Saying so much by doing so little, Un tour de Manège gets it right. It’s tactile: full of tonal and shading effects, chalky, and sprinkled in baby-powder. It’s innocent: tapping into the existential dramas of childhood, and like many works from the Gobelins school, crystallizing emotions like fear and loneliness in graphical simplicity. These moments are brief, but define a coming of age for the character, and help to humanize the inherent flaw by providing an escape from reality. Liberation by imagination.
The narrative is simple, buttressed by the fundamentals of good storytelling, and follows the same three-act structure documented at the turn of the 19th century. Much is left unexplained. The audience is left to fill in the blanks, without papering over the poetic nuance.
For their final project at VFS, Dewi Mariam and Christian Whiticar wanted to create something strong and relevant. And with an interest in the loss of biodiversity, they decided to tackle four issues in PSA form that contribute to such loss: deforestation, global warming, over-exploitation and pollution, placing emphasis on the current animals most affected by each area.
I really like the illustrative aesthetic and how animation was kept to a minimum to not overshadow the narrative.
“Whenever creating, make sure you are passionate and continually excited about what you are producing. Pre-production is so important. Never jump into something without having something solid or you may waste countless hours. All in all, be expected to work hard when you want to create something you are proud of.”
Perhaps this official description sums it up best: “Turbo is a high adrenaline short film in the tradition of The Karate Kid and Tron.”
The Karate Kid and Tron. Uh, where do I sign up?
However you spin it, USC film student Jarrett Conaway’s epic 23-minute short film is an incredibly ambitious and thoroughly entertaining MFA thesis. Born from his loves of gaming and kung fu, Turbo is a sci-fi action flick shot through with impressive vfx work and an interesting interactive gaming concept at its core.
Conaway also managed to snare some decent talent for the short, including Justin Chon (the annoyingly chipper guy from the Twilight movie).
There’s much more information on the official site, as well as a cart load of goodies for sale.
Everyone’s had those moments when the shared space of city life is just too much to bear. While in his third year of animation studies, Eamonn O’Neill brilliantly personified that urban claustrophobia as a drunken bus passenger in “My Day.”
Beyond portraying a situation that we can all relate to, Eamonn added the dizzying effects of a tumbling camera and shifting perspectives, creating a palpable vertigo that artfully echoes the confusion and awkwardness of the moment.
Justin Weber makes his directorial debut with “Juiced and Jazzed,” accompanied by the forces of Minnesota’s MAKE Visual, as they blast us back to a 1930’s-esque drunken rubber hose cartoon. The adventure follows Lulu, a seemingly innocent girl who happens upon a flask during the depths of the Prohibition Era. One drink is all it takes to get things fired up and out of control.
Justin began “Juiced and Jazzed” as his senior film at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Around the time he graduated in 2008, He had finished about 90% of the animation on paper. After being hired at MAKE, he opted to finished the cartoon there with the help of animation artists Andrew Chesworth, Aaron Quist, and Joe Kim.
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design student Elnatan Gurvitz served a nice one-two punch for his final project. First, he designed three pairs of spec sneakers (photos), a fairly impressive feat (no pun intended) in itself.
Then he busted out some 90s flavored palettes and combined them with Keith Haring-esque illustrations to create an ad promoting his kicks. The advert is as lively as the shoes, effectively building a sunny persona for his imagined sub-brand of Nike.
As a part of Tanya Cumming’s Advanced New Media class, CSULB students; Hieu Luong, Kim Winderman and Pete Martinez, put together this interpretation of the F5 Titles. With the support of Motion Theory’s Mark Kudsi, this in-camera piece (shot by Chad Liebenguth) captures a rawness stitched together with a refined quirk. Clever set-ups supported by solid art direction and a viscerally maniacal score makes this thing just work. Looks like it must have been a fun night…
Last week, we posted Alek Vacura’s elegant short film, “Without Arms,” created for his MFA thesis at Pratt Institute. Alek was nice enough to answer a few questions for us about his background and the film:
The narrative for “Without Arms” is elegantly simple. Where did the idea come from?
The idea for Without Arms came to me as I was falling asleep one night. I think some of the best ideas come when you’re not consciously trying to create them. I have always had a fascination with statues, and studied marble sculpture in Italy a few years earlier, so it seemed fitting that my thesis would head in that direction.
“Without Arms” was created for your MFA Thesis at Pratt Institute. What made you decide to go to graduate school?
I received my Bachelors in illustration from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. I always knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but I wasn’t sure that illustration was going to be enough for me. I wanted my images to move and have more depth, so I took a storyboarding class at VCU. After that I knew I wanted to get into 3D animation. So I decided to pursue a Masters in CG, even though I had no undergrad experience.
How did you decide on Pratt?
Once I decided on a Masters in 3D animation I started applying to multiple colleges. But because I had never touched a 3D program before, most schools were not willing to accept me. Pratt however caters to students like me that are going into the Digital Arts MFA program with little to no 3D experience. They offer intense introductory courses to learn the basics, which was perfect for me. I also decided on Pratt because of its reputation as one of the best art schools in the United States and because of its location in NYC.
Would you recommend Pratt to others?
Pratt has great faculty and very talented students. I had a great time there and would recommend it.
According to your Vimeo project page, “Without Arms” took three semesters to complete, two of which were completed while at The Mill. How did that arrangement work?
At the start of my second semester at Pratt, a string of lucky events granted me an invitation to tour the Mill office on August 8th, 2008. After showing them my work in progress they offered me an opportunity to complete my thesis at their facility. Once I started working at the Mill my thesis only took me 8 months to complete. Being surrounded by such talented professionals everyday motivated me to work extremely hard. 080808 is the luckiest day in the Chinese culture — it’s triple prosperity. I feel like luck was definitely on my side. I still feel like the luckiest guy in the world for being given that opportunity.
What was the most technically challenging aspect of the film?
Honestly, every aspect was a giant challenge. Before my thesis, I had only worked on class exercises and small projects. I had never worked on a project of this scale. One of the trickiest parts was the animation. The hardest part was making it subtle, which meant re-animating each shot dozens of times.
I feel like this thesis was the biggest learning experience of my life. I just kept reminding myself of something that Ed Catmull said at SIGGRAPH: “If everything is going according to plan, you’re not learning anything.”
What are you up to now?
I have been freelancing full-time as a 3D generalist at The Mill in New York City since January.
I have to admit that I was wary of reviewing Hollywood Camera Work’s Visual Effects for Directors. When the package arrived, I groaned. Seven DVDs. All about visual effects. “Great,” I thought. “When I get bored, I’ll watch paint dry instead.”
How wrong I was.
VFX for Directors, it turns out, is actually fun. Although densely educational, the material makes sense—and more importantly—it feels relevant to the art of digitally enhanced storytelling. Every chapter had me saying, “Oh, so that’s how that works.”
The classic quote “never judge a book by its cover,” definitely comes to mind in “Great Glutton Island,” a beautifully animated short by Supinfocom student director, Valere Amirault. When a school of fish-buddies band together to help their pal in a time of need, they put an unexpected twist on a fisherman’s routine.
In all the Supinfocom work we’ve seen, I’m impressed not only by the technical ability from these young filmmakers, but more importantly, by their brilliant story-telling skills as well. The
“Great Glutton Island” is no exception, with a feel-good narrative of camaraderie buoyed by slapstick and a subtle moral subtext.
Laika: A dynamic font. Watch here and test here. Cool! Made for their Bachelor Thesis by Michael Flückiger and Nicolas Kunz, Hochschule der Künste Bern 2009.
Graduating from the Vancouver Film School ’s Digital Design program, James Bartley and Jake Graydon have unveiled their final project in Invisible Wars: Redefining Aid. While the final website for the piece is still being constructed, in the meantime, viewers may notice gaps of stillness, which in final output, will be interactive opportunities for users to take part in the story.
Lovely illustration style in “The True Story of Marvin Walvis,” the final project from Ziv Arbel for her time at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Created as his final project at University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Dino Muhic’s “No Idea” is a stream of consciousness struggle with writer’s block.
