Showing posts with label film and animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film and animation. Show all posts

Saturday, 17 January 2015

Elephant No. 106: Elephants Never Forget


African forest elephant
Photo: Pal Teravagimov
Source: redOrbit


A couple of days ago, my friend Lucie Lamoureux sent me a link to a wonderful animated short by Alex Gendler and Avi Ofer.

It's only about five minutes long, but packs a lot of great information into those five minutes. Some of the information it contains actually seems to have been come from my original Elephant a Day blog, which is kind of cool.






Elephant Lore of the Day
Since the title of the short is Why Elephants Never Forget, today's elephant lore features a couple of memory-related stories from my original blog.

In the late nineteenth century, Toby the elephant was a popular attraction at Moore Park in Sydney, Australia. Toby could do a wide range of tricks, including removing her keeper's hat when asked, and ringing a handbell held in her trunk. Toby, like all elephants, also had a very good memory.

During a voyage along Australia's coast, a deckhand fed Toby an orange loaded with hot peppers. It was a cruel thing to do, given the sensitivity of an elephant's trunk and mouth. On a much later voyage, the same deckhand happened to be passing by, when Toby grabbed him with her trunk. She tried to dump him overboard, but he landed in the rigging and was saved.

Pangal the elephant showed a similar ability to remember an affront to his dignity. In the early nineteenth century, Pangal worked as an army pack elephant in India. Pangal was a remarkably clever elephant, and had decided that he was willing to carry only a certain amount of weight. If he was given a heavier load, he would simply pull off the excess and throw it on the ground. Pangal was by no means unwilling to carry things; he just had a clear idea of what was fair.

One day, the army quartermaster lost his temper at Pangal. He threw a tent peg at the elephant's head, yelled at him, then stormed off.

A few days later, as Pangal was walking from the camp to a waterhole, he happened to pass the quartermaster. Seizing the man in his trunk, Pangal placed him high in a tamarind tree overhanging the road. Pangal then calmly walked away, leaving the quartermaster clinging to the branches until rescued by members of his brigade.


Forest Elephant
Photo: Patricia Rosengrave
Source: University of Canterbury, Christchurch


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Thursday, 15 January 2015

Elephant No. 104: Elephants Sitting on Cars


Amarula the elephant sits on a car, Pilansberg Game Reserve, South Africa, 2011.
Photo: Great Stock/Barcroft Media
Source: Metro UK


A couple of days ago, my friend Ken Wilson sent me a video of an elephant sitting on a car in Thailand, basically squashing it. I commented that it would make an interesting addition to this blog's Elephant Lore of the Day, and he said that there are actually many similar videos on YouTube.

Deciding that it was clearly something elephants like to do, I figured it deserved an entire blog post.

Here is the original video Ken sent.




In it, an eight-year-old male elephant begins by sniffing around a car. Then he steps on the car, sits on it, and steps on it again (this time crushing the windshield) before he moves away.

I knew already that elephants are not huge fans of cars, and that they like to chase them, roll them over, and generally push them around. Sitting on cars, however, was something new to me.

This video was taken in Africa, from the inside of the car, as a bull elephant perches on the front hood.





And sometimes elephants just seem to think the hood of a car is a good place to perch.




No one is quite sure why elephants sit on cars. Some speculate that it might be a sign of aggression during mating season. Others think that elephants may simply be exploring a strange oversized object in their territory. Either way, inside a car with an elephant sitting on the hood is not a place I ever want to be.



Elephant Lore of the Day
Some elephants quite like cars. This story of a helpful elephant who fancied himself a mechanic is adapted from my original Elephant a Day blog.

In April 2010, a jeep broke down in West Midland Safari Park in Worcestershire, England. Before staffer Lawrence Bates could call for assistance, however, an elephant named Five moved in. The eighteen-year-old elephant stepped forward, got behind the jeep, and pushed it out of his enclosure.

He also decided it could do with a wash. After spraying the jeep with water from his trunk, Five picked up a sponge and dabbed at the windows and hood.

Then something even more surprising happened. According to Bob Lawrence, Director of Wildlife, "The jeep broke down again and, to our astonishment, Five came over and decided to give us a hand. He lifted the bonnet up, got the dipstick, and gave it to Lawrence. When we still couldn't get it to start, he went round the back and gave us a push. I've never seen anything like this in my life—it was absolutely incredible."


Five the elephant helps push an ailing jeep out of his enclosure.
Photo: NEWSTEAM
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/
7636466/Elephant-provides-breakdown-assistance-to-zoo-keeper.html



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Thursday, 1 January 2015

Elephant No. 90: A Tidy Little Elephant

After many months of not posting, I figured it was time to start up this blog again, this time mostly with contributions from others. Many people have kindly been sending me elephant videos, photos and fun trinkets over the past several months, so I'll be featuring them here, along with a few elephants from me.

First up, this wonderful little clip from my friend Lynn Owen, whose work I profiled in this blog about a year ago. Given the post-holiday detritus that never seems to get entirely put away, I think I need a little guy like this to help out.

Happy New Year!






Elephant Lore of the Day
People can be mighty dim at times. Despite well-publicized episodes of African elephants attacking—and even killing—people in the wild, the photograph below shows a group of Italian tourists who thought it would be great to have their photos taken near a large African elephant.

Happening upon the elephant at the Afsaal picnic area in South Africa's Kruger National Park, the Italians marched over towards the elephant and posed with it, as though it were a tame Asian elephant used to humans.

Local resident Sheree Theron and her husband warned the tourists to move back, to no avail. Luckily the elephant wasn't terribly interested in the tourists, and paid them little attention. Strangely, the tourist guide watched the incident from under a tree.

As a rule, tourists are supposed to stay inside their cars, and keep a 50-metre distance between themselves and wild elephants at all times. 

Sadly, when there are deadly encounters between elephants and humans, the elephant is often declared a "rogue" and destroyed. With elephant populations continuing to decline around the world, the loss of even one elephant to a misguided tourist is one too many, in my opinion.


Italian tourists approach a wild African elephant.
Photo: Sheree Theron
Source: http://www.dieburger.com/nuus/2014-03-19-toeriste-
waag-hul-lewe-naby-kruger-olifant


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Sunday, 10 November 2013

Elephant No. 69: Coffee Grounds




For some reason, my husband Terrence left a French press full of dry, unpressed coffee grounds when he went out of town a few days back. Since I don't really drink coffee, I decided I'd save them to make an elephant design.

I've seen commercials on television that use coffee grounds to make animations. I did toy with that idea, but I didn't really have an easy way to set up a camera on an overhead tripod, and I figured that it would require more time and expertise than I have handy today.

I had this much coffee handy, which is the equivalent of a small handful of beans, ground at home for a French press.




I began by spreading them out a bit.




Then I decided that I would try doing an animation, after all. You can see the result below. Jumpy and a bit uneven, but done in under an hour with a handheld camera that was not behaving well today. On the other hand, "jumpy and a bit uneven" perfectly describes me when I've had too much coffee.




Obviously this would have worked better with some interstitial reshaping of the coffee grounds, but it's still kind of fun. As my first stop-motion animation thing ever, it wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be, and I may even try it again sometime.





Elephant Lore of the Day
If you've heard of the mighty expensive civet-dropping coffee (kopi luwak) from Indonesia, you may not be surprised at the idea of coffee made from elephant-excreted coffee beans.

Black Ivory Coffee is made from coffee berries that are consumed by a herd of 20 elephants in northern Thailand, then plucked the next day from their dung. Said to be "earthy in flavour and smooth on the palate," the coffee is the brainchild of Canadian Blake Dinkin.

Why elephants? Part of it is apparently due to biology. According to Dinkin, an elephant stomach is like a slow cooker. "When an elephant eats coffee," he says, "its stomach acid breaks down the protein in coffee, which is a key factor in its bitterness. You end up with a cup that's very smooth, without the bitterness of regular coffee."


Blake Dinkin with some of the elephant-digested coffee berries.
Photo: Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press
Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/12/17/elephant-dung-coffee-
black-ivory-becomes-worlds-most-expensive-brew/

Conservationists at the refuge where the elephants live were initially leery of the idea. John Roberts, director of elephants at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, wondered at first about the impact of caffeine on an elephant's surprisingly delicate constitution. "My initial thought," he says, "was about caffeine—won't they get wired or addicted to coffee?" Luckily, it appears that there is no harm at all to the elephants.

Black Ivory Coffee currently sells for an amazing $1,100 per kilogram ($500 a pound), and about $50 a serving. Why so expensive? Part of it is because the process is labour-intensive, from growing the coffee, to picking the dung apart, to extracting the beans themselvs. It also takes approximately 33 kilograms (72 pounds) of raw coffee berries to produce a single kilogram (2.2 pounds) of coffee, largely because most of the beans get chewed up, broken or lost in the tall grass.

Black Ivory Coffee is now available at a few luxury resorts in places like the Maldives and Abu Dhabi, and in northern Thailand, right next to the Foundation. Dinkin gives 8% of the proceeds from the sale of Black Ivory Coffee to the Foundation and its elephants, helping the elephants to essentially support themselves. To my mind, it's a much better way for Thailand's elephants to earn a living than street begging or performing tricks for crowds.

To read more, click here. To learn more about Black Ivory Coffee, visit their website at blackivorycoffee.com.


Meena the elephant sniffs at some Black Ivory Coffee sipped by Miki Giles.
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/12/17/elephant-dung-coffee-
black-ivory-becomes-worlds-most-expensive-brew/

To Support Elephant Welfare
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Sunday, 6 October 2013

Elephant No. 34: Music Video


Orphaned baby elephant with keeper, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Kenya.
Source: http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/

I wasn't sure what to call this—mini-film, slide show, music video—so I settled for the latter. It's also a bit hard to say much about how I made it, since my process wasn't all that methodical.

Although I know how to use Final Cut Pro editing software, I opted to use iMovie for this project, because it's quick. I dislike many things about iMovie—the automatic save feature in particular—but Final Cut is more time-consuming to get it right, so I opted for iMovie today.

After a year or more of daily blogging about elephants, I have a vast mental bank of images, so it was relatively easy to source photographs from the Internet with a Google search. I also remembered to take down credit information to add to the end of my little film—although, if I were doing this professionally, I would obviously have to do more than add a credit. I hope those whose photographs I used won't mind for a blog project like this.

Next, I chose a piece of music I thought might work: "I'll Find My Way Home" by David Hobson, which I downloaded from iTunes.

After this, it was mostly a matter of sticking the photographs in a general order that seemed to work, moving them around to match the music, compressing or stretching them to fit logical breaks in the song, adding the Ken Burns effect to give the static photos a sense of movement, and generally fiddling around with it.

When I was happy with the image-song sequence, I added a quotation and credits at the end.

The total process took me three hours or so, which was about all the time I had. It has lots of flaws—and is maybe even a bit cheesy—but I'm happy with it.

If I'd had more time, I would have chosen higher-resolution photographs in some cases, and fussed around with it some more, maybe even creating some original music in Garage Band. Anyway, for better or worse, here it is. Because the viewer here is small and only of medium resolution, I've uploaded it to YouTube—my very first YouTube upload ever. You can see it on YouTube here.






Elephant Lore of the Day
Because I ran out of time today to research elephant lore, here's one of my favourite bits of lore from the original Elephant a Day blog. It was originally posted on March 21, 2012

I love this little story from Alex Edwards of Natural High Safaris. Last year at a safari camp in Tanzania's Katavi National Park, one of the normally well-behaved elephants in the area suddenly took to ripping the canvas flysheets on the camp's tents.

At first everyone assumed this was an accident, despite the fact that elephants are usually clever enough to pick their way over guy ropes and other obstacles with no trouble. The safari operators called in a tailor, who carefully sewed the tears in the sheets.

A day or two later, it happened again. This was repeated several times, until the guilty elephant was caught in the act. Resting his tusks on the flysheet at the back of a tent, he was gently pushing down on the canvas to make it rip. At first no one could figure out why this particular elephant had become so destructive. Then in occurred to them: he simply liked the noise of ripping canvas.

Because the flysheets could only be mended so many times, the safari operators came up with a clever solution. Instead of sewing the flysheets back together, they fastened on new pieces of canvas with Velcro®. The elephant still gets to enjoy the sound of tearing Velcro, but now it's easier to patch up.



African elephant near a vintage-style safari camp.
Source: http://www.vintagecamps.com/Photo_Gallery.htm


To Support Elephant Welfare
Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)  
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)
David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation
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