If I were in LA next Monday, I’d go to see this multimedia music/animation performance by The Decemberists at UCLA’s Royce Hall. With seemingly every other band using animation for their videos nowadays, the format is in need of some fresh takes like this:

On October 19, The Decemberists will unveil Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized, a special project that takes their ambitious and acclaimed song cycle to new heights for its final American performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles. This unique live experience will feature The Decemberists in collaboration with four filmmakers—Guilherme Marcondes, Julia Pott, Peter Sluszka and Santa Maria—each of whom have created animation to accompany a section of the music. Flux commissioned the films and worked with Hornet Inc. who produced them. This is a one time only - not to be missed - live experience. The film will later be released on iTunes.

Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. This is the trailer for Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized.

Here are two non-narrative pieces that are quite pleasing to the eye. Adam Avilla and Tony Benna have joined forces to “try our might at becoming an artistic superpower.”

“Our most recent project spawned a notion to animate one of the most unruly mediums known to man: Yarn. After two cold months in a dark warehouse bedroom (which we transformed into a shooting stage) the spot was complete. The result of the exploration left us conjoined at the temple and deprived of precious vitamin D.”

Lucky is the collaboration between Melbourne based All India Radio and Darcy Prendergast’s animation company Dee Pee Studios

“It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after to frame to create entire sequences of animation, sometimes taking a whole night to shoot.”

We’ve posted often about Jules Engel, and now the iotaCenter has released a DVD of his later, rarely seen experimental works. Jules Engel: Selected Works, Volume I is a collection of fifteen animated films from the famed artist, animator and educator.

Engel, who started as a inbetweener on Columbia Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons, went on to become a major influence at Disney during it’s golden age, a key artist and designer at UPA in their heyday, a founder of Format Films, a beloved teacher at Cal Arts, an acclaimed abstract artist and experimental animator.

Check out the excerpts (below) from his 1963 personal film Carnival and see excerpts from others films contained on the DVD at iotacenter.org.

Chances are you’ve seen this film on every other site this week, but Combo, the latest work by Blu (Muto) and David Ellis is an epic mindtrip. Created in just under a week at the Fame festival in Italy.

There’s a “creative grooming” trend happening in the US right now. Some of the more spectacular results have been photographed by poodle paparazzo Ren Netherland, who travels around the country in a bus which functions as a mobile photography studio.

To see more “Poodle Doodles” including a Poodle Fairy, a Poodle Chicken, and a Poodle Jack Sparrow, go here.

You’ll never look at an apple the same way again after Ecological Apple, an unsettling experimental piece by Swedish artist Andreas Soderberg. It’s standard time-lapse photography edited in After Effects with time remap and camera shakes.

Also appearing online are a number of time-lapse films, like the one below by Eric Spiegelman, that capture the fires happening in LA. Nature is clearly the most awesome special fx animator.

(Ecological Apple video via Kottke)