Stephen Watkins, repped by Melbourne’s XYZ Studios, created “Tick,” a stylish PSA for the World Wildlife Fund. The piece, set to Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” (which has its own animated music video too), makes effective use of digital animation and CGI to create a hand-crafted feel. The agency behind the piece, Leo Burnett Sydney, gave the following brief to the filmmaker:

Sometimes it’s hard to get people to support a cause because they think, ‘I’m just one person, what can I do?’ We wanted to show individuals how their support can have a direct and positive effect on Australia’s natural environment. So we took the universal symbol for pledged support, the ticked box, and we animated it. Then that ticked box joined forces with hundreds of other animated ticks and they built habitats around some of Australia’s precious native animals so they can survive.

(Thanks, Tony Sykes)

Congrats to David O’Reilly who just won the Short Film Golden Bear at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival for his animated film Please Say Something. It’s a thrill to see animation take the top prize at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals where distinctions aren’t drawn between live-action and animation and both mediums have to compete in the same category. (Don Hertzfeldt accomplished the same feat at Sundance in 2007.) O’Reilly’s ten-minute computer-animated short, a self-described Internet turbodrama that examines the “troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future,” uses a unique narrative structure comprising 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each. Below you can watch the first five of twenty-three episodes in the series. (On a sidenote, last December I also chose Please Say Something as my pick for the year’s best online animation.)

NY animation studio PandaPanther, whose work I quite enjoy, completed a quirky three-minute short called Zodiac Race for the Onitsuka Tiger line of Japanese shoe company Asics. It celebrates the company’s 60th anniversary with the re-telling of the Zodiac Race Legend. A director’s cut of the film can be seen on the PandaPanther website along with a ‘making of’ video that gives a sense of how they combined miniature backgrounds with the CG characters.

Here is more about the project from PandaPanther:

We were approached by Amsterdam Worldwide, previously known as Strawberry frog to produce a short film, along with an in-store display of an actual 1 Meter Diorama Sneaker which is currently showing in Amsterdam. The actual shoe was used in parts of the film as a backdrop and environment and functions in real life as a miniature race track with moving parts. We were given tons of creative freedom with the characters and environments, and also worked together with a great creative team at Amsterdam Worldwide to expand their script into a full epic. Because the film is for an online campaign, we were not restricted by a set time length and thus the film expanded to 3 minutes in order to give each character some screentime and to hit on all the key moments in the story. A big challenge was to make sure everyone involved felt their Zodiac Sign was represented in some way. We really enjoyed this project, it felt like it perfectly suited us, and we got the opportunity to use many of our techniques, combining miniatures, CG and cel animation.

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.

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

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