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.