Reel of the Month Club (Dec. 2024): Coat of Arms
December 21, 2024
The immediate success of Overwatch, Blizzard’s team-based multiplayer first-person shooter (and the company’s first new gaming franchise since StarCraft in 1998), is due in large part to a series of spectacular animated short films. [Watch]
At the PromaxBDA conference in June, I lead off my annual State of Design session with a 60-second mini-masterpiece of character and VFX called “You’re alive. Do you remember?” created by Berlin agency Heimat for European DIY superstore chain Hornbach. [Watch]
Sleek compositions and fluid transitions rendered in a minimal palette drawn from France’s Tricolor flag distinguish H5’s online video animated at Studio Wanda in Paris for Dior’s Eau Sauvage men’s fragrance first introduced in 1966. [Watch]
Dark and painterly vignettes from Mill+ open director Michael John Warren’s new Netflix doc series ‘Fearless’ which takes viewers deep into Brazilian bull riding culture and tracks the riders on their quest from Sao Paulo to the world championships in Las Vegas. [Watch]
The sweetest animation you’ll see today is this PSA/short called “Sometimes I Stutter,” created by Belgian freelance designer and animator Gilles Desmadrille during his Graphic Design studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. [Watch]
If the incessantly upbeat drone of the media world has you staring at the clock and thinking about the bar, join us as we slip into the dark and refreshingly bullshit-free world of the musician and visual artist known as Denial of Service. [Watch]
Relax for three minutes and watch as Marcin Jakubowski (art director at The SPA Studios in Madrid) revisits an old sketch and details his step-by-step process to turn it into a feature-quality animated scene layout. [Watch]
What started out for Buenos Aires studio Plenty as a straightforward project to recreate Rio de Janeiro in full CG, soon evolved into a complex experiment merging a sweeping practical MDF miniature of the city and 10 3D-printed statues of olympic athletes with projection mapping. [Watch]
Imaginary Forces offers a peek into the process and passion behind three of their top-of-the-food-chain broadcast title projects. [Watch]
Parallel Teeth (aka London director, animator, graphic artist Robert Wallace) dials up his off-beat wit and rhythmic charm in this music video for “Beffy” from New Zealand artist Ladi6, a non-stop delight of loops and whimsical visual treats. [Watch]
In direct contrast to his restrained and tasteful short film “Sins,” Los Angeles director, designer, animator Ariel Costa amps up his signature collage kinetics into a rough-and-ready promo for Green Day’s newest called “Bang Bang.” [Watch]
How do you sustain viewer interest for 75 seconds when you’re launching a product as dry and abstract as cloud data services for a company as massive and straight-laced as IBM? Like this… [Watch]
London motion mavens DixonBaxi rethink how the Premier League connects with its two billion football fans, constructing a striking and expansive new broadcast packaging including show titles, in-match graphics, augmented-reality, touch-screen, studio graphics, and soundtrack. [Watch]
Commissioned by a not-for-profit Christian ministry to promote a book by Kevin DeYoung, this vibrant and detail-rich sequence from the team of Vancouver animator/CD Jorge Rolando Canedo Estrada (aka Jr.canest) and Seattle illustrator/designer Don Clark will appeal to both believers and heretics alike. [Watch]
