Today marks the 117th anniversary of the birth of acclaimed artist and film maker Oskar Fischinger. To celebrate the occasion, Google has focused on his work for their daily doodle.
If you click the Google icon on their homepage you will be taken to what appears to be a basic music sequencer. As you click the diamonds, a corresponding tone will play at the interval and order specified.
The real fun starts when you see the fantastic shapes made by the sound, which is indicative of Fischinger’s artistic style. The Verge explains why his work is so impressive:
His work was groundbreaking; the films were visually stunning despite being created decades before the existence of computer graphics or music videos. Leon Hong, creative lead on the Doodle, expresses just how impressive Fischinger’s work was, and still is. “Each frame [was] carefully drawn or photographed by hand,” says Hong. “A master of motion and color, Fischinger spent months — sometimes years — planning and handcrafting his animations.”
An example of one such hand-crafted visual masterpiece is his 1938 classic short film “An Optical Poem,” featured above. All the visuals were created from paper cutouts and move thanks to stop motion animation.
People are already having fun with the new Google doodle, YouTuber Dave Wave used it to cover Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You.”
And today we celebrate...