Yellow Cake is a new short film by Nick Cross, an Ottawa-based animator who has worked for everyone from Nickelodeon to Spumco over the course of his career. He calls Yellow Cake a “lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth.” Animated in Flash, with digitally painted backgrounds, the fine-tuned muted color palette, retro-styled animation and the symphonic, almost saccharine, music all work to lure you into a tale of adorable blue creatures who spend all day baking and then eating their own delicious yellow cakes. But soon the tide turns, and Nick’s film explores a modern parable of terrorism and war, addressing our own attention span in a devastating way.
Hot off the festival circuit, Tim Bollinger of Via Grafik recently shared his latest short “Between” with us. This dark, surreal piece travels through grounds and walls and into moments stuck in time. As Tim puts it, “It’s a journey through worlds of the subconscious, allowing us to catch sinister glimpses of the human psyche’s ambivalence.”
Despite the mix of techniques (stop-motion, still photos animation in 2.5D, 3D elements, etc) the film still possesses a consuming visceral and visual cohesion.
Check out these three recent projects from the Brazilian Birdo Studio: Sempre Livre is a poppy, colorful Flash animated spot that was made in just 2 weeks for agency Samurai. Birdo, designed, directed, animated and handled the script as well and said they’re “proud to be able to make a commercial for sanitary napkins completely free of blue liquids!” Amen to that.
Pode Acreditar (You Can Believe) is a fun cel-animated music video, with comical and fantastic drawings appearing over the live-action shots of Marcelo D2 and Seu Jorge. In concept, it can be compared to the D.A.N.C.E. video, the Kid Cudi video or any of the many VH1 and MTV promos like this one from Click 3x that have used the same idea. Yet the personal drawing style and execution here don’t make it seem derivative at all, after all, it’s just a technique and a process.
Finally, the 33rd São Paulo International Film Festival is a collaborative project directed by Amir Admoni with characters designed by the world-renowned graffiti artists Os Gemeos. Birdo handled character animation for the festival opener.
Three cool, new, diverse projects from a small and very capable character animation studio. Fly high, Birdo, fly high!
Taking a sculptural approach, three of the Lexus’ new features are represented through visual analogy. As some car work seems to exploit the peak of technical and stylistic saturation, it’s always refreshing to see directors take a more subtle approach.
Though this spot was produced while at Rabbit, Raf has recently joined Skunk for US representation.
Since F5 last April, I’ve received a slew of emails asking how people can get their hands on a DVD of the F5 RE:PLAY films. Never fear: Stash has swooped in to save the day.
Stash 60 is a special two-disc set that includes 14 films created for the F5 RE:PLAY Film Festival.
As a reminder, the RE:PLAY festival invited filmmakers from around the world to create original short projects for the F5 festival last April in New York City. The result was an astounding array of innovative, memorable work that has helped keep the flame of F5 burning strong.
While we’re on the topic of Stash, we received a review copy of Short Films Vol. 1, and it’s definitely worth discussing.
Focusing on non-commercial, mostly narrative works, this DVD signals an extension of Stash’s influence to a wider, more general audience.
The 30 films (with a cumulative runtime of 2:32) include work from some Motionographer favorites, including Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 fame), Roman Coppola, Gaelle Denis, Johny Kelly, Shilo, Three Legged Legs and Run Wrake. There’s also a healthy smattering of student work—all of which rivals the quality of the professional work. The majority of the collection is based in animation, but there are enough live-action and hybrid works to keep you guessing.
Network branding doesn’t get a lot of attention here on Motionographer. We tend to favor the quick-cut, visual slam-dances of advertising and music videos over the comparatively conservative design systems that attempt to express a television network’s ethos.
It’s easy to forget that TV’s largest advertisers are the networks themselves. Combine IDs, graphics, promos and all the other elements of a traditional network package, and you’re staring up at a staggering mountain of deliverables—and that’s leaving out the demands of multi-platform efforts for the web, mobile devices and emerging media.
To make matters trickier still, all the elements must cohere to one another while allowing for the network to evolve, to grow.
For the first in a series of features looking at the design processes behind network branding, we enlisted the help of Dominique Elliott, Professor of Motion Media Design at SCAD. This summer, Dominique was embedded in the offices of RIOT Atlanta as they worked on launching a new integrated web/TV network called Halogen, going live today in the United States and online. She talked to creative director Jeff Doud about their process and shared her findings with us.
Happy Friday, Mographer fans! And what better way to celebrate the end of the week, than with a timely dose of ‘issue’ animation.
La Moustache, the new animation company operating out of Montreal have created these compelling animation segments for the acclaimed new documentary H2Oil. The documentary, produced by Loaded pictures exposes the ‘enterprise of epic proportions’, which is the Alberta Oil sands industry.
So what’s up with extracting oil (or bitumen rather) from Alberta’s oil sands and why do we need to know about this? Well extracting bitumen from oil sands (Often referred to as tar sands) is a hugely energy intensive process, requiring industrial scale heating (using natural gas) and 4 barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of oil. So right there you have the depletion of the planet’s most valuable and scarce resource, clean water, along with the burning of natural gas to create another carbon emitting fuel…and so it goes on. Add to this the explosion of ‘rare’ cancers in areas where post industrial contaminated water is let back into the environment, and you have a bona fide, 100% proof environmental catastrophe on your hands. And tar sand mining is only going to increase as the world’s conventional oil wells dry up…
Despite the animation itself being rendered by the friendly hand of James Brathwaite (of I met the Walrus fame), it makes for uncomfortable viewing and in as much it does its job perfectly. Sequences are inventive and dynamic whilst tonally staying in keeping with—and never overshadowing—the subject matter.
For me, viewing this work and the trailer for the film came as a real wake-up call. I try and keep up with environmental news as best I can, yet I still thought of tar-sand mining as the institutionalized crazy uncle who’d never actually get released. After watching these clips it’s obvious that the lunatic has well and truly taken over the asylum.
Also, please remember that budgets for documentaries and specifically documentary animation are ridiculously low, especially compared to commercials and studio features. So La Moustache have almost certainly invested much of themselves into making animation of this level for a documentary film that doesn’t yet have a wide scale theatrical release.
For a fairly neutral overview of tar-sand mining check this link.
It isn’t often that we see purely graphic animations like these spots for Tata Docomo, part of a new branding effort by Wolff Olins for a merger between two telecommunications networks in India. But in these new mnemonic animations, the elementary shapes which make up the logo come to life to become more than just a static mark. The geometric forms are modular and recombinant, reminiscent of building blocks, Colorform sets or Ed Emberly drawings: which like like the new logo can be arranged and re-arranged in many different ways. And in each of these animations the shapes are funny, playful and cheerful: characteristics that the new brand wants to embody and let its customers embrace. Simply made and charming, but not simple.
We recently posted a trailer for Hornet’s visual-collaboration with The Decemberists. However, off the tails of Monday’s premier at UCLA’s Royce Hall, it seemed appropriate to follow up with a more in-depth look, including notes from each director.
After deciding to make a film to accompany their new album, the band initially approached Jonathan Wells of Flux to curate, who in turn brought Hornet on-board to produce the pieces with three Hornet directors and a fourth. Although the assumptive budget of a project like this was a mere fraction of most commercial campaigns, this is a positive reminder that production companies are content-creation partners and curatorial entities — hopefully a sentiment that continues to permeate the mainstream.
Broken up into the four sides of the vinyl album, the directors each chose a side to work on with the decided theme of the seasons. Similar to Exquisite Corpse style projects like Psst! Pass It On, the directors were able to work independently of each other, and consulted one another when they got to the end of their section.
Here are extended cut-downs from the hour-long piece: Side A (Peter Sluszka), Side B (Julia Pott), Side C (Guilherme Marcondes) & Side D (Santa Maria)
I’m really digging this new spot from animation master Ruff Mercy for O’Neill to promote their upcoming snowboard event in Davos. His personal illustration style and unique color palette gives the spot its distinctive look. But it’s the tight combination of high-energy animation, pacing and editing that give the spot its visceral impact. What I love the most are the custom-made and hand-animated “digital” distortion effects. Nice touch!
Eyeball launches Viacom’s new Centric Network with retro-inspired type, crisp lines and earthy palettes. UPDATED: new video with behind-the-scenes footage.
Superfad taps the likes of Wycleaf Jean to promote the spirit of Haiti in Nou Se — a spot for the country’s number one cellular network, GLG and Voila.
Living Climate Change is a devoted space for the most defining design challenge of our time. It’s also a place to support fresh thinking and share provocative ideas about the future.
