This tasty little animation is called Orbitas, and was put together by the students at PrimerFrame, an animation school. Some of the student created productions have won awards, and after watching this gem it will be obvious why. You should take this as inspiration to build your own.
The band Passepied has a lead singer who is also a graphics artist, and she has brought some pretty interesting animation styles to her videos. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as anyone who has ever sat through the credits at the end of a feature length animation knows. There can be upwards of a few thousand animators, each working on their specialty for the small slice of the total project their production house got. Music Videos are much shorter than feature films, and take much less in the way of resources. This makes them the perfect environment to give you a sense of perspective into the process, since the size of a music video is about the same as the size of a given project slice for a feature film. Take a look at the Music Video Yes/No, and then watch the behind-the-scenes video for it, and see if it doesn’t bring the effort involved into focus.
If Miyazaki Films Were Like Other Anime is the name of this hysterical video, made by the folks over at College Humor, a site I tend to visit pretty much every week to see what new silliness they are up to this time. Of course, Hayao Miyazaki never made an ordinary anime in his life. Each work he crafted was amazing, and are some of the best animations in the world.
This is an amazing animation, by Carlos De Carvalho & Aude Danset. It doesn’t use or need words to tell its story, the pictures really are worth a thousand words. In Premier Automne, one lives in the winter, the other in summer… and one day, they meet on the border, and their lives are changed forever. This has won a ton of awards from around the world, and with good reason.
The Hollywood Reporter, usually referred to as THR, released a set of interviews at the beginning of this year covering all aspects of the film making industry, each featuring a collection of the top creators within that subset of the art. The one that had me mesmerized was the Full Animator Interview (capitols intended, as are most of the puns I often include, but I do not normally admit to them). If you have an interest in creating animation, or just appreciate amazing stuff when you see it, it would be worth a bit of your time to check this out.
The Blender Foundation is constantly testing and improving the free open source 3D modeling and animation software Blender, and part of that process is to get the funding to allow a talented team of people to do some actual animations with it. This one is called Sintel, it was made back in 2010 and has a lot of heart. Hit their site to download the free open source Blender and start creating your own animations and 3D objects today.