I stumbled across this short some time ago, I thought I should make a note of it.
In this dreamy hand-animated music video for the Adelaide band The Audreys, a little girl boards a train car that would take her on a journey where she hopes to eventually find the special person in her life. The wonderful story and animation, somewhat reminiscent one of the sequences in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, of was conceived by Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment, who together collaborated recently on another acclaimed piece The Cat Piano.
The Saga of Biorn is one of the graduation projects from class of 2011 at The Animation Workshop school in Copenhagen, Denmark. In this Bachelor Film we follow Biorn, an aged warrior determined to die a glorious death in battle so that he may be granted a place in the afterlife within the Halls of Valhalla.
It’s short and sweet, great payoff in the ending. I love it.
The new Coke ad aired during the most recent Super Bowl. I’m glad that they’re continuing their trend of making hugely epic ad spots that are also hugely entertaining. In this spot a large army including ogres, trolls and a massive dragon lay siege on a fortress, and are stopped by a bottle of Coke, natch.
My all-time favorite over-the-top Coke commercial is probably this one, from their Happiness Factory ad campaign:
By the way This American Life also ran a fascinating story this week on how Coca-Cola’s super-secret original recipe came to be published in a 1979 news article.
The writer of Wednesday’s issue on Salon really doesn’t like the character designs in the upcoming Gnomeo and Juliet film. He talks to character designer Shannon Tindle to figure out why some character designs work, and others fail.
You want to have a lot of contrast in your lineup, and “Kung Fu Panda,” “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Incredibles” all have a lot of different, broadly different silhouettes and shapes of characters. Looking at very different shapes is automatically more interesting than characters with the same height and same shape
I don’t particularly care for most of the character designs coming out of DreamWorks (where I, like Tindle, happen to work). The stock human characters in the Shrek franchise are grotesque. I do appreciate their willingness to go with edgier designs, but the more out there your characters appear, the more you limit the mainstream appeal of your films.
You only have a split second to attract the attention of someone who happens to glance up at your billboards or pass by the bus stop. In that brief time that person will have to decide between “Yes, that’s an appealing character that I’d like to connect with” or “Ew, what is that thing, get it away from me.”
Here’s another example, with two recent movies about villains:
Roxanne and Megamind (left) are all about sharp angles, while Gru and the kids from Despicable Me (right) are more rounded and approachable. If you know nothing about the plot of either film and happen to see these two posters next to each other, which one would you choose to see?
Check out the facial animation in this in-game clip from Rockstar Games’ upcoming game L.A. Noire. It conveys an amazing amount of emotional information, despite the crude rendering and the overly shiny skin texture.
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Contrast that with the effects used to generate the younger version of Jeff Bridges’ character in Tron Legacy. This is state-of-the-art performance capture that was used to alter Brad Pitt’s character in The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons. Still, Jeff’s performance looks very muted, as if he’s wearing an inch-thick latex mask.
I think we’re getting a lot closer to bridging the uncanny valley.
I’m not a huge fan of animation that uses static textures within the outline of a character, but the unified but limited color palette of The Thomas Beale Cipher above, helps to hold this piece together and keep the textures from distracting too much. This is a lot less garish and so much easier to watch than Gankutsuou.
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