Now, a quick return to the lo-fi, funny, flash animation genre, Red Medusa made these 40 spots for Hrusteam snacks, a brand that’s apparently owned by Pepsi.
Here’s my favourite two, but do check the rest of them out, and pick your own favourites! Sure to make a dull day pass quicker…!
It’s a shame I don’t read Russian, I would love to explore the Red Medusa site and actually understand what I’m reading…
Thanks Igor for the help, and Ken McLean for the tip!
Production – http://redmedusa.ru/
Sponsored by PepsiCo, Hrusteam brand
Produced by Egor Yakovlev
Designed by Boris Kravchenko
Seattle based studio Oh, Hello bring their signature style of cel animation to the Seattle International Film Fest. Like their previous work for the Pacific Science Center, their brand of animation is a much more lively take on how a film festival can bring an exciting and playful approach to its identity, while still maintaining its love of film.
I asked the guys at Oh, Hello to share some info on the project…
WONGDOODY came to us with the concept of an infinite pullback, going through world after world to convey SIFF 2010’s theme of “Inside Out”. Our immediate reaction was that we wanted to somehow incorporate the festival’s rich history and depth of movies into that basic structure.
As the largest film festival in North America, SIFF plays A LOT of movies from all over the world and the more research we did, the more of our favorites we found. Also, SIFF is a film fan festival, so we wanted to do something that was a call out to the fan culture. We tried to load as many film references into the background and foreground of each scene as we could. Another call out to film fans was to try and incorporate the spirit of all these amazing film posters that fans are now drawing and posting on their flickr, deviantart, facebook, etc. Our take on that was to animate the entire spot, creating something new yet recognizable.
Production Co.: Oh, Hello
Creative directors: Dan Brown, Thai Tran
2D Animators: Dan Brown, Thai Tran, Yassir Rasan, Lee Grambush
3D Animators: Lee Grambush
Compositing: Dan Brown, Thai Tran, Lee Grambush
Rotosope and illustration: Yassir Rasan, Leslie Ann Kam
Producer: Nathan F. Barr
Last week Daniel Oeffinger and Matt Smithson played a slo-mograph match of Layer Tennis. Their match was done over the course of 5 days, with 2 rounds being posted each afternoon. Each night they designed their scenes in Photoshop and Illustrator and animated them in After Effects. The final film clocks in at over 4 minutes – full of original animation that they both produced completely on their own! Impressive, hilarious and a little crazy. We absolutely love it.
Rise and Fall is a new interactive project developed and designed by Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille for the cover of ‘boards magazine’s Innovation issue. The actual piece is a gentle and subtly engaging Augmented Reality project that utilizes both the cover and back of the magazine to manipulate the camera and story flow within the piece. It’s also really great to look at, and easy and intuitive to play with. Rise and Fall was made with openFrameworks and is completely open-source. You can access the source code (if you’re interested) right here.
The Story of Bottled Water, a new film by activist Annie Leonard and Free Range Studios employs the same clear and accessible style of their highly successful Story of Stuff film to explore the issue of bottled water for World Water Day.
Lucky is a film that was made for Twenty120 earlier in the year. Attentive readers may already have seen it, but it’s really too gorgeous and haunting to let it slip by and not give it its own full post. Its creator, EB Hu is a Director and Motion Designer based in London. We previously featured another non-commercial short of his in 2007: Josie’s Lalaland. High time then to catch up with EB and find out what he’s up to:
Q&A:
What was the inspiration behind Lucky? How did you come up with the concept for the film?
I wanted to create a short some time ago after I saw images of Japanese Whale hunting. There is a extremely haunting picture that features the corpses of a mother whale and her cub. Then comes the occasion that I was asked to think of something around the theme “Good Luck”. When I put the images of my cat against the whale hunting, I felt the irony behind. Our pets have luckily adapted to human world, while the wild animals are unluckily being hunted. On the other hand, our pets have unluckily lost their sense of freedom while begging us for food. The real lucky ones would be those wild animals that escaped our chase.
What was the process like in actually making this? The Twenty120 shorts aren’t funded, so you have to make the time to complete them on your own, right?
Before Twenty120 ’s calI, I already had the initial idea and had done a rough animatic. Once I was commissioned, I felt the topic would match my short very well.
At the time I was still assigned to my full time job, so I had to work my own stuff after work, but who doesn’t? I teamed up with my workmate Simon Graham. We usually spent few hours after work on building senses. Though we were using our own time, I still managed to set a deadline on the project which we had to stick to. The process spread into a 2-and-a-half week period, which went down pretty well according to my original art works and animatic.
We posted your short Josie’s Lalaland a few years back, and Philip Sheppard worked on the score for that as well. Each of them are so evocative and melancholy, how did you collaborate with him? Did you have the track first or did he score it to your picture?
I was lucky at the end of the project that my producer Joe Marshall found our mutual friend- musician Philip Sheppard – was willing to lend his instrumental talent on my piece, once more. Based on my rough animatic cut, Phil captured the atmosphere and recorded his piano playing, and I finalised the edit based on his music.
Can you give us a little background into your work history? How did you get involved in Motion Design and what have you been working on recently?
I started my career in Shanghai as a 2D & 3D animator. In 2004, I decided I need to find time to do more of my own concepts, so I left for UK, to study my MA degree. Upon graduation, I first briefly joined BskyB’s sport team and then BBC broadcast, lately Redbee Media. From 2008, I was represented by Redbee as a director until I left earlier this year. Now I have set up my own studio called MIE with my partners. We started up with a series of viral ads for Spinvox and some pop promos for Zero7. We recently finished George Michael’s new Christmas single promo called December Song, which is due to be released on 13th Dec. The final piece can be seen here.
Here is some additional art from December Song:
Lucky Credits:
Production Company: MIE
Direction and Design: EB Hu
Music: Phillip Sheppard
3D modelling: Simon Graham
Animation: EB Hu and Simon Graham
Producer: Joe Marshall
Lifelong Friendship Society crafts an existential allegory of angst for One Eskimo in a new music video, Givin’ Up. With a finely tuned color-palette, minimal illustration style and expressive animation, they tell an emotionally charged story of an abstract character that journeys through puzzle-like scenes of conveyor belts, revolving doors, and an ever-changing landscape of new challenges. Is it a game? Is it work? Can he keep going? Will he just give up? The two-man team of Creative Director / Designer Travis Spangler and Animator Sid Seed made quite a strong short film for One Eskimo, responding to the emotion in the song and coming up with a cohesive vision that fits its mood of melancholy and frustration.
Yellow Cake is a new short film by Nick Cross, an Ottawa-based animator who has worked for everyone from Nickelodeon to Spumco over the course of his career. He calls Yellow Cake a “lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth.” Animated in Flash, with digitally painted backgrounds, the fine-tuned muted color palette, retro-styled animation and the symphonic, almost saccharine, music all work to lure you into a tale of adorable blue creatures who spend all day baking and then eating their own delicious yellow cakes. But soon the tide turns, and Nick’s film explores a modern parable of terrorism and war, addressing our own attention span in a devastating way.
1. Can you give us a brief run-down of your animation background, other shorts films you’ve done or commercial work that’s been notable in developing your own films?
A. I’ve been working in the commercial animation world since 1996, mostly working on children’s television programming. Since two of the things I enjoy the most is drawing and films, animation was a natural fit for me. However, since I never went to animation school, working in animation was a good education and grounding for making my own animated films later. I made my first film in 1998 just to sort of learn animation, and I’ve been making films ever since.
2. What was the specific inspiration for Yellow Cake?
A. In 2003, while I was working on my previous film, The Waif of Persephone, there was a lot of talk in the media about Iraq purchasing yellow cake uranium. It was talked about so much that it was eventually just referred to as yellow cake, which I thought was pretty funny since they were speaking in such ominous tones about a tasty dessert treat. I just kept thinking about it, forming the story in my head until I finished Waif of Persephone in 2006, and then I jumped right on to working on Yellow Cake.
3. I know that you’ve mentioned that you’ve worked on this film (off and on) for almost three years. Even then, at over 8 minutes, how did you ever find the time to make this all on your own?
A. Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty streamlined production method through trial-and-error. Working almost entirely digitally now saves me a lot of time; I draw right into Flash with a Cintiq tablet and paint all of the backgrounds in Photoshop. I think that I could have made the entire film in just a few months if I didn’t have to keep putting it on the shelf to do commercial jobs, but such is the life of an independent filmmaker.
4. Did you deliberately use a few visual cues from well-known photographs from history? We’re thinking of the famous Napalm Girl photo and the Orwellian / They Live references in the town… Are there any others we might have missed?
A. Yes, definitely. I think that photograph from the Vietnam War really encapsulates the horror of war, so I couldn’t help referencing it. Also, 1984 is my favorite book so I couldn’t help but put some Orwellian imagery in there. The only other overt reference that I put in the film is to the Disney short, The Brave Little Tailor. When all the cats are freaking out near to the end of the film is based off of the montage of the villagers yelling “Seven in one blow!”.
5. The ending of the film leaves the fate of the little blue guys a little bit up in the air, cutting right to cartoons, music, sports and a final test pattern before the film ends. Watching the film leaves the audience itself a bit complicit: we’re all cats, aren’t we? Is there a call to action there?
A. It’s not really a call to action, it’s just sort of my thoughts about how we as a society view war. We are interested up to a point and then, since it doesn’t really affect us in our everyday lives, we get distracted and kind of forget that there is even a war still going on.
Thanks, Nick! Good luck with the film on the festival circuit and with the release of a DVD collection of your work. We’re looking forward to that.
We should also mention that Nick is one of the creators of the pilot for Angora Napkin which premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival a few weeks ago.
Check out these three recent projects from the Brazilian Birdo Studio: Sempre Livre is a poppy, colorful Flash animated spot that was made in just 2 weeks for agency Samurai. Birdo, designed, directed, animated and handled the script as well and said they’re “proud to be able to make a commercial for sanitary napkins completely free of blue liquids!” Amen to that.
Pode Acreditar (You Can Believe) is a fun cel-animated music video, with comical and fantastic drawings appearing over the live-action shots of Marcelo D2 and Seu Jorge. In concept, it can be compared to the D.A.N.C.E. video, the Kid Cudi video or any of the many VH1 and MTV promos like this one from Click 3x that have used the same idea. Yet the personal drawing style and execution here don’t make it seem derivative at all, after all, it’s just a technique and a process.
Finally, the 33rd São Paulo International Film Festival is a collaborative project directed by Amir Admoni with characters designed by the world-renowned graffiti artists Os Gemeos. Birdo handled character animation for the festival opener.
Three cool, new, diverse projects from a small and very capable character animation studio. Fly high, Birdo, fly high!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A. during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
