Music video for Work Day by UK band It Hugs Back. Directed by former Aardman animator Martin Davies, with a behind the scenes photo gallery posted on Flickr.

(Thanks, Robert Pisani)

If Fritz the Cat had been done as an artsy independent animated film, it might look something like “Welcome to the Third World,” an offbeat video directed by Webster Colcord for The Dandy Warhols. It was produced through the now-defunct Orphanage. Artists who worked on the piece inlcude Jan Van Buyten and Eric Kilkenny, as well as a crew of students from DeAnza College and Ex’pression College of Digital Art.

(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

Here’s something different - and a nice way to start the week: French pop star Gregoire’s music video for his new song Rue Des Etoiles. It was directed and created by the Le French Bulldog animation studio.

“Mykonos” is a visually mesmerizing paper cut-out music video for Fleet Foxes, directed and animated by Sean Pecknold with artwork by illustrator Jesse Brown. Full video credits, along with a ‘making of’ short can be viewed here.

This music video by Japanese artist Kondoh Akino (gallery website in English) constantly surprised me with its playful use of the human form and its strikingly designed movement. As best as I can discern, it appears to be from 2002 and was created when Akino was a student in art school.

(Thanks, Susie Wilson and Saschka Unseld)

Paul Greer created this viral for part of a Nizlopi song called “Without You.”

Though it’s not a recent piece, I thought it looked interesting visually so I asked Paul if he could describe the process he used to achieve this look. Here’s his explanation:

The budget for the viral was very slight and I had about three official working days to get it done, coming up with a method that would be effective and efficient was therefore key. Back in the days before computers, myself and fellow students experimented with ways of producing un-registrated animation, drawing on rolls of paper and cards and the like. To integrate this thought process into CGI has been something that has always fascinated me, and I have used it before on projects like “The Boy with the Incredible Brain”.

The whole sequence was drawn as curves in Maya, with a Wacom and then “inbetweened” using deformers. I didn’t have time to do any kind of shoot, so I photographed work colleagues, friends and family memebers, then rotoscoped the stills. These were worked in with improvised drawing and rotoscoped CGI (I had a second hand beating heart knocking about). The final result was very simple illustration of the lyrical content of the song, I would’ve like to have taken it further. I did storyboard the whole song, with a psychdelic bit for the upbeat section in the middle, but they only wanted the last third of the song done.

Pixilation by Yuval & Merav Nathan, for musician Oren Lavie.

Animator Elliot Cowan recently posted the following animation on YouTube featuring his characters Boxhead and Roundhead. The short uses an unlicensed piece of music by They Might Be Giants:

So how did the band respond to this? They called up Elliot, while he was taking a dump no less, to tell him they liked the animation and that he should change the credit at the end of the video from “Used Without Permission” to “Used With Permission.”

There are so many video sharing website contests and the like which encourage you to submit your work because you’ll get some “exposure.” If Elliot’s story proves anything, exposure is available to everybody, it’s free, and it doesn’t require silly contests. The key is to simply get your work out there. If it’s good, people will discover it and who knows what can come out of that.