If I ever get lucky enough to go to a house-party in Hell, it’s probably going to look like this music video from Zander Brimijoin and Arthur Jones for the band Man Man.

Inspired by the Day of the Dead holiday, “Mister Jung Stuffed” is brimming with rich colors and crazy ornamented skulls. The video takes the viewer on a borderline NSFW ride, filled with little details and wacky characters, such as a gay werewolf, a drunk Santa hitting on a helper, Mr. T and many others.

The video was fully illustrated by Arthur Jones himself. Animation techniques included traditional hand-painted backgrounds and stop motion effects combined with compositing to—according to Zander Brimijoin—”create something that was both slick and rough.”

Watch “Mister Jung Stuffed” on Motionographer | Visit the official site

Jean-Julien Pous’ latest short film, “Seeking You,” is a poetically ambiguous ode to sensuality, seduction and, ultimately, the cacophonous beauty of Hong Kong. Its hybrid imagery dances between the figurative and abstract, pulling the viewer into a vortex of sensory overload inspired by the film’s subject matter.

On the official movie site, Pous does a great job sharing his production process and the inspiration for the film’s look and feel, which includes Japanese Studio 4°C’s “Mindgame” and Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers.

“Seeking You” was created while Pous studied at the Vancouver Film School. You may have also seen Pous’ previous effort, Switch, an existential short co-created with Pierre Prinzbach while they attended Supinfocom in France. Pous currently lives in Hong Kong.

Watch “Seeking You” | “Seeking You” Official Site | Jean-Julien Pous’ Website

Lets kick this Monday off with some killer student work. Lilium Urbanus is a collaborative senior thesis project by Anca Risca and Joji Tsuruga, recent graduates from SVA. There are a few student works that come out every year that just blow me away and this is one of them. Very playful and polished throughout, I could easily say this is created by a studio and no one would question it.

If you are thinking of nabbing them up it looks as though Joji is already part of the Shilo machine and Anca is on the other side of the island with Nathan Love. Lucky bastards.

Also, the great music and sound design the rounds off this animation was done by Dante Nou.

Thanks Evan for the tipper!

It’s time for another After Effects New York meeting this Thursday, May 22nd @ 6:30pm at Pratt. Sean Cusson of Qmedia and Dan Opsal, Editor for CableVision’s Gameplay HD, will be sharing their work and AE secrets. AENY’s regular cache of fabulous door prizes will brighten up several people’s weeks as well.

The main reason I like these meetings, though, is because of the enthusiastic, hungry vibe from the attendees. Everyone’s there to learn and share and have a good time. It’s a nice example of New York’s community-minded design scene. See you there!

Full details on the meetings are here.

Even though we posted BLU’s amazing stop-action wall-painting as a Quickie on Monday, we’ve received tons of “check this out” emails since then. So I’ve decided to re-post the project as a full writeup, which will hopefully give it the visibility and attention it deserves.

We asked BLU to tell us a little about the project, and he shared this with us:

Everything is handmade by myself alone with a simple digital camera. All the drawings are basically improvised on the wall. I did it in Buenos Aires because it is one of the few cities where you can still paint public walls easily.

I had no idea Buenos Aires was graffiti heaven, but let’s thank them for it. If this project was five or six seconds long, it’d be pretty damn amazing. The fact that BLU sustains his level of extemporaneous ass-kicking for nearly seven minutes… well, that’s epic. Legendary even.

If you’re new to BLU, give yourself some time to wander through his site. He’s a rare talent. Lorenzo Fonda and BLU toured the Americas for a forthcoming documentary-cum-art project called Megunica, which should be pretty interesting.

(Photo from muteboy)

Here at Motionographer HQ, we spend a lot of time looking at motion graphics websites from around the world. Over the last four years of running this site (and its predecessor), I’ve seen a few ideas that work—and a few thousand that don’t. This is a short list of my best advice for creating useful, enjoyable web experiences that showcase your motion work.

1. Use QuickTime (with Fast Start).

While Flash may be the most ubiquitous media player on the web (more on Flash later), QuickTime is still the industry standard format for distribution. Some reasons for this:

• Easily downloadable
• Easily scrubbable
• Huge array of supported codecs

Perhaps the biggest reason, tough, has to do with your audience. Your site is targeted at designers, producers, agencies and other video-savvy clients. Call it brand fascism, but QuickTime is currently the expected choice for distribution. Anything else (AVIs, FLVs or, god forbid, OGMs) are regarded with a mixture of suspicion and disdain.

It’s like wearing pink to a black-and-white party. Sure, that inner rebel in you wants to do it, but you’ll be standing alone in the corner nursing a stiff martini most of the night.

Using Fast Start with Compressed Headers
One more thing on the QuickTime tip: For god’s sake, please use fast start. If you don’t enable the fast start option when compressing your video, your viewers will have to wait for your entire video to load before they see the first frame. For longer form projects, like music videos and short films, this can be reason enough for someone to skip your project entirely.

Using Fast Start is easy, but it requires QuickTime Pro (or Compressor). Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your video in QuickTime.
2. Go to File > Export…
3. In the Export drop-down, select Movie to QuickTime Movie and click Options….
4. Configure your video and audio compression settings however you like.
5. Here’s the crucial part: Make sure to check Prepare for Internet Streaming and choose Fast Start - Compressed Header from the drop-down menu.

The compressed header option losslessly crunches your movie’s header information and allows for an even quicker playback experience than fast start alone. The only reason you wouldn’t want to use the compressed header option is if you expected someone to watch your QuickTime using a player that doesn’t support compressed headers (like Quicktime for Linux and/or older, lesser known players).

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Blacklist’s Pistachios created the visuals for Douglas Coupland’s words in this unassuming little ditty on hope. The project was created at the request of Jesse Dylan, “Yes We Can” director, for Hope.Act.Change., a website promoting Barack Obama.

I watched this thing like four times in a row—not really because of the visuals, but because of the simple profundity of the message. It really is our conception of time and a belief in free will that gives birth to hope. That’s not a political message; it’s a poetic or philosophical one. It’s the kind of idea that will recur to me in various shades of meaning for months—maybe years—to come.

I post this knowing full well that there will be at least one “should have been a Quickie” comment (as though there is some limited space on the internet for full posts), but I wanted to shine the light a little brighter not just on this spot, but on the larger idea of creating bite-sized nuggets of motion that attempt to change the way we think. In the middle of a hectic afternoon, this project carved out a peaceful pause for me. I wanted to give it the chance to do the same for you.

Credits | Visit Hope.Act.Change.