This short CG film Ascension has won multiple awards and certainly made me smile when I watched it. As so many of these are, this is a graduation movie, meaning it was built to prove they deserved the degree or certification offered by their school, the same way you do it to get a degree for film school. The school in this case was the Supinfocom Arles in France (if you don’t speak French they have an English version of the site), and the students who created this are Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry and Florian Vecchione doing the animation, with Seth Stewart composing the music.
The amazing video The Looking Planet won over 50 film festival jury and audience awards including Best Short Film, Best Sci-Fi Film, Best Animated Film, Best Production Design, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound Design. Eric Law Anderson created one amazing animation when he built this one!
This amazing tribute to Hayao Miyazaki is from dono on Vimeo. He built it using Blender (3D modeling and animation), Gimp (graphics/painting creation/editing), Octane (real time 3D rendering) and Natron (matting, masking, and compositing). I will point out that all of them except Octane are free, open source software that rival any of the commercial software packages which do the same job. I am sure everyone will be surprised that the music he used is by Joe Hisaishi. It looks like he modeled and rendered the scenes, sets, and backgrounds in 3D but composited the original 2D characters into those scenes, including scenes they were never in before for some of them, creating a wonderful visual effect. Many thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one, and my only problem now (as someone else said in the comments) is deciding which Miyazaki masterpiece I want to re-watch tonight, after watching so many old friends on the screen together after all this time.
Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.
The animation was created by Janis Skulme for the music video of Olga Korsak’s Behind Closed Doors, and filmed at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The paintings and statues were brought to life using Crazy Talk 7 and an array of painting, video editing, and compositing software. To give you an idea of what’s involved in a project like this I have included his Video Effects Showreel 2014, which includes a number of instances of the original footage, and the steps they went through on their way to the final product. The fact that the song and performance are so powerful go a long way to making this a memorable video.
Olga Korsak – "Behind closed doors" from Janis Skulme on Vimeo.
I find the whole 7 Things series from Anime Vice very interesting, so here is their take on the classic Neon Genesis Evangelion. At long last, it looks like part 3 out of the four in the rebuild series will finally be released in the US in February. enjoy!
Normally I do music on Saturday night’s, but normally Saturday is not Halloween. So this time around, a couple of classics in honor of the holiday. To make up for the schedule, music will be along very shortly, in honor of the new Abney Park album. The first Halloween video:
This is part of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series: The Skeleton Dance is a classic from 1929, not long after the Steamboat Willie era, and perfect for Halloween. In those days, this stuff was experimental state of the art, which tends to explain why Walt himself directed this one. The entire Silly Symphony collection was created from 1929 to 1939, and totaled out to 75 separate short animations, most of which were mini-masterpieces for their time. As evidence of this, the series won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film seven times, including the first 6 times that award was ever given out. It was also a Disney test bed for new technology, of which the single most important piece (to my mind, at least) was Technicolor, a technology nobody else in the industry would appreciate until decades later.
The second Halloween video is a more modern classic: The 8 Bit version of Army of Darkness. It may have been the third film in the Evil Dead franchise, but it became the definitive horror comedy film of its time very quickly. It didn’t have a serious contender for that title until Shaun Of The Dead hit the big screen quite a few years later. I do kind of wish I could have played the game instead of just watched it, though. These CineFix virtual remakes are quite the hoot.