Results tagged “animation”

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion
by Carols Lascano

The Filmmaker writes:

A couple of pencil-outlined birds escape from a little girl’s drawing, leading us through the life she dreams of.

You can find more about the making of at this link: http://www.carloslascano.com/

Overflowing with both style and emotion, this is yet another example of conquering both style and substance. This film has flavor. You’ll see what I mean.

If you enjoyed this one, or if you’re looking for darker fare, then you might also want to check out Carlos’s Legend of the Scarecrow [Spanish, no subtitles].

There was a time when the term “horror film” didn’t mean “gross out film.” A time when the blood, if any was shown at all, was minimal. How did that work? Instead of going for the shock moments, they gradually built up a sense of dread and unbalance. In those films you had this uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that things were somehow worse than even you, a member of the audience, were being led to believe.

This idea hasn’t been completely abandoned. It’s the reason why we occasionally see an “art house” horror film gain steam and make a splash across the country, like Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project before it. The other way to find them is to turn to outside channels from the mainstream. My friend and fellow Suvudu blogger, SpinMatt, coordinated film screenings through his site, Shocklines, that showcased some really fun and pretty creepy international and/or smaller screen horror films. Each of them got the job done without going crazy throwing around buckets of blood (with the exception of Dog Soldiers, which was fun, tense, and bloody).

Well, in the spirit of Halloween, I’ve picked out a couple of films short animated pieces that carry on the spirit of those tense, dark films. The first has such a great execution and payoff that I don’t even want to summarize or tease it for fear of giving it away. The second one follows in the footsteps of the big monster movies. I think you’ll enjoy them.

Happy Halloween!

Hemlock
by Tyson Ibele

The film’s creator writes:

“Here’s a film I made for the latest CGSociety challenge…the theme was to adapt an ancient myth to steampunk stylings. I chose the myth about the fountain of youth for my topic.”

SPOILER WARNING: I’m putting up the spoiler warning in case any of you out there have seen a film called The Fountain. I’m reminded of that film here, but that’s only because of the ending. Finding that fountain of youth is supposed to be such a great thing, right? Well, actually…

Great job by the filmmakers here.

Let’s call today Saturday Morning Panoramas! We’re featuring two films today that examples of long panoramas that tell the story of a place and not only a character.

I enjoy stop motion work. It has a weight and tangible feeling that I haven’t yet seen replaced in digital animation. Maybe that’s an indictment of my own viewing habits, but I don’t think so. It isn’t always as smooth and polished as its animated cousins, but you can’t say it isn’t a labor of love as these shorts alone can take nearly a month to complete. Feature length movies, you can imagine, take much longer. For instance, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, required 12 shots for every one second of finished film (source) and took a crew of 200 animators/puppeteers three years to complete (source). That’s just a thought.

Now, I don’t want to confuse you so I’ll tell you right out that the second of these isn’t stop-motion (the film making style I just rambled on about), but is a mash-up of hand drawn images being animated into that panorama-style of storytelling and I love it. I dare you not to feel inspired to create something after watching these two. Maybe it’s a drawing, a story, a tune, whatever; if you’re like me, these are the types of things that really get your creative mojo pumping. Uh, so to speak.

In any event, the videos below are fantastic and a bit of a change of pace for this humble little series of posts. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

This Is Where We Live
by 4th Estate

The Filmmakers write:

Welcome to our city - to our world - of books. This is where we live.

A film for 4th Estate Publishers’ 25th Anniversary. Produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

The film was produced in stop-motion over 3 weeks in Autumn 2008. Each scene was shot on a home-made dolly by an insane bunch of animators; you can see time-lapse films of each sequence being prepared and shot in our other films.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of Saturday Morning Animations here on Suvudu! We’ve come a long way in digital animation and storytelling, as I hope this little series (I have no idea how long this will run, but I have enough to get us through this month and the next). You’re not longer tied to enormous production houses to create a digital film with high production values.

Of course, that’s not to say I’m going to restrain myself to only the slickest and most polished of productions, that would be far too limiting. The joy of finding animations across the web is in the free-for-all creativity and, as you’ll see today, you don’t have to be photo-realistic to put together a ripping good video.

To kick things off we’re starting with one video that’s so funny it had me in tears and another one that had me in awe at its storytelling from top to bottom.

Enough preamble - let’s get things started! On with the show!

Star Wars: Retold
by Joe Nicolosi

If you’re even remotely aware of the original Star Wars trilogy, then you’re probably going to get a kick out of this one. If you aren’t, then you’ll probably still get a kick out of this video. I watched it at work and ended up with tears in my eyes, a bright red face, and an office full of co-workers who were getting pretty concerned for my well-being. It’s that funny. Star Wars: Retold is a recounting of the first three movies’ story arc by someone who hasn’t actually seen the movies. It was also the winner of the ‘George Lucas Selects’ award in the 2009 Star Wars Fan Movie contest. Enjoy!

You have to love some of the little oddities that you find along your surfings on the web. This is one such item and it involves a small project by one of my favorite storytellers as he warmed up for a new project.

This is a Neil Gamain short story brought to life by Gahan Wilson. As Gaiman writes on his blog concerning this very video, this was a writing exercise that he undertook on his way to writing The Graveyard Book. It found it’s way into a story collection of the same name edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, and now animated by Gahan Wilson.

Hot dog there’ve been some talented hands all over this story!

And as if all of that wasn’t enough, check this out: this little bit of animation comes via The New Yorker (of all places). Just saying that makes me feel all kinds of intellectual and somewhat swarthy. We’re breaking new ground here. Well, actually, maybe they’re doing that over at the New Yorker as well. Regardless, this is a really well-done web video and everyone involved deserves a pat on the back.

The story involves a group of kids who’s get together is crashed by the undead*, who teach them all manner of new and fantastic games. Also, there’s a little jazz involved.

Check it out below:

I love Comic Cons. All of them. They are always fun and they always give us geeks the earliest looks at what is to come in books, comic books, gaming and movies!

The NY Comic Con is allowing one of the coolest things I’ve seen at a Comic Con: Pixar is showing the first 50 minutes of their forthcoming 3D movie Up!

Click HERE to read more!

Needed a reason to go to the NY Comic Con this year? This is it!

Along with the hundreds of other cool things to enjoy!

Neil Gaiman’s delightfully wicked little fairy tale, “Coraline,” is going to be an animated film—brought to life by Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Selick. Rotten Tomatoes has an awesome series of behind-the-scenes videos. “Coraline” will be out in February 09, making it a nice stop-gap for otherwise inconsolable Harry Potter fans who may be grieving over the recent Half-Blood Prince news.

Neil himself also recently blogged about the forthcoming Coraline musical, which, if anything, is even more exciting—it features music by the brilliant Stephin Merritt.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Gorillaz, in part because of my admiration for Damon Albarn—but also because the idea of a virtual animated band is just amazing and kind of future-rific (except that, I guess it has been done before).

However you feel about the Olympics, you’ve got to enjoy this epic animated ad for BBC’s coverage, from the Gorillaz’ co-creators, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (of Tank Girl fame), featuring an extremely ambitious monkey.

Drawn links to cartoonist Gavin Ewing and his amazing project: Drawing comic characters from A-Z. That’s his “C Is for Captain Haddock.”

Which fictional sport should be at the Olympics? NY Metro’s Vulture Blog posts a highly entertaining list here. My vote’s for Pyramid!

A long-lost pilot for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer animated pilot leaks to Youtube, and Underwire has the goods.

Over at MTV’s Splash Page, comics luminaries including Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, and Tim Sale speculate on who the next Batman movie villain should be. Vote in the comments—and include your casting choices!

Just returned from Cartoon Network’s “Ben 10” panel. In addition to a revelatory Q & A with the show’s creators and voice actors (Greg Cipes is just like Kevin Levin in real life), a ballroom full of devoted cartoon crazies were treated to a trailer for CN’s new show, “The Secret Saturdays.” All I needed to know was that “Saturdays” is about a family of cryptozoologists (yes!), but the trailer has me even more psyched: The show feels like a cross between The Incredibles and Johnny Quest. More details about the “Ben 10” segment after the jump:

David A. Price’s The Pixar Touch is illuminating on many levels, relating the thrilling history of the most important movie studio ever (emphasis emphatically mine). Pretty much the whole thing is required reading for devoted Pixar worshippers—for one thing, I didn’t know before that Pixar has been around, in one form or another, since the 70s, being the brainchild of a group of visionaries who knew, even then, that computer animation was the future, and devoted themselves wholly and passionately to making it happen—but it’s also full of small and satisfying factoids.

For example, I was thrilled to learn that it was John Lasseter who’d originally shopped Thomas Disch’s story “The Brave Little Toaster” around Disney for animated feature film treatment. Lasseter didn’t end up working on the project (having been let go)—but Disney did end up making a deft and underappreciated Brave Little Toaster film. The result was less innovative than the 2D/3D hybrid that Lasseter envisioned—but this story of inanimate objects harboring deep and affectionate attachments to their human owners presaged a later Lasseter masterpiece.

Which brings us, in total non-non-sequitur fashion, to Joss Whedon:

Just a few days ago, the new film from Hayao Miyazaki opened in Japan: Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. This has me wishing, badly, that I were in Tokyo right now, adrift in Miyazaki dreams.

I’ll leave all attempts to describe a Miyazaki film in mere words to those with more senseless hubris than I. So, after the jump, let’s marvel instead at the Japanese-language trailer, and sing along with the deliriously catchy theme song (“Ponyo, Ponyo!”)