From 1A4 Studios, a Moscow based uh… animation studio? At least, I think they’re in Moscow. Am not actually sure on any details beside the name as my Russian is about as good as Google Translate which well… didn’t do so good there. But anyhow, this short condenses The Matrix into a fun 60 seconds and is the second in a hopefully on-going series.
Also, their other series Animirus is definitely worth a watch too; particularly Postmas, Scio and aw hell, all of them really. Go nuts.
First two are great stop-motion pieces of amazing design and quality. The last one is just a delightfully hilarious short about a hand’s creation not quite going to plan and tiny animated destruction ensues.
Directed by Christophe Thockler
Directed by Kijek/Adamski
by Persistent Peril
Made almost entirely by Kaleb Lechowski, this impressive 6 minute short depicts a sci-fi world in conflict, as told through the interrogation of an alien combatant by its machine captor(s).
Short and smartly told, this is of course is made all the more impressive given the fact that Lechowski wrote, directed and animated this entirely by himself over a seven month period. It’s very well told and I especially liked the lighting and texture effects on display here. I have little idea how much easier it is to render that kind of detail these days, but it is mighty good work.
Some would (and have) nit-pick the fluidity of character movements and other aspects, but those people are assholes who can’t also say that they’ve made an entire animated film by themselves too (unless they’re Don Hertzfeldt or Makoto Shinkai, but I doubt that).
Bill Bailey + Maths + Dinosaurs = YES
This awesome animation by Alex Parker (whose Kepler-11 Sonata video is also excellent) illustrates the 2299 fast-transiting planets discovered to so far by the Kepler mission and their orbits to-scale around a single star.
There’s a wealth of detail in this rendering like colour/temperature correlation and the white rings representing Mercury, Venus and Earth’s orbits and that’s all elaborated on on it’s vimeo page. But all you need to know is this part of the description:
Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!
Planets. 2299 of them. Up there. And all of them were found in a really short period of time, with still so many more out there yet to discovered.
Fuck yeah, you bet I love this science stuff.
An official selection at this year’s Sundance film festival, this animated short was Julia Pott’s theses at London’s Royal Colloge of Art in 2011. Mixing various styles and symbolisms, Belly tells a beautiful coming of age story that is both wonderfully weird and mildly terrifying.
Man, the output of quality works from animation schools lately has been phenomenal; this dialogue-free animated short film by 4 Supinfocom Arles students is no exception.
Must remember to start playing with Source Filmmaker, this short made using the awesome program takes on properties of a great Pixar short (even if the facial animations are a bit stilted).
This is a short film about Illustration, which is based on a poem that I wrote in my last year of art school, needless to say; studying illustration. It concerns a fictitious congratulatory letter written by a proud tutor to a recent graduate.
Ooh… this one I really like. The Eagleman Stag (directed by Mikey Please) is a stop-motion short that tells the story of Peter Eagleman, who’s always lived with a obsessive predisposition towards time. Wonderful art direction, fantastic animation, a really great soundtrack; all this coupled with a well told story whose themes touches on time, subjectivity and even bits of existentialism… It’s pretty easy to see why this short has been recieving overwhelming acclaim of late.
Going for some slightly abstract ones, each of varying medium. First is an animation of the track “Where Did the Night Go?” by Gil Scott-Heron (who I should make a note of checking out more of later).
Second, one in a series of semi-psychedelic watercolour animations by Matt Box based on influential skaters.
And lastly, this fluidly surreal short by Masanobu Hiraoka that evokes several impressions of Masaaki Yuasa films, but wholey unique as well.
This time bring you three mildly disturbing (but in many ways brilliant) short films.