Politics and ethics aside, I keep being drawn to the pure graphic language of Propaganda art from around the world. It's use of beauty, emotion, symbolism, bold graphic imagery, regional tradition, messaging and typography combine to make persuasive communications. There's a mix of overall styles in this Chinese Propaganda Poster collection, but for me to make sense of them I've grouped them loosely into Joyous, Children, Oddly Modern and Militant.
Here's the next installment from The Arcade Flyer Archive (TAFA) - all the flyers here have a Space theme, and just out of habit I've also included the Star Wars flyers separately - enjoy! For more flyers visit http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=home
I've been going through the site for a couple of nights and have only been through a fraction of it's content, phew it's dense...but I can look at this stuff until I drop, and it's a pleasure to drop after a night of these graphics. Here's the first post, which is a mix of retro go-faster game & sports styles, cute and character based styles and then photographic people, robots & typographic flyers. The Space based collection follows in the next post...
Retro Games & Sports
Cutesy & Character
People, Robots & Type
"The Arcade Flyer Archive (TAFA) is a digital repository for advertisement flyers that are used by the coin-operated amusement industry to promote the sales of its games. Over time flyers represent much more than a marketing brochure. They capture a unique blend of the industry's history, graphic design trends and advertising campaigns. Most importantly, they bring out the nostalgia of countless people who have grown up with the culture of video games, pinball machines and arcade games. Unique cabinet designs, attractive artwork and real screen shots -- all of which represent the visual language of coin-operated games, make flyers sought after items for collectors and effective tools for restoring games to their original factory specifications." Source: the 'About Us' section of the archive site
"...with about one machine for every twenty-three people..." there's a lot to look at in the world of Japanese vending and here's some interesting ones I've found, including (of course) robots, eggs, batteries, umbrella's, games, classical busts, plants and beetles!
Remember the animation of the Death Star that was shown to pilots in the Rebel Alliance?...Course you do - well the computer graphics for the first Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1977 were created by Larry Cuba at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information on the lab, visit the website www.evl.uic.edu and Larry Cuba at www.well.com/user/cuba and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Cuba Image source: http://www.empireonline.com/features/history-of-cgi/p3
...Other early Larry Cuba Computer Graphics
"(1985) Calculated Movements by Larry Cuba is an example of early video art using software developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). The video has a minimalist/ambient original sound piece."
Watch the whole film, it's broken into 14 parts - here's Part 1 of 14, they're are all available on http://www.youtube.com/user/jambedavdar#p/u and you can watch & cycle through them all on youtube. Jambe has also made 'Building Empire' and 'Returning to Jedi', see part 1 of both below and find all the other parts on youtube also. See Jambe's blog here: http://buildingempire.blogspot.com/
The Background Four years in the making - Star Wars Begins is an unofficial commentary to Star Wars by editor Jambe Davdar. It offers an insight into the development and creation of film. The documentary combines video from the movie itself with seen and unseen behind the scenes footage, rare audio from the cast and crew, alternate angles, bloopers, reconstructed scenes, text facts and more to give an in-depth look at the process which brought the film to the big screen. Duration: 2hrs 18mins
"Phenomenal. Honestly - just...stupendous. I can't say enough about it - I've been a fan since it came out and I learned 20 things in Part 1 alone. Now I'm honestly pissed the studio couldn't make something this incredible and release it on the DVD. And all of that has nothing to do that it was made by a FAN? I can't imagine how much work went into this - and to think it's the best SW Doc I've ever seen. Amazing." byrnesmp, youtube fan comment
Building Empire
Returning to Jedi
Thanks to @gavrov for tweeting about these films...
"The legion of space invaders are attempting to take over the earth, but first they must establish a staging ground on the surface of the moon. Your mission is to prevent the moon from being taken. You must single handedly destroy each faction of the space invader army, and you must not let a single alien touch down on the moon's surface, or the humanity's future will be over."
And so it begins...
The Artwork
Tomohiro Nishikado's Original Sketches for Space Invaders
Click on any tile to start a note playing & increase notes to taste. If you click a square and drag your mouse around you can automatically fill in multiple blocks, oh and you have to refresh your browser to start again. G'wan, have a play...
