SSSEEN!

A small & funny commercial for the Wario Land: Shake It! game for the Nintendo Wii. Directed by Jeff Goodby of Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Stop motion AND typography? What more do you want? A short but sweet stop motion film made by ruifilipeabreu. The moving fonts are done quite nicely and here’s some “making of”-information of him in one of the YouTube-comments:

This was photographed with a Nikon D60 with a 18-55mm lens. I shot it with Istopmotion which is very easy to use software, and not very expensive. The music was made with Garage band. And most of the sound FX are stock sounds.

The letters were cut in MDF, and I used the substitution technique.

The set is made of 5mm cardboard painted with acrylic ink
and was inspired/copied from Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Oath of the Horattii.

Quite interesting that it is MDF – it sort of looks like clay.

http://www.vimeo.com/3944880
Now for something a bit different – a video that doesn’t have anything post-production related, but is possible to inspire you to use art in a different way. There has been a few videos that use a pop-up book style (like Fergie’s “Clumsy”), but I haven’t seen one which uses a real pop-up book like in this video of Lisa Hannigan, which is an interesting style to visualize the story she’s telling in a more playful way. I also like the fact how the story literally “unfolds”.

The pop-up book is made by Maeve Clancy and Jamie Hannigan, who also directed the video.

Directed by Jørgen Leth for the interesting documentary The Five Obstructions where Lars von Trier gives him five challenges for short movies. Apparently von Trier hates movies and that’s why he gave Leth a challenge to make a cartoon, which resulted in this really stylish short, rotoscoped animation. It is made with the help of rotoscoping expert Bob Sabiston, which you might also know from Linklater’s moves Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

I really dig the hand-drawn style and how it actually looks so rough and unfinished (even if it might not be intentional). The story is pretty cool as well. It’s the first year project of Persona-Sama (check out his other video we posted as well).

“Father and Daughter” has won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2000. I saw this a few years ago and thought it was French because of the French feel to it, but weirdly enough it’s Dutch! Made by Michaël Dudok De Wit.

“The Aroma of Tea” (2006) is a more abstract piece which interest my not only of that, but also because of the fact that it has been drawn entirely with tea. For those who don’t understand the video, the YouTube user cosmolossus explains it as following:

it’s a video representing a molecule of the scent of tea leaving the tea, traveling into the air, passing noses, being inhaled and exhaled, passing by other smells (such as a cluster of molecules next to food, perhaps a loaf of bread) and finally reaching one last nose.

interesting and simplistic approach, and enjoyable music, but nothing i’d call a transcendent marvel…

And then the title suddenly makes sense!

And I might put the other 2 videos (which are more humorous) he also directed: “The monk and the fish” (1994).

And “Tom Sweep” from 1992, which only uses one camera angle.

A short 3D animation done by the independent Korean animation studio MESAI. Lots of really cool shots, environmental detail and – besides the humor and the familiarity with the story – I like the smart usage of sounds in this short.

Now we for something different: cracktros! These are intros made by release groups, dating back to C64 games (maybe earlier?). It’s mostly programmed (correct me if I’m wrong) graphics and these coupled with chip tune music or old school MOD-type music these bring back the good old times! They sure are charming! The video above is made by Dream Design/SAC, not really sure for what game though.

This is the Razor 1911 Cracktro #11 by Hetero/SAC made in 1997 for the “release” of Quake 2. Apparently Superior Art Creations (SAC) have their own site where you can check more of their cracktros ans Flickr pages where you can check their ASCII-art. Just check out their page for a full list – good stuff!

http://www.vimeo.com/5020497
Not the best lyrics in this song, but this fan made video is making up for the lyrics! Made by Joerg Narton as a final project for his university. In case you don’t ever read the comments, here’s what he said about making the video:

“i used Cinema 4d for 3d modeling and 3d Animation, Xfrog (as Cinema 4d plugin) for modeling and animating the plants and ornamental shapes and After Effects for 2d Animation and compositing.”

I’m not really sure how this sort of ink/grow/organic style is called, so if you have the official term for it, enlighten me!

Very inspirational, even if it’s an ad for a college and not really a message video. I love this kind of stuff that makes you wanna do things! Done by the ad agency Rethink Communication.