VizWorld.com

A beautiful and deep, if not a little bit disturbing, short film from David Sharf is his final thesis for university and is now available for you to enjoy on Vimeo.  The description:

Antonia is a 12 year old girl. She often has daydreams, in which she wonders of in to a magical far away forest, were she hides from the problems of the real world. One day, however, her father takes drastic measures and she has to face a decision.

Is your inner peace an utopian state until you have finally escaped the grip of the society and its rules? Or is affirmation a faster way to your personal luck? And what are you supposed to do, if you have to answer this question at the age of 12?

In the Animated Short “The Forest”, the protagonist has to cope with this question and her hostile environment and finds a simple but radical solution.

The graphics are beautiful, and the voiceovers haunting.

via The Forest – An animated short by David Scharf.

Graphics animation, short, vfx

Robin George’s “Tezcatlipoca”, a 3-minute short based on the Aztec myth of the deity who descends from heaven in the form of a jaguar, which premiered at SIGGRAPH2009′s Computer Animation Festival, is now online for you to enjoy.

From September 2007 to January 2009, it took about a year and a half to take from conception to completion as a solo project. It has been a huge learning experience for me as I inched through each phase; I started with storyboards and animatic, then moved to modeling, rigging, texturing, and preliminary set design, then eventually moved to character animation and ultimately to final sets, backgrounds, lighting, rendering and finally compositing. I was lucky enough to have my classmate Chris Wombold do lava simulation for me, as well as the help and advisement of my teachers Aaron Adams and Zach Gray.

via Robin George: Online Portfolio – Tezcatlipoca.

Graphics animation, caf, short, siggraph, vfx

Nina Paley has just taken a major step with her fantastic “Sita Sings the Blues” by placing all of the original assets (FLA files) online at archive.org under the CC-ShareAlike license.

“All the Flash authoring (.fla) files I used to make Sita Sings the Blues have just been posted on archive.org, under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Want to know how I got a certain animated effect in Sita Sings the Blues? Open up the .fla files and find out. Want to put flying eyeballs and demons in your next music video? Now you can.

via Sita Sings the Blues sourcefiles online.

Graphics animation, assets, flash, vfx

Kevin Hanna, Sean O’Reilly, and Barnaby Ward have been hard at work adapting the award-winning graphic novel “The Clockwork Girl” to an animated feature, and the first trailer is online now.

See it after the break.. Their website, www.theclockworkgirl.com is having some bandwidth issues at the moment.

via CG Video & Animation » Blog Archive » “The Clockwork Girl” Trailer.

Read more…

Graphics animation, vfx

A fun little video from Gabe Askew showing a few months work to create a fan video for the song “Two Weeks”.  See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics animation, example

If you were at SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, you undoubtedly say the unwashed masses wandering the conference in their viking helmets, occasionally stopping only long enough to scream “FJORG!” and then trudge onward.  What was this, you ask?  It was the third annual “iron-animator” FJORG competition, and the winners have been announced:

Prestissimo, comprised of Sasapitt Rujirat, Phon Thiramonkol, and Lee Croudy was chosen as the winner of FJORG! for their animated reel, “Great Expectations.” Team Prestissimo was chosen from a field of 10 three-member teams that competed for 32 non-stop hours to create character-driven animations under extreme pressure and multiple staged distractions. The team is from Thailand and traveled for more than 30 hours to compete in FJORG!

Also, this year was the first “GameJam!” competition, using similar rules and environments to create a video game.

The first annual GameJam! is a newly created competition for teams to create a 3D game using the Panda3D game engine and a 2D game using Flash during a 24-hour period. The team comprised of John Fielding, Rory Riggins, Ryan Neff created the 3D model that was chosen as Best of Show. The team comprised of Laurissa Hughes, Chance Dodd, and Melissa Guldbrand was chosen as Best of Show for their 2D videogame. Prizes were awarded to every team that participated.

Congratulations to all the participants!  See the winning short after the break!

via ….. >> VFXWorld / News << …...

Read more…

Graphics animation, contest, fjorg, gamejam, siggraph, videogame

Supinfocom has another great animated short answering the great mystery of what happens on the top-shelf at the supermarket?

What is going on above the shelves of a supermarket?

A short adventure directed by Supinfocom Arles students: Laurent Harduin, Delphine Bourgois, Victor Phrakornkham, Pierre-Vincent Cabourg and Fanny Vergne.
Music by Samy Cheboub.

A great little animation, but we’ld expect no less from the likes of Supinfocom Arles.  See it after the break.

Read more…

Graphics animation, miam, supinfocom

You can head on over to CGSociety for the list of the 2009 SIGGRAPH CAF winners, with stills from the winning films.

“This year’s accepted films really overwhelmed us with the level of technical expertise and expert storytelling, which made the awards decision process extremely difficult,” Carlye Archibeque, SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival Executive Producer. “The winners not only exemplify what makes excellent animation today, but also provide a glimpse into the great things we have awaiting us in the future.”

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2009 Diary.

Graphics animation, siggraph

A new feature CG movie “The Missing Lynx” is gaining some publicity by being done entirely in Autodesk’s 3ds Max. It’s the story of Felix the Lynx and his animation friends as they fight again an eccentric millionaire, Noah, to gain their freedon.

For the production of the film Manuel and Raúl chose Autodesk 3ds Max. Animation was done using Character Studio’s Biped, and the quantity and variety of animals as well as humans proved to be one of the main challenges for rigging and animation. One of the most complex cases the team faced was rigging birds’ feathers.

Manuel explains that the feathers located at the extreme sides of the wings are generally used as hands or fingers, to help give bird characters more expressiveness. Due to time constraints they solved the issue by doing two types of setups, one for the acting parts, and another one for when the birds were flying.

via CGSociety – The Missing Lynx.

Graphics 3dsmax, animation, vfx

In 1983, right after the success of the original Tron movie, Disney experimented further with CG animation.  Not satisfied with the results of complete CG rendering (remember, this was 1983) they instead opted for a hybrid approach of CG environments with hand-drawn foregrounds.

This is a vintage clip from 1983, of an early CG animation test they did over at Disney, when they owned the rights to Where The Wild Things Are. This showcases the combining of traditional hand drawn 2D animation, with then-state-of-the-art 3D computer animation. This is absolutely remarkable for the time, and is quite eerie in a way. The test was directed by John Lasseter, who went on to direct and produce most of the Pixar films. If he only knew! Other than this, Disney never utilized the rights they had for Wild Things, and eventually lost them.

For 1983, it’s some amazing work.  See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics animation, disney, history, movie, vfx