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Animagic Museum of Animation Special Effects & Art
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
5 reviews for Animagic Museum of Animation Special Effects & Art
5 reviews in English
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Review from Jennifer O.
Tolland, CT
4/27/2012
I'll second that this is totally the place for a beginner and kids will thoroughly enjoy themselves.
Eugene Mamut has an interesting collection of special effects, and asked some good questions of my 6 year old to let him explain what was going on with each. He showed us some differences between different styles of animation.
The video that W made was uploaded on his website for sharing and Will had a great time! -
Review from Alex M.
Manhattan, NY
1/11/2012
My girlfriend and I spent a weekend in western Mass recently, and since we're into movies decided to check out Animagic in Lee. It's just a small storefront among real estate agencies and flower shops, but inside it's a different world. The museum part was pretty interesting - we saw a real Oscar, watched some cool videos, and learned about how different effects for movies like Predator and The Matrix were created from the founder of the museum, Eugene. (I don't want to include any spoilers here, but these effects are all pretty intuitive, but ingenious nonetheless). We also learned about different animation techniques, like stop motion and a new technology that uses puppets for animated films.
Another family with kids was there as well, and it's clear that there are different displays for the kids and the adults. Eugene was great at entertaining both the kids and covering the things that we adults were interested in as well.
After the tour, we were asked if we wanted to do the Animation Workshop. We said "Sure" and before we knew it, we were sitting around a table in the museum sculpting little clay figurines. Then Eugene pulled out the pre-made movie set to create our movie. Since we created everything on a Mac with iMovie, I was mentally taking notes to do this in the future with my niece at home. Then we did some simple post-production, like adding titles and music and voila - our movies were ready. As noted in the other reviews, the movies are certainly not professional quality, but for people who have never created any animation, this was a great intro.
We really enjoyed our time at Animagic! We'll be back here with some nieces and nephews next time! -
Review from Peter C.
San Francisco, CA
12/27/2011
I had travelled to the Berkshires from the West coast and found ourselves facing a cold and rainy day looking for something to do with the family. Animagic was suggested to me as somewhere to take my daughter. In addition to us, there was one other family there with a boy who seemed about 10 years old. The whole group really enjoyed the experience and I would recommend adding it to your intinerary if you are vacationing in the Berkshires area.
The museum is located in a storefront, so it's not the Museum of Natural History or anything, but that's one of the things I liked. This is much more of a hands-on of place, casual attitude, charming space, lots of things to look at. It's not just plopping the kids in front of a TV screen to watch a video, they are actually making something. We learned some interesting facts about the special effects biz out here (who knew), but mostly it was just about having fun, and to that end Animagic served it's purpose.
Overall a nice place to spend some time with the family, long enough to remain interesting, but not too long that the little ones get antsy.
Quick note on the (oddly) long negative review from an earlier poster. This place is definitely geared towards children and/or an open-minded grown-up. If you do animation or work in showbiz prefessionally...not for you! It would be like Chef Gordon Ramsey taking a Cooking 101 class, doesn't make sense. Also apparently last fall they moved to a bigger store up the street, the place we took the class was fine. -
Review from Austin J. A.
Wellesley, MA
9/22/2011 1 photo
Remember carnival sideshows and the relentless shilling that happens out in front of the midway tent? This is what it feels like to visit AniMagic.
The handbill reads, "50% off Make Your Own Animation in our Hands-On Studio," and "$20 workshop includes 2-hr training, materials, and your creation on take-home video (reg. $40). Good for dates!
Absolutely not.
What we received for $40 instead of a 2-hour, make-your-own-animation workshop was:
- a 10-minute tour of all the overpriced optical illusion toys in the dusty gift shop
- a 10 minute "free" tour of their "museum," a small room full of sight gags and posters, and an expanding sphere that drops out of nowhere, just barely missing your head. We weren't allowed to linger over the really interesting things - a family tree of all the animators and animation studios in the Berkshires, the actual crab puppets from a food commercial, a technical Oscar - and were instead hustled (pun intended) from one thing to another, with a long, incomprehensible spiel accompanying our visits with long-outdated computer equipment, trompe l'oeil toys, and a mechanical Donald Duck on a high wire. I feared for my eyes during the entire visit.
- a bait-and-switch video (really! on VHS!) of claymation (plasticine stop-motion animation), claimed to have been created by the guy's workshop students (we'll get to that in a minute).
- 20 minutes of doing exactly what this guy impatiently told us to do, followed by being hustled (again, pun intended) out the front door.
In that twenty minute (not two hour!) workshop, we were treated to a machine-gun-fire rapidity of commands by a person who had absolutely no intention of allowing us to make our own animation. We were told to sit at a table in a back workshop and were nonconsensually videotaped as he told us exactly what to do with the plasticine. When the camera was off, he was barking orders at us to make simple stick figures, which were NOTHING like the melting snowmen, dancing flowers, and amazing animals of the teaser video. I felt like I was promised a visit with a unicorn, but when I pulled back the oilcloth tent flap, I was treated to a brief glimpse of a dog with a tree branch secured precariously to its forehead with a necktie.
As dreams of a romantic afternoon evaporated in the exact way that my forehead sweat didn't, I noticed his sign, printed in ALL CAPS, which read "THIS IS NOT BURGER KING. YOU DO IT *MY* WAY." No joke, if you have to make a sign to explain to people that they will adhere directly to your totalitarian clay regime, you probably shouldn't be in the business of working with small humans. Any humans.
We've both made movies before, and - in the case of my beloved, who's taught classes in animation - brought some measure of competent experience to the table. I had hoped to learn something further about new technology's role in stop-motion animation, and have time to build my character, the backbone of any subject-based creative endeavor. Instead, I was given two minutes to cut legs out of a tube and shove a head onto a trunk with exacting precision, what this guy called "surgery." He had his spiel down pat. When I tried to ask if I could make something else, he said "NO." When I asked if I could make my figure an animal, he said "NO!" He sighed, and growled, and grimaced, and flat-out took our pieces away several times and just built them his damn self. It was as if we weren't there, because every time he noticed we had any selfhood, he seemed supremely annoyed at our very existence. Show's over, folks, keep on moving.
The best part of this celluloid turd was when we went back into the main room and were told how to press computer buttons on a 1998 iMac running iMovie 2.0, which apparently required a complex call-and-response system to actuate still photos from a twenty-year-old, 0.5 megapixel webcam in the shape of a giant eye. I prayed that this eye would bear witness to our ordeal. Instead, we were told that we were making different movies (not one, as we at least expected to do), and were told what the movies would be about. We were not allowed to touch the figures more than twice apiece, because we were Doin' It Wrong, so he positioned the figures and told us when to take the pictures and basically used us to fulfill a role he had long before decided needed to be filled with deformed, ugly clay monstrosities. I imagined that a clay horse would run through the set and rescue my poor puppet, or, at the very least, trample it into the earth so it could avoid suffering further.
He wouldn't let us do any post-production, forcing us instead to watch as he looped "our" terrible movies, added copyright-infringing music, and tasteless audio effects. We didn't even get a copy - we had to hunt on YouTube for it! When we were led out with a Bye Now after 40 minutes, we knew we'd been had.
It's so unfortunate, too, because these people are so very talented (Irena is WAY more talented than he is). Run!! -
Review from Paul R.
Greenfield, MA
10/27/2011
My experience as an educator was one of what a great place to bring kids of all ages. For one is taken to the behind the scenes of animation and given an opportunity to have a hands on experience of making one's own animation. I found the staff friendly and very helpful and knowledgeable. I saw that one of the reviews mentioned that the equipment was old, an old imac, etc, which didn't affect my experience, on asking about the equipment, being curious if you needed special equipment to do this, I was pleasantly surprised that it could be done with equipment many schools are still using. I have passed on to friends and family that when in the area, they should have it on list of places to visit and experience.
Specialties
Interactive hands-on activities for kids and adults. Learn how to make your own animated movies and special effects in our workshop.
Meet the Business Owner: Eugene M.
Special effects pioneer Eugene Mamut worked in the special effects industry for over 40 years. He created the "Camouflage Effect" in Predator, the "Elastic Effect" for commercials, and helped create the "Bullet-Time Effect" for the Matrix. His optical bench is memorialized in the Museum of Moving Pictures New York, he is listed in IMDb, and he has been nominated for several Academy Awards. In 1987, he won an Academy Award for his work.
In the 1990s, Eugene moved to the Berkshires to work at Mass Illusion and discovered a vibrant special effects and animation community. When he retired, he started Animagic, a labor of love for his life's work. Today Eugene helps people learn the art and science behind the movies.
