Sublime and surreal: Harold Lloyd art gifs!

 

Cat squash

Is this the world's worst wax museum?

So did you honestly think Madame Tussaud's cornered the market on celebrity waxworks? Guess again.

There's this place. This shabby little English museum that looks like it should be IN a museum, or else a mausoleum.The brochure informs us:

It was named after the great grandson of Madame Tussaud, the founder of the famous waxworks museum in London in 1835.

The Great Yarmouth museum’s website describes it as 'different from many wax museums, in that it remembers the stars and famous people as they were at their height of fame and influence.'

It adds: 'See your gallery of how people looked, how the passionate owners captured them at this time and preserved them for your enjoyment. Many wax museum (sic) update their models to keep the realistic to reflect the current looks or styles.

'If you are looking back to the 70s, so (sic) the stars as they were. Nostalgia and memories. Show your grand children the stars and leaders during your generation and help us bring the museum to life.'

"Museum" and "life" aren't usually used in the same sentence, but there you are. I doubt if Louis Tussaud (the Tussaud that nobody talks about) had much to do with the design of these things. I'm not going to tell you who they all are, of course! There are too many of them, and some simply confound me. As with bad taxidermy, bad waxworks are meant to be cringeworthy, provoking uneasy laughter and memories of Vincent Price melting down girls in his giant vat of paraffin. 

What I love most of all is that all the photos are exactly the same size, so I could make a gif of them in about twelve seconds. Thank you, Louis Tussaud!

But keep in mind there are (were - the place experienced a meltdown and had to close a couple of years ago) a purported 150 figures in this place, and I've only shown you 36. 

The torture chambers sound like the most interesting feature of the exhibit. Pity we'll never get to experience them.

Squid Inc.

Boy in tree

(with sister!)

What's that bird?

Laughing baby

All day, all night, Harold Lloyd

I think it started with this one. There didn't seem to be much scope for animation (if you can call it that), but that never stopped me before. The idea is that someone thinks this is a still picture, then. . . OOPS!

Similarly, this thing flips into reverse at the strangest times. This little doll was something you could win as a prize at theatres (I think) where Harold's movies were showing. There are lots of them on Pinterest and eBay, collectibles, though whether they're authentic or not is anybody's guess. The original doll was maybe 10" high and was made of oilcloth. The paper doll version, above, is likely a reconstruction.

I take no credit for these incredible Harold dolls, the likes of which I never saw while researching his life. They are on a site called Red Cap Art Dolls, links below. I might have been tempted then to buy one, and maybe stick pins in it when the novel ultimately failed. Oh well! There's something quite beautiful and something more than a little creepy about this Harold doll, not to mention effeminate. Dolls are innately creepy anyway, as I've covered in many a post. A human in miniature, they invite the best and worst kind of treatment from their owners. Come to that, it sounds like we're talking about children.

I found a total of four photos of the doll: two with hat, and two without. From the four, I made eight frames (reversing each of them to give me that added dimension of creepiness). Then, combining them every-which-way, Harold began to move, rigidly at first, clunkily, and then - as I sped up the frame speed and mixed it up a little - to dance.

http://lilliamslasher.deviantart.com/art/Harold-Lloyd-art-doll-651254316

https://www.facebook.com/redcapartdolls/

http://bluecat-neoguri.deviantart.com/art/Harold-Lloyd-1919-593856316

I am forever being blown away by the calibre of artwork on DeviantArt.com. I'm not trying to steal it! Really, not. Borrow it for a few seconds, maybe, to make hokey animations out of. Then give it back. But I want you to see this. This artist is called BlueCatNeoguri. He captures something essential about Harold, especially the hairline which is really difficult to "get". It's not a 21st century hairline, because it is combed straight back with a lot of pomade. That's what they did then, but because Harold had thick, black, unruly hair, it was forever falling out of that configuration. It was even curly when wet. That, and his blue-blue Welsh eyes (not apparent here) added to his sexiness.

I didn't make this at all - only made a gif out of an old YouTube video. In those days, meaning the 1920s, this was as good as you could get. There are still a few of these around, rocking back and forth spastically and wincing.  I hate to do this, but here is a closer shot:

Not a pretty sight. To get the taste of that one out of your mouth, here is one more by the brilliant BlueCatNeoguri of DeviantArt. Christ, how I wish I had talent!:

http://www.deviantart.com/

Totems: power and grace

During a recent visit to Stanley Park, we were knocked over by these totem poles. I can't find much information about them, except that they were "collected from all over the area". Right. Like saying the Mona Lisa was bought at a garage sale, but at least we got to enjoy them and be in awe. I put music behind this one to try to capture the mood.

The Birds: out of nowhere!

Back when I was doing all sorts of video experiments and being flagged by YouTube for using copyrighted material, I made this: a very short snippet from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, set to the dire, dark music of Finnish composer 
Einojuhani Rautavaara (photo by Ari Korkala, below). I was amazed at how neatly they dovetailed (squawk) without any real effort on my part. I think that's because Rautavaara is natural movie music - and for all I know, he actually DID write dire, dark film scores for dire, dark Finnish movies. The Scands are not known for their lightheartedness.

I was interested to realize, all over again, that Hitchcock did not use any music at all in The Birds except theme music. The squawwww-ing and skreeee-ing of those hideous birds was enough of a soundtrack. Hitchcock knew that music would only interfere.

I guess I'm not quite so clever.

The Sneeze Animations

OK, so this might just look like a whole lot of jerky animations of a guy sneezing. And it is. But if you look at each of them, they're not the same: the frames are combined and recombined in slightly different ways. 

It started off as something like this - a contact sheet, with five frames per row endlessly repeating.

These are still frames from a very short (like, three seconds) film that Edison made in 1894. It's sometimes called Fred Ott's Sneeze, maybe because it depicts Fred Ott sneezing. Stuck a feather up his nose, or huffed that sneezing powder the fetishists use on YouTube. 

When I see something like this, I have a mad desire to make it move again, to resuscitate the guy who's been dead for a hundred years, and turn his frame-frozen sneeze back into motion. To do that, I had to cut the frames in the contact sheet into little squares, re-assemble them into some semblance of film, then run them through my gif program.

As you can see, it worked fairly well. Blown up like this, Fred looks eerily realistic, even though I was working with only five frames:

Meanwhile, I found a Library of Congress video of the original, three-seconds-long masterpiece of cinema. Frankly, I think my animations look better.

If I had an alligator

If I had an alligator, which I'm not likely to do in the near future, I'd want it to look like this.

When you  see something white which is normally some other colour, you automatically think "albino". But no! My research tells me these are leucistic alligators, which means they have blue eyes (and the rest of them is ivory, not pure white). Big difference.

Leucistics are rare - I keep finding different stats on this, but one source said there are "only 12 of them in the world". I don't get this. Have they mucked and gumbooted through all the swamps of Louisiana in search of these "swamp ghosts"? Who knows how many are lurking under rotten logs, waiting to attack? The logic is that something like this would stand out like neon and wouldn't survive a predator's attack. But wouldn't an alligator be pretty handy at self-defense? What natural enemies does it have? It has survived for hundreds of millions of years without having to evolve at all. So does it matter if a handful of them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy?

Maybe it would. A white alligator hide might make tasty material for a Fendi bag. One of those purses that costs as much as the down payment on a car.

These guys are frightening, ugly and beautiful at the same time. While looking for appropriate images to make an animation (above), I found some beauties. Or uglies. 

The blue eyes seem to peer at us with some kind of expression, but they don't. This creature's brain has just one setting: FOOD. (Well, two, but the other one isn't turned on all the time.) It looks at you as if you were food, which you are. If you have a pulse, if you have warm blood - or cold blood - you're food. Do we have some primeval memory of being eaten alive by some prehistoric version of this thing? Imagine how big they were back then, given that everything was on a ridiculous scale.

This one creeps me out majorly. It's either jumping up in the air in a ballet-leap, or underwater. How would anyone get such a shot without being eaten?

Don't ever think it's smiling. It's not smiling. It is jaws on legs. It is hissing and death-roll, and then, digestion.

These three look almost poetical, except they're not. Once more I doubt the "only 12 in the world" statistic. Who runs around in the forest trying to find these? There must be more of them. Here's an extra one just lying around, basking on someone's dock.

My brothers had an old stuffed alligator (crocodile?) with cotton batting in it (the cotton batting spewing out of its stomach and having to be shoved back in). It was a real alligator, or it had been, the skin tanned like leather. I never knew where it came from. The boys played Tarzan with it, and claimed that if you turned the alligator (or crocodile) over on its back and rubbed its tummy, it would relax and become extremely docile. This is a legend along the lines of taming a bird by putting salt on its tail.

So the swamp ghost, the White Bite, the leucistic Fendi bag of Louisiana isn't a myth. Its only real enemy is humankind, which means it will probably be wiped out in short order, along with everything else.

That is the meanest face I have ever seen.

POST-SCRIPT. I never knew what I was getting into when I looked up alligator bags. I assumed they might top out at, say, $10,000.00.

But no. I found this in a post about The Five Most Expensive Purses In The World:

The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag – $261,000

Next on our list is the The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag for a little more than a quarter of a million. It’s limited edition and it’s incrusted with 334 diamonds, white gold hardware and white alligator skin. And that’s only №4!

The description does not specify if this is from an authentic leucistic alligator, or just some old garden variety Wally Gator from a golf course in Florida who had a dye job. One would think the scarcity of the variety would preclude making it into bags, even for a quarter of a million dollars. Might it be that hideous vinyl stuff we had in the '60s, which would get so hot and melty in the sun?