: The Movie (Wikipedia IMDB Amazon).
What Paul created is beautiful. The animations, particularly the lasers and explosions. The TIE fighter launch sequence, with close-ups of the engines firing and the pedal mechanics. The fight-sequence soundtrack. It’s all so spot on and really takes me back to the original (and only true) Transformers movie. I watched it multiple times to take in every detail.
Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens
I mentioned Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix back in newsletter #2. Kirby is back with his take on The Force Awakens. In it he compares J. J. Abrams style of remixing to the style used by George Lucas and of course all the remixing done to arrive at The Force Awakens. Very much worth watching.
Lucas tended to copy scenes and shots while Abrams tends to copy major story elements. [2:02]
So The Force Awakens clearly is a remix but so is everything else. For as long as humans have been creating, we have been copying, transforming, and combining. The issue isn't the remixing in the film, it's that it's heavy on copying and lighter on transforming and combining. [6:05]
This target between the novel and the familiar is something we can all aim for. We can make our novel ideas more accessible and understandable and perhaps more impactful by copying familiar elements. And we can make our familiar ideas more fresh, exciting, and surprising by extensively remixing from diverse sources. And if you can create that perfect hybrid of the new and the old, the results can be explosive. [7:23]
—Kirby Ferguson
Also check out Kirby’s Kickstarter campaign Everything is a Remix: Star Wars Edition. It’s a chance to contribute to Kirby’s work and pick up a t-shirt. I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign because I believe in supporting work that I find value in. Speaking of what I support…
/patron
I wanted a way to show what I support. And by support I mean by giving, either financially or even better, with your time. Supporting something just with words isn’t enough in my mind. What we believe in is what we do, not what we say we do. So I made a /patron page dedicated to showing what I support.
Inspired by /now from Derek Sivers, I’ve came up with a similar format others can use to show what they give to. If you want to show what you are a patron of, make a /patron page on your website and spread the word.