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David O'Reilly 

(*1985) is one of the most talented and visionary film makers to emerge out of Ireland in the last few years. He is a regular lecturer at animation festivals around Europe and has won numerous awards.

David O'Reilly has created sequences and props in Son of Rambow and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, as well as stage visuals for M.I.A. He has just directed the amazing video for U2's single, I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight with designer Jon Klassen in Lumiere Studios, London.

Described by many in the animation industry as a genius, O'Reilly's brilliant short Please Say Something, made entirely at home in his own room, subverts the traditional cartoon cat and mouse roles. His raw unrenderred style, which he says comes down to a matter of economy, has a beauty and expression in its own right.

His short films have garnered enormous repect from his peers in the animation field. He is a regular lecturer at animation festivals around Europe and has won numerous awards including, Best German Film - Oberhausen and Golden Bear for Best Short film - Berlinale. Animation magazine named him the rising star of animation for 2009.

Under the pseudonym of a child named Randy Peters from Chicago, his crudely drawn creation Octocat (an eight legged cat searching for his parents) gained a following through Youtube before it bursts from the 2D of MS Paint into a 3D world and epic battle. The series showcased both his brilliant animation prowess and the power of the internet as a medium for such artistic concepts.

Currently based in Berlin, the Kilkenny native who has never formally studied animation, has previously worked for the brilliant Shynola and Studio AKA in London and now works on his own with the freedom to pick and choose his projects.

 

Source: Scruff Daddy

 

 

O'Reilly is very specific about who and what inspires him. Film directors Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, Haneke, Jodorowsky, Bresson and Van Sant get a mention – as does animator Oskar Fischinger. His Fabrica cinema sessions awakened a passion for filmmaking and in January 2007 O'Reilly took himself to Berlin, where he currently resides, specifically to concentrate on a new project – a short film entitled Serial Entoptics. The film looks at the relationship between two people living in the same flat in a city – although O'Reilly candidly reveals the decision to make the characters human was something he struggled with for a while. "I've always been the first person to say that using human characters in animation is pointless and impossible," he says. "I'm very conscious of the 'uncanny valley' idea [that the closer a robot resembles a human, the more the differences between it and a real human are magnified and disturbing] but I basically cannot bring myself to do talking animals. It's just wrong. This was one of the reasons why we never see the main, male character's face until the last shot of the film. I just don't know if it's possible to empathise with a CG 'human'. The possibility of emotionally misfiring is huge."

 

Source: Creative Review

 

 

David O'Reilly, *****, berlin

Reading

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

Art in Cinema – Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (2006) by Scott MacDonald provides extensive and fascinating documentation of one of the most important film societies in American history. Art in Cinema presents complete programs presented by the legendary society; dozens of previously unavailable letters between Stauffacher, his collaborators, and filmmakers including Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Vincent Minelli, and Man Ray; a reprint of the society's original catalog, which features essays by Henry Miller and others; and a wide range of other remarkable historical documents. (Temple University Press)

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SEE ALSO

VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (2008) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/ artist theory in which artist/ practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. (VJ Theory)

Fredrik Olofsson is educated in music composition at the Royal Music Academy in Stockholm and at the Music College in Piteå. He writes software for interactive installations, fiddles with electronics and performs audiovisual pieces under the alias redFrik. (HfM Karlsruhe)

Collaborations include twelve years with the group MusicalFieldsForever, making interactive art for museums, exhibitions and public spaces. Fredrik Olofsson is also working as a researcher on the Rhyme project in Norway and teaches the computational art class at UdK in Berlin. (Digital in Berlin)

playZero (2010) by Victor Morales was originally part of an opera called Playzero made at Festspielhaus St. Pölten in June 2010. Music by Wolfgang Mitterer.

Winterreise – Songs & Places (2010) is an exploration of Franz Schubert’s iconic song cycle where different spaces intersect in order to create a new and interesting performance. Real-time visuals generated with video games, surround music based on urban field recordings and Schubert’s Winterreise lyrical part were combined. Winterreise – Songs & Places is a collaboration between Victor Morales (visuals), Ulrike Sowodniok (voice and performance) and Hannes Strobl (Music). (Winterreise – Songs & Places)

Transforma (Baris Hasselbach, Luke Bennett and Simon Krahl), a Berlin based video artist collective, combine the momentum of VJ improvisation with the power of highly composed imagery and narrative. Transforma started producing experimental video art in 2001 and have been taking their imageworld and production processes to higher levels of absurdity ever since. They have worked on promos, concert video and live cinema approaches, in collaboration with Apparat and Funkstörung among others, and have VJed in clubs in Berlin and around Europe. (CueMixMagazine)