How could Sweden, a country that is synonymous with tasteful and elegant design, turn out an animated feature that is so decrepit-looking and painful on the eyes? The trailer for Gnome and Trolls: The Secret Chamber is so pitiful that it almost plays like a parody of a children’s animated movie. A sequel called Gnomes and Trolls: The Forest Trial is already in production.

(Thanks, Tobias Lind)

Gary is a French student CG film created by Clement Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sebastien Eballard and Quentin Chaillet at Supinfocom. The stylized illustrative look, while not exactly new, is refreshing to see in a student short. Film clips and pre-production artwork can be viewed at Gary-LeFilm.com.

(Thanks, Matt Jones)

Paul Greer, who is the head of 3D at British design studio BDH, offers a description of how they made the title sequence for the BBC TV series British Style Genius by blending stop-motion with CG:

I thought you might like to know about the title sequence to the new BBC series “British Style Genius” that myself and my colleague, Orla Handley created recently at BDH.

Orla designed the concept and logo which was made up as an actual label which she then slowly and methodically unpicked and filmed in reverse using stop frame. We then took this animation and added the strings and threads in CG to give the impressions the label was being created by a giant off-screen sewing machine, the music by Metronomy helped with this feeling.

Orla took the basic animation and made 5 different versions to illustrate each fashion era described by each programme.

Yogi is going CG. Don’t worry, they’re not planning to make it nearly as appealing as the last time Yogi was three-dimensional.

(Thanks, David OReilly)

This eye-catching computer-generated animation by Glenn Marshall was created in the open-source programming language Processing. Marshall writes that after creating the application, “I just let the program run till the end of the music, I felt reluctant to interfere too much by trying to sculpt an ending, and just let the code run its own natural course.” Glenn offers more details about the process on his blog.

While the movement in the piece above was not created frame-by-frame, the results on the screen are controlled by the artist who designs the application and sets the variables that determine the look of the piece. In most digital animation (CG, Flash), allowing a computer to generate movement is a rote affair that comes in the form of tweening or other types of automation which are designed to make the movement easier to create, not more interesting to watch. Generative animation, however, allows the computer to be a creative partner alongside the artist with resulting movement that would be impossible for either an artist or computer to create by itself.

Readers, feel free to share other interesting examples of generative animation that you’ve run across recently.

(via Motion Design)

French animation studio BIBO Films is working on a new CG short called French Roast directed by Fabrice O. Joubert and with character designs by Nico Marlet. The short has a production blog—written in French but with lots of pics. The studio is also wrapping up its first feature—A Monster in Paris—directed by company founder Bibo Bergeron (co-director of Shark Tale and The Road to El Dorado).

(Thanks, Matt Jones)

AICN recently posted the above two images as part of a preview of Disney’s Bolt. So, as I understand the animation process at Disney, here is how you translate a board drawing into a final CG film frame:

1. Remove all the funny shapes in the character design and turn the character into a nondescript blob.

2. Take out any asymmetry (like the angles on the arms) and even out the pose.

3. Tone down the funny expressions.

4. Just in case there is any appeal still left in the CG model, add flat lighting and excessive texturing so the characters and background mesh into an indistinguishable dark muck.

5. Repeat this process until you have blown $150 million dollars.

David O’Reilly has built a very cool animated walk cycle that takes advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensitivity.

O’Reilly describes the effect on his blog:

“The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. This application does the exact same but updates dynamically.”

There’s been some controversy online about whether O’Reilly’s animation is actually motion-sensitive or if all the animation was completed earlier and he’s simply moving the iPhone to match the onscreen action. Regardless, the reality is that there is amazing potential for interactive cartoons on the iPhone and other motion-sensitive devices. Let’s do a little blue-sky thinking and imagine the possibilities. Instead of simply watching a cartoon, viewers can now interact and control the actions of their favorite characters. A simple tilt of your iPhone could send a character walking in any direction. A quick shake could make your character turn away from another character. Don’t feel like watching an 11-minute cartoon today? Control the pace of short and make it a four-minute cartoon. New technologies will open up new narrative possibilities for animation artists.

The linear cartoon is so 20th century. For a new generation of kids, watching a cartoon with only one ending (i.e. every cartoon today) will test the limits of their patience. It’ll be the equivalent of riding a horse-and-buggy after cars had been invented. Sure, Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese came up with a good ending for One Froggy Evening, but today’s cartoonists can come up with twenty different endings for their shorts, exploring all sorts of what-if scenarios. They can begin to understand their creations from a deeper, more psychologically complex perspective. As a viewer, if you like a particular ending, you can control your character’s actions to always achieve the same result. But every individual viewer can also change the outcome of the cartoons they watch with a simple tilt or turn of their screen. Viewers can become engaged in the universe of their favorite cartoons as never before, and it will become a much richer experience for both creator and viewer. All of this could happen, but it will take the combined efforts of programmers, animators and studios with the vision and desire to push their cartoon characters into the 21st century.

Previous Brew posts about David O’Reilly HERE, HERE and HERE.