A new online drama series, Afterworld, a just-about-animated show reported to have cost $3 million for 130 episodes, launched earlier this month on MySpace TV.
There's an article about the series, created by American company Electric Farm, by Virginia Heffernan for The New York Times.
What’s best about it is the way it looks: charcoal, hazy, painterly, like nothing on television. To say the animation is rudimentary is an overstatement. Often, when Shoemaker is shown moving from, say, the bottom of an escalator to the top, we see only two still images, faintly interlaced with tracers, as if the action were witnessed in a sleepy, almost drugged, blink. This is not Disney animation, to be sure, but neither is it “South Park.” It’s more like a strange series of digitally manipulated photographs.For some reason I can't get the Afterworld videos to play on MySpace TV , but they work fine on YouTube.
And that’s where it all clicks: “Afterworld” is a comic book. It has a far-fetched story, frankly clichéd speech, a solitary hero, Marvel-style foreshortening and images that hardly move. “Afterworld” is the work of authors who think in panels.
To my eye it's exactly like a magic lantern show... mimicking movement by the use of crossfades and the occasional moveable element within the frame.
ReplyDeleteStorywise, so far it's barely entry-level SF.