You Know What’s Amazing?

This:

It’s amazing to me how much technology has changed the world just within my lifetime. Hell, just within the last couple of years.

Art has always pushed the boundaries of technology, even if that technology was little more than powdered pigment blown onto a cave wall with a hollow reed. But now, now artists can create entire worlds.

The above short film, Legacy, is the third such created by Grzegorz Jonajtys, a 36 years old VFX artist and animator/director from Warsaw, Poland who now lives in San Francisco. He’s no amateur, having worked on a number of high end projects for Digital Kitchen, Cafefx, Syndicate, and Industrial Light and Magic, but still – Legacy is what he does in his spare time, and his second short film, Ark, won the Siggraph Electronic Theater Best of Show Award in 2007 and was nominated for a Golden Palm at Cannes.

Even ten years ago, the depth and lifelike detail of a little film like Legacy would have been impossible - short of several million dollars and a cadre of special effects wizards – and it still wouldn’t have been as good. These films and those like them represent an emerging generation of artists who use computer systems, software, and the Internet as a medium of expression - as paint is for painters and clay is to sculptors.

While it’s true that nearly anybody can create realistic images using tools like photoshop and digital animator, it takes an artist and a story teller to do what Jonajtys did above.

I wonder if some day, little films like this will be regarded the same way sketches and doodles by Van Gogh, Da Vinci, or Picasso are regarded today?