Oskar Fischinger, Hitler's Least-Favorite Animator
On Tempo, YouTube
The worlds of animation, computer effects, music videos, and other forms of artistic expression involving the synchronization of sound to image all owe a considerable debt to Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), a German artist who would have celebrated his 117th birthday this year.
Fischinger is famous for taking great pains to animate his short films, which used traditional cel animation, wax or clay sculpture, and charcoal drawings. Sometimes, Fischinger would paint over Plexiglas for each frame, a laborious process even for the teams of artists used in traditional animation methods. Matching the flow of his images to music, Fischinger created what he considered to be "visual music."
Fischinger first became interested in abstract moving art when he discovered Lightplay, a 1921 short that featuring gyrating geometric symbols. Working out of Berlin, Fischinger subsidized his experimental work with jobs creating special effects for features and animated advertisements. The short films, for which he remains best known, won a number of awards at European film festivals. Many were shown in cinemas before the features, and represented the first introduction to classical music for some members of the audience.
But Fischinger's preference for the kind of non-linear, abstract work he first saw in Lightplay drew the ire of the Nazi government: Adolf Hitler had no taste for what was declared "decadent art." Leaving Germany, Fischinger found opportunities in Hollywood. The results were mixed: Working on Disney's 1940 musical Fantasia soured him on commercial filmmaking. He considered such large-scale productions "factory work."
Because his animated films were expensive and time-consuming to make and had few ways to be monetized, Fischinger eventually turned to painting. Today, his influence can be felt practically anywhere you've seen images move and shift in relation to music.
Leon Hong, a creative lead on today's Google Doodle which honors Fischinger, told The Washington Post that "despite the incredible assistance of digital tools of today, the endless amount of motion graphics we see every day on TV and digital media still don't come anywhere close to the greatness of Oskar Fischinger."
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Paris Musées Digitized More than 100,000 Major Artworks and Made Them Downloadable
"Setting Sun on the Seine at Lavacourt" by Claude Monet
Paris Musées, CC0
The museums of Paris are home to some of the most influential artworks on Earth, and if you live outside France, you no longer need a passport to see them. As Smithsonian reports, Paris Musées—the organization behind 14 of the city's iconic museums—has digitized more than 100,000 paintings and other pieces of art and made them freely available to the public.
The institutions under Paris Musées's umbrella include the Petit Palais, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Maison de Balzac. It started sharing the work in its inventory online in 2016, and has since uploaded more than 320,000 pictures.
Roughly a third of the images in that digital collection were published in January 2020. This recent update was part of Paris Musées's initiative toward embracing open-access art. Every one of the 100,000-plus images uploaded in this month fall under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means they are fully in the public domain. Works like "Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine" by Gustave Courbet, "Setting Sun on the Seine at Lavacourt" by Claude Monet, and "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" by Paul Cézanne, are now not only free to view, but free to download as well.
"Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" by Paul Cézanne
Paris Musées eventually hopes to transition all the out-of-copyright items in its collection—which comprises roughly 1 million works—to a Creative Commons Zero license. The most recent image dump is just the first round, and other art will become available gradually as the institution carefully evaluates the copyright status of each piece. It plans to someday expand its public domain artworks to external platforms like Wikimedia Commons, but for now, you can find them on Paris Musées's website.
[h/t Smithsonian]
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Apple Wants to Show Off Your Best Night Mode Photos as Part of a New Campaign
BY Ellen Gutoskey
Austin Mann, Apple
Calling all aspiring photographers who nabbed an iPhone 11 for the express purpose of trying out its fancy camera capabilities: It's time for your night mode photos to see the light of day.
As Travel + Leisure reports, Apple is currently hosting a competition to find the best night mode photos taken on an iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, or iPhone 11 Pro Max. You can submit your photos through January 29, after which a carefully selected team of experts will evaluate all submissions and announce the five winning images on March 4.
Judges include Arem Duplessis, the former design director of The New York Times Magazine; Darren Soh, an award-winning photographer from Singapore; Tyler Mitchell, the first black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue (his subject, rather memorably, was Beyoncé); and several other esteemed members of the industry.
The Golden Gate Bridge, shot on an iPhone 11 Pro.
Jude Allen, Apple
In addition to appearing on Apple's homepage and Instagram (which has more than 21 million followers), the photos could also be featured in digital campaigns, Apple stores, third-party photo exhibitions, or even on physical billboards. In addition to all the exposure, the winners will be paid a licensing fee in exchange for granting the company complete freedom to use their work for one year.
To submit your shots, you can either share them on a public Instagram, Twitter, or Weibo account with the hashtags #ShotoniPhone and #NightmodeChallenge, or email your images to shotoniphone@apple.com—just be sure to title your files in this format: 'firstname_lastname_nightmode_iPhonemodel.'
If you're new to the iPhone 11 and aren't quite sure how to snap photos in night mode, it's easier than you might realize. The feature comes on automatically in dim or dark places and decides on a capture time for you (which you can always adjust). And if you think editing your photos afterward will increase your chances of winning the competition, that's fine, too: Apple will accept photos edited in the app or even with non-Apple software.
You might want to avoid capturing the Eiffel Tower after dark, however—here's why.
[h/t Travel + Leisure]
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