Here's another excellent explainer video from CGI animator Jared Owen (see my previous posts about his explainer videos: escalator, combination padlock, pull-back toy car, gumball machine). This time, Jared shows how the various mechanisms in an oscillating fan work. Read the rest
While I respect Netflix's decision to go with 3D CGI instead of a more traditional anime-style animation, this reminds me of when I was 9 years old and obsessively watching ReBoot on Saturday mornings. At least Scarlett Johansson isn't in this one?
Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 hits Netflix in April 2020. Read the rest
Edison Electric Institute created this fantastic public safety video in 1990 with CGI that's been aged to perfection for today's vaporwave music videos.
(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest
Read the restAdapted by Maria Sova from Gareth Crocker’s novel, Finding Jack is based on the existence and abandonment of more than 10,000 military dogs at the end of the Vietnam War. Dean will play a character called Rogan, considered a secondary lead role.
"We searched high and low for the perfect character to portray the role of Rogan, which has some extreme complex character arcs, and after months of research, we decided on James Dean," said Ernst, who also produces with Golykh for Magic City Films alongside Donald A. Barton of Artistry Media Group.
"We feel very honored that his family supports us and will take every precaution to ensure that his legacy as one of the most epic film stars to date is kept firmly intact. The family views this as his fourth movie, a movie he never got to make. We do not intend to let his fans down."
Tiago Teixeira set Massive Attack's "Teardrop" against the award-winning short movie "Happy Valentine's Day", directed by the Neymarc Brothers. It matches so well in mood and tone; the originals follow below.
Here's a "behind the scenes" on Happy Valentine's Day's entirely-digital setting:
This totally excellent computer animated television commercial for Hawaiian Punch was created in 1987 by Omnibus/Abel, the ill-fated company born from the merger of Omnibus Computer Graphics with computer animation pioneer Robert Abel's Abel and Associates.
From Vintage CG:
Rarely seen is this full 90 second version.... Music is by Mark Mothersbaugh (of DEVO), who later admitted to embedding a subliminal message: "Sugar is bad for you."
Excerpts from the commercial later turned up in the classic computer animation VHS compilation "Beyond the Mind’s Eye," the content of which you can enjoy below:
From Etudes.ru (Google translation):
More than 40 years ago in 1968 ... A team led by Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov creates a mathematical model of the motion of the animal (cat). The BESM-4 machine, executing a written program for solving ordinary (in the mathematical sense of the word) differential equations, draws a cartoon "Kitty" containing even by modern standards an amazing animation of cat movements created by a computer.
(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest
@jonty_pressinger was unhappy that the live action/CGI remake of The Lion King was set in the Uncanny Valley so he "attempted to fix (it) by doing an AI style-transfer using @ellejart amazing fan art."
Laanlabs's showreel for 6d.ai meshing technology is an augmented reality demo in which virtual cockroaches crawl all over a very real kitchen. It's the best use of augmented reality I've ever seen. (via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest
From TMeeks01:
This bit of ancient animation history was programmed in GW-Basic on a Mindset Computer.
The "live" sets included full size props, such as the typewriter and schoolroom desk, and doll house furniture, such as the paintings and the easel.
Overlays were accomplished by partially drawing the figures, rather than chromakeying the live shot, cutting away part of the character around a prop that was to be in the foreground.
(via r/ObscureMedia)
Extraweg (AKA Oliver Latta: Twitter, Youtube) is a superb and surreal animator whose computer rendered grotesques of human faces and forms writhing, merging, and doing the impossible are spellbindingly weird. Read the rest
Brilliant Game Studios follows up on their 2016 video that showed off a crowd-renderer by pitting 11,000 penguins against 4,000 Santas with a new video demoing "our new GPU accelerated dismemberment and procedural wounding system. Limbs can be cut off on a massive scale. Wound from getting hit appear as deep gouges which warp their mesh." I'm really glad that we're using GPUs to do sensible things again, rather than computing virtual Beanie Babies. (via JWZ) Read the rest
In 1991, Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (aka Moebius) and a team of animators created this gorgeous short pilot for a film called Starwatcher. According to this Wired feature that Mark wrote in 1994, "Starwatcher was slated to be the first feature-length animated movie to be made with 3-D computer graphics. But the film's producer died in a car accident, and shortly thereafter it was discovered that the French production company bankrolling the film was FF85 million (US$15 million) in debt. (Many suspected the car accident was no accident.)"
Maxim Zhestkov (previously) created a mesmerizing exercise involving light refracting within computer-generated crystals. Read the rest
This whimsical series of images by Filtre Studio imagines Queen Elizabeth straightening paintings and vacuuming up after her dogs. What's most interesting is that the entire room was created digitally. Read the rest
From the apt metaphor department, Romanian illustrator Andrei Lacatusu's series titled "Social Decay" renders 3D images of logos for social media giants as rusting derelict signs. Read the rest
Twitter user πend creates mesmerizing mechanisms called kaleidocycles, which twist and torque and spin in an endless loop. Some of them are quite imaginative: Read the rest
