Fungus Zone Blog - by Mike Horowitz https://fungus.zone/ Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:40:00 -0400 20000 As an animator, you train your eye for observation. You might see a person gesticulate and note, “Oh, that’s an interesting hand motion!” or watch someone interact with an object and think, “I wouldn’t have thought to do it like that.” You collect all these observations and mentally catalogue them for future reference. Before long you also start to appreciate the immeasurably small ways other animators make decisions about their own work. Every now and then, those works come to you like small gifts, to cherish and carry around with you. Enter the Pickpocket animation from Betrayal At Club Low (2022). https://fungus.zone/posts/2024-04-19-In-Praise-of-the-Pickpocket.html Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:40:00 -0400 I hesitate to call this a “Best Of 2023” list because they may not be current works, or ones that most other people are putting on their end of year lists. Neither are they flawless or ultra-polished works. But they’re certainly those that have lodged themselves firmly in my thoughts (outside of baby/toddler-development books). These are works that provoked dialogue or questions about themselves, about my relationship to them, or their relation to other works at the time that I engaged with them. Or all three at once! https://fungus.zone/posts/2024-01-10-A-2023-Wrap-Up.html Wed, 10 Jan 2024 14:10:00 -0400 What’s more interesting to me aren’t the things PsychOdyssey’s subjects talk about but what they all know and make an effort to not talk about: the elephants in the room. And not the (figurative) ones operating the cameras. Here are eight truths about our industry that I noticed while watching. https://fungus.zone/posts/2023-06-25-The-Elephants-In-The-Meeting-Room.html Sun, 25 Jun 2023 16:23:25 -0400 This year was a big year: I finally caught up on One Piece! During my last read-through attempt, I only made it up to the timeskip and had to dip out to give myself (and my emotions) a bit of a breather. Thankfully, with the Wano arc wrapping up this year, it was a good enough reason to give it another go. And I’m glad I did. https://fungus.zone/posts/2023-01-20-The-Beating-Rubber-Heart-of-One-Piece.html Fri, 20 Jan 2023 20:00:00 -0400 In literary forms alone you can find flash fiction, short stories, novellas, and novels, for example, with a general agreement on the length of each one. In film, there are feature length films and short films, and in scripted television, you can find full series, limited series, and made-for-TV movies. Across all of these examples, there’s a consensus about the length of each category that sets up audience expectations, and provides creators with an array of viable options to tell the story they want to tell, in a way (and in a length of time) that best serves its purpose. So why don’t narrative video games have formal genres to convey their length, too? https://fungus.zone/posts/2022-07-31-The-Next-Novella.html Sun, 31 Jul 2022 20:40:02 -0400 Let’s delve deeper, then. I want to understand what makes the Mother games Motherlike because not doing so feels like a disservice to the games themselves. It’s a worthwhile exercise, as players, to better reflect on our own experiences. I hope that by understanding these core features we can better map their influence on other games, and to find new titles in its lineage that do more than simply pay homage. https://fungus.zone/posts/2022-06-18-Whats-In-A-Mother.html Sat, 18 Jun 2022 20:55:36 -0400 Animation is an incredibly versatile medium. From silhouettes to paint-on-glass to stop-motion to CGI, it’s a medium that offers filmmakers a near limitless swath of tools to bring their ideas to life. Yet, why does animation work? There’s plenty of insight into the mechanics of the medium already; we know how animation works on a technical level. But if we ask why, we start to delve into some interesting ideas about animation’s untapped potential. And curiously enough, a major clue came to me while learning about puppetry and theater... https://fungus.zone/posts/2022-05-02-Puppetrys-Irrational-and-Intellectual-Gap.html Mon, 02 May 2022 03:53:00 -0400 https://fungus.zone/posts/2022-04-12-The-Fungus-Manifesto.html Tue, 12 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400