Joel Sundberg of the Stockholm animation studio Mad Crew sent me a link to Mad Santa, a nice-looking CG holiday greeting produced at their studio.

Manchester-based vfx house AHD Imaging created this timely and clever Internet viral for the holidays:

“AHD168 is a computer generated robot who was written out of a TV advert due to credit crunched budgetary constraints. AHD168 now spends his days wandering the streets looking for a meaningful role in an animated TV project.”

(Thanks, Aaron Bynum)

The CG animated feature Delgo opened last weekend and nobody went to see it. According to Box Office Mojo, Delgo had the worst opening ever for a film that opened in more than 2,000 theaters earning just $511,290 or $237 per theater.

Moments like this really make one pause and reflect. What is the world coming to when an animated film with the voices of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Chris Kattan, Anne Bancroft, Eric Idle, Val Kilmer, Lou Gossett Jr, Malcolm McDowell, Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds and Kelly Ripa isn’t a box office blockbuster? A story that makes sense and visuals that don’t make you want to heave are quaint touches, but the filmmakers behind Delgo understood where it really counted: celebrity voice actors. They hired every B- and C-list actor this side of Dancing With the Stars and somehow still failed. You know the recession is affecting Americans deeply when they no longer want to see Chris Kattan and Kelly Ripa voicing their CG characters.

Here’s a little taste of what all of America missed last weekend.

French animation school Gobelins has released the latest batch of their student films. From a purely technical standpoint, the quality of this school’s work never ceases to amaze me. It’s certainly better than a lot of professional work that comes my way. My personal favorite in the current crop is California Love, a CG short with the design sensibilities and expressiveness of hand-drawn animation. The film was created by Lucie Arnissolle, Yann Boyer, Vincent Mahe, Mael Gourmelen and Stephen Vuillemin. At the film’s website CaliforniaLove-LeFilm.com, you can see various ‘making of’ videos showing the individual contributions of each of the team members. Solid work all around.

Another curious entry is For Sock’s Sake, which is a stop-motion short produced by one person, Carlo Vogele. Though Vogele graduated from Gobelins, he made this film during an exchange semester at CalArts. I’ve seen pieces of clothing anthropomorphized like this before but the quality of acting and personality in Vogele’s animation is particularly impressive and shows a promising animator in the making.

(Thanks, Pete Shand)

31 comments  permalink  posted in CGI, Stop Motion, Student

Studio aka’s Lost and Found

December 3, 2008 6:46 pm

Studio aka has completed a 25-minute film adaptation of the children’s book Lost and Found. The film, directed by Philip Hunt, will debut on the UK’s Channel Four on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. It’s about the friendship that develops between a boy and a lost penguin who shows up at his doorstep. The film is narrated by Jim Broadbent and scored by composer Max Richter (Waltz With Bashir). Sounds like a charming film and looks promising too.

More exclusive images from the film after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

18 comments  permalink  posted in CGI, TV

Night of the Werehog

November 22, 2008 11:00 am

Here’s the entire Sonic The Hedgehog short (mentioned previously here), released to You Tube today by Sega:

23 comments  permalink  posted in CGI, Shorts

Astro Boy teaser trailer

November 21, 2008 9:50 am

This teaser trailer for Imagi’s Astro Boy is attached to today’s release of Twilight. I love Tezuka’s original manga and TV series - and I really want to like this feature. I hope they can pull it off.

How does it look to you?

49 comments  permalink  posted in CGI, Feature Film

Sonic Unleashed

November 16, 2008 6:40 pm

This is the first six minutes from the new video game, Sonic Unleashed. (This video is in Japanese; the good stuff starts at the 40-second mark):

Sega is also releasing a separate Sonic short film, Night of the WereHog, to promote the game. I don’t know if the game itself will be good, the visuals do seem to be well executed. Is this the first time Sega, or any video game company, released an animated short to coincide with a new game?

(Thanks, Lev Polyakov)

40 comments  permalink  posted in CGI

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