Working on a tight budget? The piece below is a beautiful example of how great artwork combined with creative compositing can be just as effective as a piece of full animation. True, the movement may be limited, but the graphic thinking behind the piece is fully developed and intelligently executed. It is called “Men in Black,” and it’s a sequence based on a story by U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell. It premiered on April 16 as part of the PBS film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

The illustrations were done by Christopher Koelle of South Carolina-based Portland Studios. Animation and compositing was created by a group called The Law of Few.

(Thanks, Chuck Gammage for letting me know about this, and to Brad Constantine for finding the whole film on YouTube)

A quick follow-up to my earlier post about the pixilation shorts of Chuck Menville and Len Janson: another one of their shorts is also posted on YouTube—Stop, Look and Listen. This film was nominated for an Oscar for Live-Action Short.

Today’s post about the pixilated shorts of Chuck Menville and Len Janson makes me want to point out a more recent short in a similar technique, Iraqi Kurdistan by photojournalist Ed Kashi. It’s arguable whether the film qualifies as pixilation since it’s documenting existing action instead of designing original movement with live subjects, but the technique has its roots in pixilation and the striking results have a distinctly animated sensibility.

More about the film from its website:

Iraqi Kurdistan is an expansive look into the lives of the Kurdish people of northern Iraq. These images provide an alternative perspective on a changing culture, one different from the discord that dominates so much media coverage of the region. Documented by photojournalist Ed Kashi during a seven-week stay in 2005, the photographs of Iraqi Kurdistan are presented in flipbook-style animation; gradual changes between still images simulate motion.

Perhaps what I find most compelling about the project is how Kashi has employed animation techniques to give traditional documentary/journalistic photography a compelling narrative structure. The film, which has also been licensed by MSNBC.com, offers intriguing potential for further experiments combining hard news with animation, an area that is ripe for exploration.

Watch the film here

All praise the Internet for making available three difficult-to-find LA-produced indie animation classics—Vicious Cycles, Blaze Glory, and Sergeant Swell of the Mounties. All three shorts were directed by Len Janson and the late Chuck Menville. The films make superb use of the pixilation technique, which is the frame-by-frame manipulation of live-action subjects.

Vicious Cycles (1967)
(Note: The leader of the bad bikers is Len Janson; the leader of the top-hatted fancy bikers is Chuck Menville.)

Blaze Glory (1968)
Interesting credits on this film include TV commercial director Bob Kurtz as co-writer, and Warner Bros. animator Ken Champin in the role of the Indian.

Sergeant Swell of the Mounties (1972)
Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube

(Thanks, John Hudgens)

Student films have come along way since my day.

Our friend “DeK” has just posted this little gem by three students of the CSC, Italy’s national film school. Based on a poem with the same name written by Jacques Prévert, Page d’ecriture (”Writing Sheet”) uses hand drawn and CG to illustrate what happens when a bored child in class dreams of being free as a bird.

The filmmakers — Filippo Giacommelli, co-director, co-art director, script writer and 3D animator; Fabio Tonetto co-director, co-art director and 2D animator; and Juan Correa Diaz co-director and technical director — also have a great production blog.

CalArts: 20 Years of Experimental Animation, 1970-1990 is a website that offers for viewing nearly twenty experimental shorts created at CalArts. The selections were chosen by Jules Engel who started the experimental program at CalArts, and includes works by many well known names including Joanna Priestley, Paul Demeyer, Henry Selick, Kathy Rose, Gary Schwartz and Eric Darnell. The image above is from Pink Triangle by Bob Doucette.

(via Motiongrapher)

Every year, for the past four years, the National Film Board of Canada has been running a neat program called Hothouse. The idea is simple: bring together a group of emerging artists from various disciplines and help each of them produce an animated short in 12 weeks. It’s kind of like a boot camp for cartoonists. The latest edition of Hothouse is just getting underway and eight artists—six Canadians and two Brazilians—will each have completed a film by the end of May. Their ‘mentoring director’ is Torill Kove, whose NFB short The Danish Poet won the animated short Oscar last month. The Hothouse website includes profiles of the filmmakers and a video podcast documenting each filmmaker’s experience. The completed Hothouse shorts from the past three editions can all be seen here.

Superstar cartoonist/designer Chris Ware (Acme Novelty Library) apparently animates too. Here’s a four-minute segment he did for Showtime’s new series This American Life, based on the public radio program of the same name which interviews ordinary Americans about events in their lives. The story in this short strikes me as being more interesting than the animation, which doesn’t particularly enhance the audio track in many ways. All the same, it’s interesting to see Ware doing animation. It’d be even more interesting if he collaborated with an animator who understood his work and wanted to build on his graphic style in animation.

(Thanks, Adam Koford)