The featured link of the month is dedicated to the recently deceased Bill Etra, a pioneer in the field of video art and a co-inventer of the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer system. Etra helped make the videotape an expressive artistic medium, creating a device that could mold images in real time.
This month’s cartoon I Love to Singa (1936) is Tex Avery’s adaptation of The Jazz Singer, featuring a musical owl family that gives birth to 3 musical prodigies and a jazz singer.
This month’s explore is dedicated to the voice actor of “Owl Jolson” in this month’s featured cartoon – “I Love to Singa”. Tommy Bond was an American actor who got his start as a child in comedy series Our Gang or The Little Rascals, eventually working as a voice actor in cartoons and behind the scenes in his later years.
Miscredited as Bernice Hansen in a variety of animated cartoons, Bernice Edna Hansell was a voice actress known for her squealing voice in countless cartoons of the 1930’s, providing the sqeaks for Mickey Mouse, small children and animals.
Earlycinema.com provides an excellent introduction to the first decade of motion pictures and the developments which helped shape cinema as we know it today.
A magician increasingly enlarges a playing card for his audience to see, until it is life-size. He then changes the card to a few of the face cards, animating real people out of and back into them, finally animating himself in and out as well.
Auguste and Louis Lumière were the first filmmakers in history. The invented and patented the cinematograph, the first technology that allowed the viewing of films by multiple people at once. Their film Sortie de l’usine Lumière de Lyon (1895) is considered to be the first “true” film ever produced.
George Méliès was one of the earliest filmmakers, and one of the few who experimented with the vast trick and illusionist possibilities of film, inventing a wide range of cinematic techniques. These techniques include substitution splices, multiple exposure, time lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour.