A Conversation is a piece combining stop-motion and digital compositing that was created by student Matt Saunders. It shows lots of creativity and promise. There are also some videos documenting the painstaking production process on his Vimeo page.

The next several Saturday nights at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles will feature a rare festival of vintage stop motion animation films. Tonight (11/15) at 7:30pm is Stop Motion Rareties featuring Starevich, Bowers’ and Svankmajer amongst much odd and unusual. Next week (11/22) at 7:30pm an entire show of George Pal Puppetoons; and on November 29th at 6pm, a fully restored 35mm print of Lou Bunin’s Alice In Wonderland (1949).

And that’s not the only animation event at the Silent Theatre this month. Spend An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt on Sunday November 30th at 7pm.

There is a beautiful copy of George Pal’s advertising short Philips Broadast of 1938 currently available on the Europa Film Treasures site. It’s almost overwhelming to see animation that’s so fun, so colorful, so individualistic and so stylish. This was produced exactly seventy years ago, yes, SEVENTY years ago, and yet it feels as fresh and contemporary as anything being produced today. Case in point: a musician on YouTube put one of his tracks over the film. While the music isn’t timed to the animation beats, this simple experiment drives home how well the animation holds up in contemporary times.

What is most amazing is that George Pal managed to achieve these wondrous results through an archaic replacement animation technique that involved carving thousands of individuals puppets. One could well assume that today’s vastly superior and powerful technologies would be capable of producing even more spectacular imagery, and yet we end up swimming in gobs of the insipid and uninspired. At the end of the day, tools are besides the point. Animation such as Pal’s requires something more…it requires elements that have been largely absent from mainstream animation for many years: the imagination of an artist and an understanding of the possibilities of the medium.

(via Mark Mayerson)

“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

I love this new channel ident for BBC2 directed by Guilherme Marcondes (of Tyger fame). I also love the behind-the-scenes photos that Guilherme posted on his Flickr. He writes about the spot:

This spot was one in a series of six (each directed by a different person) promoting some of the hosts of the most popular shows on BBC2. Bruce Parry presents some wild reality shows in the channel, like “Tribe” and “Amazon”. My job was too create a visual interpretation of Bruce’s own concerns about environment and life in a materialistic society.

We built the “ultimate exploitation machine”, powered by human beings, ravaging the land, sucking nature on one side and spitting consumer goods on the other. We placed the scene inside a mirror box to create a sense of boundlessness to the destructive process imposed by the machine.

Animation credits are:
Direction: Guilherme Marcondes
Production designers: Ryan Heck and Andy Byers
Design: Guilherme Marcondes and Douglas Alves
Animation and Compositing: Guilherme Marcondes
Additional Compositing: John Harrison

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.

$9.99 is a new clay animated feature-length movie opening in Los Angeles for an Oscar qualifying one week engagement on December 12th. It’s based on a story by Etgar Keret (Wristcutters: A Love Story), was directed by New York-based film-maker Tatia Rosenthal (Blues Clues), and produced in Australia with voice overs from Anthony La Paglia and Geoffrey Rush.

Looks intriguing. I don’t know much about it, there is no trailer online, but I’ve been told Asifa-Hollywood members will be getting an Annie screening next month.

Suzie Templeton’s contemporary stop motion retelling of Peter and the Wolf can be seen below in three parts. As we reported last week, the film is on the shortlist for possible nominees in this year’s Oscar race. Last year the film was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Short Animation Film and also won both the Annecy Cristal and Audience Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

(Thanks, Karl Cohen)