It’s been far too long since Jérémy Clapin’s last short, Skhizein, an existentialist/mental illness drama that ranks among the more original pieces of animated filmmaking in the past decade. The trailer above is for his latest short Palmipedarium, which he’s readying for release in 2012. This new ten-minute piece was produced entirely with free, open-source Blender software. I can’t wait to see it!

Check out his earlier masterpiece below:

(via @FelixMassie)

Disney is previewing the entire pilot episode—”Beck’s Beginning”—of Tron: Uprising on YouTube (sorry, US viewers only). The series, which premieres June 7 on Disney XD, takes place between the original Tron and the more recent Tron: Legacy. It follows the quest of a young program named Beck (not Jerry), who under the mentorship of Tron, leads a revolution to wrest control of The Grid from the sinister clutches of Clu.

If you’re the type of fan that geeks out over new vehicles in the Tron universe, you’ll likely have a different take than mine, but as someone who just wants to see good entertainment, I wasn’t satisfied. There’s some mad artistic talent working under art director Alberto Mielgo, but they can’t overcome the monotonous direction that alternates between flat dialogue scenes and numbingly repetitive (though impressively staged) action scenes. The leaden CG character animation, produced by Japanese studio Polygon Pictures, and ridiculous script (“There you are.” “Here I am.”) don’t help matters.

To be fair, this is just the pilot. As Tron: Uprising director Charlie Bean gets more episodes under his belt, he may yet realize the show’s full potential. On the other hand, it could just be ten more episodes of a guy jumping on a light cycle ad nauseam, which is what this pilot felt like at times.

On a sad note, the end credits include the dedication “For Pete.” That refers to a technical director on the show, Peter Kranjcevich, who passed away unexpectedly last month at the age of 36.

If you watch the episode above, please share your thoughts.

(via Super Punch)

Apparently, somebody wasn’t having a good time on the production of Illumination Entertainment’s The Lorax.

(via Aryeh David Zucker on Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page)

This is the poster (designed by Jeff Turley) for Paperman, a Disney short that’s been generating buzz for its distinctive melding of CG and hand-drawn animation. It’s the directing debut of veteran CG animator John Kahrs (Toy Story 2, Tangled, The Incredibles). Paperman will debut at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in June. It will be distributed more widely in November when it plays in front of Wreck-It Ralph.

The synopsis below is from the film’s Facebook page:

Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting… with a beautiful woman on his morning commute. Convinced the girl of his dreams is gone forever, he gets a second chance when he spots her in a skyscraper window across the avenue from his office. With only his heart, imagination and a stack of papers to get her attention, his efforts are no match for what the fates have in store for him.

I post films for many different reasons on Cartoon Brew. Laissez, Laissez Entrer Le Soleil merits a post mainly because Charles Lemor added a butt to a house. Perhaps it’s funnier if you’ve been up all night (as I have), but frankly, adding asses to inanimate objects always helps. Besides that bit of whimsy, it’s your typical short made at Supinfocom, which means it has above-average production values for a student film.

There’s a price to pay for working in visual effects, and we’re not talking about the money that students need to pay John Textor to work at Digital Domain. Many artists are faced with paying the ultimate price—a matter of life and death.

The LA Times published an important article yesterday by Richard Verrier about the health problems faced by visual effects artists and how they’re fighting back. The stories aren’t pretty:

After midnight, when the coffee and Red Bull had worn off, Sari Gennis and her co-workers would take a brisk stroll to make it through their graveyard shift. For four months straight, often seven days a week, a team of visual effects artists worked 12-hour shifts to complete the 3-D conversion of movie blockbuster Titanic. Gennis said the long hours aggravated a severe arthritis condition. She’d already had both knees replaced, and needed a third surgery, but couldn’t afford to take time off for the operation.

or:

The matte painter, who asked not to be identified for fear of damaging his career, said he nearly died when he fell asleep at the wheel after working 75 consecutive days, up to 17 hours a day, doing visual effects work on National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The money was good — $1,000 a day — but the long hours were taking a toll. Three months after his car accident, he began experiencing chest pains and was rushed to the hospital. He said emergency room nurses initially didn’t believe he was having a heart attack because he was only 37. As a freelancer, he didn’t qualify for the company insurance plan to cover his $100,000 in medical bills. His employer, the now-defunct Asylum Visual Effects, refused to hire him back.

Meanwhile, on Friday afternoon, union representatives hosted an information session for Sony Pictures Imageworks artists who are pushing to unionize the studio, a story that we covered last week on Cartoon Brew. The Animation Guild reported that the meeting was a success with over 75 Imageworks employees attending.

So will this turn out to be the VFX Spring as some are suggesting? There’s a lot of positive sentiment right now, but no one is under the illusion that working conditions will improve overnight. Animation Guild rep Steve Hulett noted on his blog that the Imageworks meeting was “only the first few steps of a long hike, but we’re going to do whatever it takes to reach out and get visual effects artists and technical directors under the big union tent.”

The documentary above offers a fascinating look at the Key Frame animation system designed by Marceli Wein and Nestor Burtnyk at the National Research Council of Canada. Besides the impressively futuristic vibe of their hardware setup, it’s also amazing to see the sophistication of their software. It may come as a surprise to many that shape tweens had been figured out as early as 1971.

The Key Frame software was used in Peter Foldes’ pioneering vector-animated shorts Metadata (1971) and Hunger (1974). Here’s my question for the CG historians: what happened to vector animation between 1974 and the early-90s? After the films by Foldes, were there any other vector animation films in the Seventies and Eighties because I’m having trouble finding many examples. It seems to me that not many artists explored the possibilities of vector animation until Web animation in the mid-Nineties brought it back into vogue.

(Thanks, Celia Bullwinkel)

Many artists have animated famous paintings before, but the husband-and-wife artistic team Rob and Nick Carter have taken it to a whole other level. They created a a three-hour animated version of an Ambrosius Bosschaert still life painting from 1618:

Every aspect of Bosschaert’s painting has been brought to life including each flower stem, insect and background scenery. The film…takes the painted scene from early morning darkness through to noon (where the film exactly resembles the original painting) into dusk and late night.

They worked with a team of nearly two dozen artists from the vfx house Moving Picture Company where they first recreated all of the painting’s elements in Maya. Then they spent two-and-a-half years animating the film. If you go to Rob and Nick’s website and click on #10, you can get a taste of the exceedingly subtle and meditative quality of the real-time animation.

This article in Computer Arts offers more details of the challenges involved in creating such a slow-paced animated sequence. The digital artwork, titled “Transforming Still Life Painting,” is being released in an edition of 12 (plus 5 artist proofs). Each one is valued at £50,000 ($80,000). The Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, which houses Bosschaert’s original painting, has already agreed to acquire one of the Carters’ digital reproductions for its collection.

(Thanks, Alex Rannie)