“Inside a Boy” is a fresh-looking music video for the group My Brightest Diamond. It’s directed by Spanish artist Rafa Toro. He says that he made it “with a tight schedule (barely a month and a half) and low budget (I made every step of the production, including design, animation, editing, etc…).” The illustrations in this vid are a treat for the eyes and the real highlight of the piece. This is Toro’s first major freelance animation assignment and I hope it’s not the last.

Kanye West writes on his blog that this new video for “Heartless”, directed by Hype Williams, was inspired by the rotoscope-animation in Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop. The Jetsons also make an appearance in the vid. West says, “WE RECORDED REAL PEOPLE AND THEN HAD 65 ANIMATORS IN HONG KONG HAND DRAW OVER EVERY CELL [sic] . INSPIRED BY THE MOVIE “AMERICAN POP” . HYPE SHOWED ME THE MOVIE AND I WAS SOLD.”

(Thanks, Jeremy Bernstein)

“In Our Talons” is a stop-motion music video directed by Alan Poon (repped by Circle Productions) for The Bowerbirds. It has a lovely and naturalistic, almost ethereal, feel to it. A few notes about the production:

Principle animation took 3 months. The stop-motion puppets were custom made for this video. The bird alone took over a month for the puppet fabricators to build with over 300 feathers manually sized and glued on. Most of the miniature sets were made out of foam and clay and then painted, while the clouds were made from cotton.

Credits for “In Our Talons”
Directed by Alan Poon
Produced by Circle Productions & Alan Poon
Cinematographer: Adam Makarenko
Edited by Mark Paiva/School Editing
Lead Animator: Mike Hollenbeck
Animator: Sylvie Trouve, Anibal Davila
Sculptor: Christy Langer
Lead Fabricator: Diana Savage
Set Designer: Adam Makarenko
Set Construction: Joel Harrison-Off
Visual Effects Lead: Yoga Kurniawan
Compositing: Alan Poon & Yoga Kurniawan

Hey, I really like these guys. Their work is strange - but fun.

Back in August Amid linked to a United Airlines spot by the Norwegian/Japanese animation collective SSSR. Above is their music video The Mercury Craze for Subtle. Check out their other videos F.K.O. and Swan Meat.

Now, SSSR directors Marc Reisbig and Hanne Berkaak have a new video for indie band Of Montreal for their song Id Engager. Neat stuff.

(Thanks, Jeff Kuykendall)

To teach himself Flash CS3, Russell made a fan video for the song “Water Curses” by Animal Collective. The result is a fun-to-watch piece of abstract animation. He writes in the video’s online description:

I started making this in an attempt to learn Flash CS3. There are two basic layers in this animation, a flash layer at 24fps, and a stop motion powdered charcoal layer at 12fps. They are mixed together in nifty ways with After Effects. I started to get a hang of things in the second half of the video, so, sorry if the first half isn’t as interesting.

There are more details about the making of the video posted on his blog Music to Video.

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)

I couldn’t help and notice a similarity between this music video by Kristofer Strom of Sweden…

…and this signal film for Cartoon Forum 2008 directed by Regina Welker and Max Lang of Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg’s Institute of Animation.

I’m not suggesting that either idea was copied from the other. After all, non-descript blobby creatures straight out of a Pictoplasma book and cavorting in a real-world environment is hardly anything new. Still I thought it might be interesting to show two different animated approaches to a similar problem.

(Thanks, BitterAnimator, for the Cartoon Forum link)

If Lotte Reiniger made trip-hop music videos in the 21st century, they might look something like this striking mixed-media silhouette piece produced for the Hungarian group Beat Dis. All I know about its animator, Emil Goodman, is that Emil Goodmanhe’s a 24-year-old from Hungary. There’s more of his work on his YouTube page.