The information that Kenny gave us in that email, we couldn’t have asked for any more. He was insanely helpful and we managed to gather so much information from the email with secret emails, links and images that we would have never been able to find online. I sent him this in reply:
“Wow Kenny, I couldn’t have asked for a better and actually pretty humorous reply! I appreciate all the information you have given me there and appreciate the time you took to write all that too so thanks for that! haha. Oh and obviously thanks for revealing your secret to me, absolute massive help. Will really give me and my group the edge in the presentation. Taken everything on board. Now comes the shit part of putting all that into my own words! Or maybe i could lie and pull off something like you did here, claim it was all my own discovery haha. Funny actually, reading through all that, i don’t know how no one did actually pick it up, especially when as you say Chris Martin is a superstar and wouldn’t have had time to do all of that. Also especially with the fact that obviously your friend passed away too (my condolences to you guys and his family by the way) which meant less hands to pull it all off. So, congrats for doing such a good job of keeping it secret till now!
 And yeah i saw that interview about that guy claiming you copied him. Was a load of bull, they were obviously just jealous of your success over theres. But yeah that reply could come in quite handy, obviously that wasn’t available on the web so that will do nicely.
But honestly, thank you so much again. Been a real big help. Most of the other groups in my class haven’t heard any news back from who they have emailed asking for help, so means a lot that you took the time out of your day to help.
 Keep up the good work. You guys are an inspiration.



Best Wishes

Callum.”

So in the end, we managed to gather more information than we could possibly ask for. We managed to find out where they are working now, their massive and incredible secret about how they were able to pull off such a lie and not to mention Kenny also gave me his Facebook and blog and special pages so i can find out what he is up to in the future so i can keep close contact with him in case i desire his help again. 
Overall, i am stunned about their secret. The fact that they were able to cover up their work to all the press was unite humorous and very clever. It also makes you feel sometimes you don’t have to work too hard if there is an easier option. Although it is not the best advice, it could save you a lot of time whilst still being able to pull off an incredible animation. So i thoroughly enjoyed researching the video and finding out about Shynola and am so grateful i got the opportunity to speak to such a helpful and hardworking person. Him and the rest of his team have really inspired me with their stop motion animation and can see myself referring to it a lot in future projects and a lot of inspiration will come from it. 

The information that Kenny gave us in that email, we couldn’t have asked for any more. He was insanely helpful and we managed to gather so much information from the email with secret emails, links and images that we would have never been able to find online. I sent him this in reply:
“Wow Kenny, I couldn’t have asked for a better and actually pretty humorous reply! I appreciate all the information you have given me there and appreciate the time you took to write all that too so thanks for that! haha. Oh and obviously thanks for revealing your secret to me, absolute massive help. Will really give me and my group the edge in the presentation. Taken everything on board. Now comes the shit part of putting all that into my own words! Or maybe i could lie and pull off something like you did here, claim it was all my own discovery haha. Funny actually, reading through all that, i don’t know how no one did actually pick it up, especially when as you say Chris Martin is a superstar and wouldn’t have had time to do all of that. Also especially with the fact that obviously your friend passed away too (my condolences to you guys and his family by the way) which meant less hands to pull it all off. So, congrats for doing such a good job of keeping it secret till now!
 And yeah i saw that interview about that guy claiming you copied him. Was a load of bull, they were obviously just jealous of your success over theres. But yeah that reply could come in quite handy, obviously that wasn’t available on the web so that will do nicely.
But honestly, thank you so much again. Been a real big help. Most of the other groups in my class haven’t heard any news back from who they have emailed asking for help, so means a lot that you took the time out of your day to help.
 Keep up the good work. You guys are an inspiration.



Best Wishes

Callum.”

So in the end, we managed to gather more information than we could possibly ask for. We managed to find out where they are working now, their massive and incredible secret about how they were able to pull off such a lie and not to mention Kenny also gave me his Facebook and blog and special pages so i can find out what he is up to in the future so i can keep close contact with him in case i desire his help again. 
Overall, i am stunned about their secret. The fact that they were able to cover up their work to all the press was unite humorous and very clever. It also makes you feel sometimes you don’t have to work too hard if there is an easier option. Although it is not the best advice, it could save you a lot of time whilst still being able to pull off an incredible animation. So i thoroughly enjoyed researching the video and finding out about Shynola and am so grateful i got the opportunity to speak to such a helpful and hardworking person. Him and the rest of his team have really inspired me with their stop motion animation and can see myself referring to it a lot in future projects and a lot of inspiration will come from it. 

I obviously was gobsmacked and so surprised. This was so interesting to find a professional group that had actually cheated in their own animation! I had to find out more so i immediately replied to this email with this response:

Oh wow, really??!! Didn’t see that one coming! That’s really interesting.
Yeah if you wouldn’t mind? Anything you have: images, movies etc will be very helpful. We present on Tuesday, so that’s changed everything. Will have to alternate our approach to it all haha.
But of course first question would obviously be then what was your actual technique for the animation then? How did you go about making it? What was your methods and how did you pull it off looking like how it is whilst making it look like it was done with chalk?

Callum


And in response, I got this extremely long and helpful essay chock full of information that Kenny sent me:

I was put in a group for researching and finding out about a music video of our choice with Raymond and Rob. My first initial and instant thought was to look into the video for ‘Rubber Lover Girl’ by a fairly unknown band known as ‘Marmaduke Duke’. Here’s a link for their video:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2exTquOiUM&ob=Avon.

I found this video extremely intriguing as soon as i saw it years ago for the first time. It is very unique i have never seen anything like it before. I have always been a fan of unusual and weird stuff, especially with drawings. So, the characters in this video are very interesting to look at and are very inspiring for my creations in drawings and my imagination. 
I did suggest this video to both Rob and Raymond and although they were both interested in it too, i couldn’t manage to find much information at all about how the video was made or who even the animators and developers were. So there was no use in going for it. 
However, Rob came up with the suggestion of a fairly recent video of major worldwide band Coldplay who had released a song and video known as ‘Strawberry Swing’. Here is the link for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb9X5jMofEo&ob=av2n

I instantly fell in love with it. We also were originally thinking of possibly another Coldplay video but decided against it after we saw this. I am a huge fan of stop motion animation so i was immediately drawn into the unusual chalk drawings and delightful story being told in the video.

We all decided to split into different sections about how we would find out information about this video. Rob and Raymond tackled finding who the developers were and any useful links and interviews they could find. We soon found out that the developers were a group known as Shynola. Here is a wikipedia link if you want to know the basic details about them: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shynola

We all found different and numerous interviews telling us about how it was made, here are a couple of links:

http://www.coldplay.com/newsdetail.php?id=448

http://www.animationblog.org/2009/10/shynola-strawberry-swing-coldplay-2009.html

Here, one of the developers Kenny explained how they drew numerous chalk drawings surrounding lead singer of Coldplay Chris Martin. as he lay on the floor. As he acted out numerous and different poses and movements, the chalk drawings differed to create an animation telling the story of a superhero off on a mission to save a damsel in distress from a tormenting giant squirrel. 
Soon, we found Kennys email address so i personally wrote him an email trying to find out what we could from him. Here’s the email that i sent:

Soon after, i received this reply from Kenny: 

Hey Callum

this fairytale tells the story of three pigs who are sent out in the world by their mother to learn to survive independently and alone and find their own fortune.
each pig decides to make themselves a home out of a certain material. the first and least intelligent pig chooses to make his house out of straw. the second of the pigs settles with sticks. however, the smartest pig of the three instead chooses wisely and decides to make his house from bricks.
things are going smoothly until the story takes an unexpected twist to drive the story forward on a darker path. a wolf decides to terrorise the pigs. he first visits the pig who’s house is made from straw. he knocks and utters the words “little pig, little pig, please let me in.” in to which the pig replies “no, not on the hair of my chinny chin chin.” an irritated wolf strikes back with “then i’ll huff, and i’ll puff, and i’ll blow your house down.” the wolf then gobbles up the first little pig. the wolf re-in acts the same scenario resulting with the second pig in turn being eaten too. 
fortunately, the story doesn’t end badly. the wolf approaches the third and final pig’s brick house repeating the same episode of dialogue. however, this time the wolf is unable to blow down the house as it is too sturdy. which leads him to an idea to climb down the chimney. 
unknown to the wolf, the pig is expecting this and settles a pot of hot cauldron of water at the foot of the chimney. the wolf casually jumps down into the pot, burning him to death. fin.

Animation

Animation is an illusion of movement created by displaying a series of drawings, pictures of frames. It combines various pictures and puts them together to form the simulation of a continuous motion. Software applications such as Flash and After Effects are only a couple of programmes among many that can be used to create animation. Cartoons on television is one example of animation.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/animation.html

Fairy Tales
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features fantasy characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, giants and usually magic or enchantments. The stories may nonetheless be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described) and explicitly moral tales, including beast fables. Colloquially, a “fairy tale” or “fairy story” can also mean any far-fetched story or tall tale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_tale

High Culture

Much of high culture consists of the appreciation of what is sometimes called “High Art”. This term is rather broader than Arnold’s definition and besides literature includes music, visual arts (especially painting), and traditional forms of the performing arts, including some cinema. The decorative arts would not generally be considered High Art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture

Magic
The art of producing illusions as entertainment by the use of sleight of hand, deceptive devices, or conjuring. Can also be said as the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control or supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/magic

Popular Culture
The totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture

Storytelling
A story is more generally agreed to be a specific structure of narrative with a specific style and set of characters and which includes a sense of completeness. Through stories we explain how things are, why they are, and our role and purpose. It is the live, person-to-person oral and physical presentation of a story to an audience. “Telling” involves direct contact between teller and listener. It mandates the direct presentation of the story by the teller. The teller’s role is to prepare and present the necessary language, vocalization, and physicality to effectively and efficiently communicate the images of a story. The listener’s role is to actively create the vivid, multi-sensory images, actions, characters, and events—-the reality—-of the story in their mind based on the performance by the teller, and on their past experiences, beliefs, and understandings. The completed story happens in the mind of the listener, unique and personal for each individual.

http://www.eldrbarry.net/roos/st_defn.htm 

(Source: theinturnet)

(via theinturnet)

(Source: theinturnet)

(Source: kimlundgren, via 0mphalophobia)