Director/Animator Nicolas Ménard brings us his new film: Somewhere.
With a unique style combined with the amazing music/sound design by Rich Vreeland, Somewhere takes us to a completely fresh universe of animation and storytelling.
UPDATE: The making of video is up, and it’s simply astounding:
The Making Of: The Bear & The Hare from Hornet Inc on Vimeo.
Yves Geleyn and Elliot Dear worked with the talented team at Hornet / Blinkink to produce this heartwarming story of The Bear and The Hare.
The style and content harkens back to classic English illustrated children’s books, and the campaign extends to other platforms such as interactive ebook, classic kids book and an Ipad app. I love the blend of 2D characters against the background which I’m guessing is a combination of miniature and 3D backgrounds.
From the press release: ‘The marriage of traditional hand-drawn 2D animation with stop-frame model animation creates a tangible world full of texture and detail that conveys the honesty behind the John Lewis Christmas message.’
Also a nice informative Guardian article about it here.
Executive Producers
Bart Yates
Michael Feder
Producers
Bart Yates
James Stevenson Bretton
Josephine Gallagher
Line Producer
Kev Harwood
Production Manager
Benjamin Lole
2D Animation
Premise Entertainment LLC
2D Animation Supervisors
Aaron Blaise
Dominic Carola
2D Line Producer
Iris Pearson
2D Animators
Erin Humiston
Darko Cesar
Head of Clean-up 2D Animation
Janelle Bell-Martin
2D Clean-up Artists
Mi Yul Lee
Teresa Quezada-Geer
Jacque Pierro
Chad Thompson
Jason Peltz
2D Compositor/Scene Setup
Mac Masters
2D Artistic Coordinator
Pam Darley
2D Digital Artist
Anthony West
Enoc Castaneda
2D Lead Colourist/Coordinator
James Lancett
2D Colourists
Sean Weston
Joseph Sparkes
Frankie Swan
Harriet Gillian
Assistant 2D Colourist
Lila Peuscet
2D Illustrator Technician
Albert Sala
Printers
The Graphical Tree
Laser Cutting
Ewen Dickie
Designer/Typographer
Robert Frank Hunter
Storyboard Artists
Sav Akyuz
Steve Tappin
James Lancett
Robert Frank Hunter
3D Technical Director
Patrick Hearn
3D Previsualisation Artist
Simone Ghilardotti
Lucas Cuenca
Johannes Sambs
Lead Stop-Frame Animator
Andy Biddle
Stop-Frame Animators
Daniel Ojari
Daniel Gill
Production Designer/
Supervising Modeller
John Lee
Art Department Modellers
Colin Armitage
Sonya Yu
Maggie Haden
Collette Pidgeon
Yossel Simpson Little
Richard Blakey
Gary Welch
Christy Matta
Lucy Begent
Scenic Painters
Fiona Stewart
Beth Quinton
Rigging Department
Richard Blakey
Art Department Assistants
Morgan Faverty
Anna Ginsburg
Jennifer Newman
MOCO/Camera Assistant
Max Halstead
Director of Photography
Toby Howell
Gaffer
Aldo Camilleri
Runner
Robert Gould
Post Production
Blinkink Studios
Post Production/Compositing
Alasdair Brotherston
Ian Sargent
Carlos Diego
Jonathan Gallagher
Elliot Dear
Editors
Sam Sneade at Speade
Ellie Johnson at Speade
Sound Design
Sam Robson at Factory Studios
Colourist
Jean-Clement Soret at MPC
‘Making of ’ Film
Jake Hopwell & Josh Hine
Studio Manager
Elizabeth Day
Studio Assistant
Toby Goodyear
Catering
Laura Barbi
Advertising Agency
Adam & Eve DDB
Executive Creative Director
Ben Priest
Creative Directors
Aidan McClure
Laurent Simon
Agency Producer
Anthony Falco
Assistant Producer
Catherine Cullen
Luke Saunders re-interprets his travels through Indonesia in this wonderfully animated passion piece.
Lovely stylised illustrative video by Jens & Anna at Picasso Pictures. Good news for Kentuckians? For behind-the-scenes info including concept art sketches and more, visit Jens & Anna’s project page here.
Been a long time coming, but this delightfully illustrative and darkly comic tale is now available to view in its entirety online, after having toured festivals. I especially enjoyed the constantly pulsating and bubbling white beard of “dad.” Designed and directed by Dylan White, so be sure to head over to his site for more behind-the-scenes info. I enjoyed the click-thru showing the juxtapositions between storyboard images and final style frames. Full credit list on the site and on the Vimeo page here.
Le droit de suite (The Resale Right) — VA from Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet on Vimeo (via Drawn).
Time and again I have been moved by the sense of solidarity that comes across from various discussions on Motionographer about protecting the rights of designers and artists (i.e., How do we look out for one another?). This is why when I came across this piece, I simply had to share it with you. It is gorgeously arresting in its simplicity, and informative. It’s been a while since I saw typographical-pictorial animation handled so well. So, enjoy!
According to Pierre, “The ADAGP is the French collective rights management society in the field of the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, multimedia, etc.). It represents almost 80,000 artists. They asked for a film that explains what the resale right is.”
Directed by Pierre-Emannuel Lyet, and made at French animation studio doncvoila.
Full credit list can be found on the Vimeo page.
“Lilac Wine” is a music video directed by Vanessa Marzaroli of Bl:nd to celebrate Dr. Marten’s 50th anniversary. The song is Cinematic Orchestra’s rendition of the cult classic, “Lilac Wine,” made popular in the early 90s by Jeff Buckley.
Inspired by Spencerian Calligraphy, “Lilac Wine” is hypnotic as subtle movements transition incarnations of lost love. Like sheet music, the design pairs perfectly with the drifting music, in and out of solitude. The beauty of this graphic language is no surprise coming from a company with a history of creating some of the most iconic black and white spots in the industry.
Vanessa Marzaroli, creative director of the 2006 music video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, tells us more about “Lilac Wine”
The idea for the video came to me right away. The music is moving and it really felt like some sort of a lover’s letter or testimonial to me. With that said, I wanted something that was hand written and full of beautiful flourishes. I’m very fond of typography and calligraphy, so through my research, I found Spencerian penmanship to be quite inspirational.
I actually have a much deeper connection with animation. In my heart, I treat each project like a piece of music. This worked well for “Lilac Wine”, and we really took the opportunity to do something that was compelling to us, something we’d love to create.
With its grace and striking design, ”Lilac Wine” takes us back to a time in our industry’s history when it wasn’t as important to create the most trendy work, as it was to challenge ourselves to do what we love, and be ourselves, better.
What’s not to like about this? To me, anyway, this is another one of those ‘tick-all-the-right-boxes’ kind of spot. Cocoe, the Madrid-based multidisciplinary design studio, was commissioned by Shackleton, to create this spot for the Spanish government, which promotes:
“Fondo de cooperación para agua y saneamiento”- a public institution dealing with water supply and sanitation tasks- is a project that meets one of the “millennium goals”: reduce the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water and basic sanitation by 2015.’
Just like the Story of Kakenya which was posted last week, pieces like this gives me hope, that as animators and designers, we can use our skills for the greater good! Keep ‘em coming, I’d say!
Several days ago, we received the latest from MAKE: a knock down, drag out homage to film noir style crime dramas of old Hollywood, called Palm Springs. The piece was created for the Palm Springs International ShortFest, which runs from June 22nd – June 28th. Rather than opining on the merits of the work, we asked MAKE’s Director and Lead Animator for the opener, Andrew Chesworth, to summarize how the team of artists executed the piece, in detail:
“Palm Springs was created using primarily traditional animation drawn directly into Photoshop with Wacom Cintiq tablets. The idea was to achieve the aesthetic of classical animation but to do it in a completely paperless fashion. The creative workflow was near identical to that of traditional analog animation – starting with rough layouts buried in construction lines, and gradually working toward more finished scenes through a layering process of drawing. In several scenes, assistants in-betweened and touched up the drawings of key animators, and finished animation was passed on to the colorists who painted each frame of animation with the dry-brush styling.
3D animation was employed for a handful of inorganic subjects, such as the vehicles in the car chase, the ceiling fan in the office, and the movie projector. The modeling, animation, and rendering was all done in Maya. Mental Ray’s contour shader was employed to achieve the outlines on the objects, and the models were built very specifically to accommodate the line work to match the drawn designs. Hard shadow render passes, animated texture overlays, and a great deal of rotoscoped hand-drawn effects were composited onto the 3D elements to mesh them within the hand-drawn world as much as possible.
Compositing was all done in After Effects, where additional treatments were placed over the drawn elements to achieve a more analog aesthetic. Subtle texture overlays, diffusion filters, and in many cases film grain and noise were added to conform the elements.”
For more, check out the Q&A and behind-the-scenes artwork that went into creating the opener here.
We saw this beautiful cel-animated and aquarelle-painted music video by Irina Dakeva for Breakbot recently and wanted to find out more about the production process she used. You can tell immediately that it’s a real analog and painted work. It’s got a real energy and kinetic style of painting that is entrancing. The inventive transitions and constantly-shifting color washes go hand-in-hand with the bouncy, French pop-disco track.
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.
