Director Lea Esmaili Joins Blinkink for UK Representation
November 21, 2024
Bristol designer/director Chris Hopewell returns to directing with this spooky stop-motion folktale with a terrible twist for Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch,” recalling the style of vintage UK kid’s shows like The Trumptonshire Trilogy. [Watch]
The wisdom and insight of American naturalist Eustace Conway comes to vivid life in this fluid mix of 2D and cel animation for History’s “Mountain Men” show crafted by LA motion and production studio Roger. [Watch]
Buck‘s Sydney and US animation crews team up to combine two chocolatey snacks, hyper-active emoji’s and an infectious pop song to make this 80-second Australian adventure for Cadbury’s new Dairy Milk with Oreo bar eminently watchable. [Watch]
Ten artists, three months, 340 white shirts and 2,576 stain-painted frames later, Aardman and Kode Media prove “Dirt Is Good” for Persil laundry detergent in this painstaking stop-motion film thru Ogilvy & Mather, UK. [Watch]
Check this impossible-to-ignore animated spot from Moscow motion house Loop and Mexican character designer El Grand Camacho for the massive Garorock music fest taking over rural Marmande in south-western France this summer.
[Watch]
Powered by first person accounts of time spent in solitary confinement, the haunting and claustrophobic nine-minute VR experience called “6×9” produced by The Mill for UK newspaper The Guardian gives viewers the chance to simulate what 100,000 people in US prisons endure for 23 hours every day. [Watch]
The bumper crop of student films from the 2016 CalArts Character Animation program includes “You Look Scary” by Xiya Lan and “Desert Critters” by Li Wen Toh – both demonstrate outstanding storytelling talents while using fully divergent styles, techniques and narrative structures. [Watch]
Ice versus gold. The battle of the warring sisters – Evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) and Ice Queen Freya (Emily Blunt) – visualized by director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and The Mill crew in a shimmering collision of live-action, CG and motion design for Universal’s “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” end credits. [Watch]
Independent Spanish director/CD (formerly a co-founder and director at DVEIN) Fernando Domínguez Cózar shows off his mastery of style, tone and haunting photo-real 3D in these titles for Kike Maíllo’s second feature film, an action thriller called “Toro.” [Watch]
Hideyuki Tanaka and his Tokyo prodco Frame Graphics prove maximalist bubblegum is alive and thriving in Japan with this kooky and complex candy store of motion capture, CG and compositing for the track “Sai & Co” from Japanese fashion model and singer Kiriko Takemura aka Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. [Watch]
Supamonks, the French animation crew responsible for 2014’s infamous Holypop film, are back with another off-the-rails 3D rampage.
[Watch]
The standout in a series of three films created by Beakus director Amaël Isnard for the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London, “Seeing the Invisible” is a master class in how to make educational content entertaining, digestible and therefore memorable. [Watch]
Part of a full rebrand for UK culture-oriented TV channel Sky Arts, these 25-second IDs from MPC in London mix live action and VFX to “visualize the transformation from ordinary to extraordinary through color.” [Watch]
Meet Sofia, a 3D amalgam of 500 actual children trapped in crisis situations all over the planet, their faces merged into a scared and vulnerable young girl created for UNICEF Sweden by Stockholm agency Edelman Deportivo and Swedish VFX facility Pixel Grinder. [Watch]
