I saw Tim Beckhardt’s Pellet Gun in Ottawa a couple weeks ago. It’s a student film from RISD. I liked the crisp linear style and it made me chuckle even though I didn’t get it. Tim explained it to me afterward, and the explanation was quite reasonable, which made me wonder why I didn’t get it in the first place.

A graduation film by Sjors Vervoort of The Netherlands, with sound design by Steven Aerts. While I would have liked to see the interplay between the cardboard creatures and their real-world surroundings pushed even further, there’s some imaginative ideas throughout the piece.

Leah Shore just graduated from RISD. This is her thesis film. This is either genius or nonsense. I’ll let you decide. It’s NSFW.

Vurup is a team of animation students working together in Buenos Aires, who have created their first short film called Insert Coin. The students, who hail from Argentina, Mexico and Colombia, are Gabriel Fermanelli, Leonardo Campasso, Bruno Olguin, German De Vivero, and Luz Lazzaro. Their short is a good example of how to tell a story in under one minute, and there are creative moments of drawn character animation throughout the piece. Hopefully we’ll see more from them in the future.

My Day is a short about personal space. It’s a third-year project by Irish animation student Eamonn O’Neill. It was made at IADT Dun Laoghaire. I like how he’s exploring the visual possibilities in a largely dialogue-driven concept.

Today, two of the biggest names in animation—John Kricfalusi and Bill Plympton—each announced that they were starting up classes to teach animation. Their models are very different.

John K. is calling his “Cartoon College.” It is a free, invitation-only private blog in which he’ll spend time giving individual notes to the promising artists that apply. He admits in this introductory post about the program that part of the motivation for giving away free training is selfishness:

The kind of cartoons I make require these skills, and I can’t afford to teach them during a production. Cartoon budgets go down every year and so I need people who already understand what I’m looking for and are functional. I always want to do layouts in my cartoons - it’s what separates my cartoons visually from so many others, but layout is mostly not done anywhere anymore. Nowadays, they just design the characters from a couple different angles, take them into Flash and then move the still pieces around like paper doll puppets. I can’t make my kind of custom stories and acting using that system. I need talented and SKILLED people to help. It’s worth it to me to help out before a production begins, but it will be up to you to practice and apply and critique yourselves according to what you learn. I will give some critiques and everyone here can learn from each other’s studies.

Bill Plympton is starting up his class in the real-world. Beginning September 16, for 14 consecutive weeks, he will teach a two-hour class every Wednesday evening from 6-8pm. It will take place at his studio in Chelsea, Manhattan. The cost is $1000 per person and is limited to 15 students. According to the description which he posted on Facebook, students will:

Learn how you can make amazing films that can earn money. Learn the tricks of drawing, design, layouts, storyboards, writing, humor, directing, backgrounds and editing. Learn the business of animation, budgets, funding, selling, distribution, festivals and cost-cutting tricks. Call (212) 741-0322 or email at Plymptoons (at) aol (dot) com for more information.

Student film by Nicolas de Gorter from Ecole Emile Cohl. Not perfect, but it looks like he was having fun with the idea.

(via Animation Blog)

Today also marks the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which upwards of 100,000 Japanese people were killed instantly by an atom bomb dropped by the US military. In commemoration, here is Dan Blank’s Shadowplay, a moving stop-motion film about the “permanent shadows imprinted on the city’s walls and streets by the intense flash, creating indelible images from the exact moment the bomb hit.” Made at NYU, it won a gold Student Emmy as well as a bronze Student Academy Award.