Reel of the Month Club (Dec. 2024): Coat of Arms
December 21, 2024
In March 2015, Framestore LA creative director Ben West released his phenomenal buddy-film sushi comedy “FUGU & TAKO” exploring the perils and unexpected perks of eating live puffer fish. The film and perfectly realized VFX were created while West was a director and VFX super at Robot in Sydney. [Watch]
Take a peek at four months of intensely detailed work by Oscar-nominated stop-motion star PES and his team of animators and illustrators as they recreate the evolution of Honda products with thousands of hand-rendered drawings on real live paper with pre-vis and VFX/finishing by a52. [Watch]
Dutch director Matthijs Van Heijningen hit superstar status in 2011 via his brilliant Canal+ “The Bear” spot with Mikros Image supplying the beat-perfect VFX. In early 2015, Van Heijningen and the Mikros crew re-teamed for another smart, funny, animal-centric Canal+ effort called “Unicorns.” [Watch]
Known for their character-driven craziness, Buenos Aires design/animation studio Ronda turn their talents to Cartoon Network’s “The Amazing World of Gumball,” creating this series of lunatic loops including a claymation clip by fellow Argentinians Can Can Club. [Watch]
Over the last decade, studios like Blur, Axis, Platige, and Digic have elevated the art and craft of CG game trailers to an extraordinary level. That exclusive club gained a new member in 2015 when Psyop flexed it’s 3D and narrative muscles on this trailer for Microsoft’s ReCore at E3. [Watch]
During the summer of 2015, legendary UK studio Aardman Animations acquired a majority share in NYC animation studio Nathan Love to establish their US production entity called Aardman Nathan Love. The new company created this extraordinary piece of character madness to announce the launch. [Watch]
CDs Chris Bahry, Alexandre Torres and the Tendril crew help Canada’s Space Channel go beyond their core demo of young men in search a broader (read female) audience with a stunning set of macro-world IDs. [Watch]
Seamless and surprisingly extensive VFX from The Mill in this much-loved Snickers Super Bowl spot from O Positive director Jim Jenkins thru BBDO, New York starring Danny Trejo as a royally pissed Marcia Brady and a surprise guest star as Jan. [Watch]
Director Patrick Clair and the Elastic crew team with agency 72andSunny to compile a convincing news montage stretching 50 years into the future creating an unnerving back story for Activision’s Call of Duty franchise in prep for the release of “Black Ops III” in the fall of 2015. [Watch]
Directing collective bif, aka Jules Janaud and Fabrice Le Nezet, (both seasoned 3D artists, represented by Mill+ in London) combine motion capture and procedural animation/rendering to build a full-CG blast of escalating action for rising Parisian electro artist Azel Phara. [Watch]
Inspired by a life-threatening family tragedy, New York director/writer/cinematographer Vincent Peone (who co-founded the video team at collegehumor.com) leads a stellar crew on a seven-month, stop-motion and CG journey to reveal the magical story behind just why The Sea is Blue. [Watch]
Inspired by anime, propaganda art, the murals of Diego Rivera, and graffiti paintings, Not To Scale director Kris Merc takes on modern cultural excess in the video for “To My Surprise” from veteran Manchester rockers James and asks “what if love was the driving force of our cultures and interactions?” [Watch]
Seizure-inducing, hi-con op art makes for an unintuitive but eye-grabbing solution to promo La Vita Nòva, a free iOS app about the future of food, designed, animated, and scored by Milan motion design studio The Workroom for the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. [Watch]
It’s no secret how Vancouver filmmaker Eoin Duffy feels about Xmas, skewering the season’s conventions for three years running with short, acerbic animated tales. His 2015 take, titled “Happy Holidays” teams Duffy with character animator Henrique Barone and audio maven John Black at Cypher Audio. [Watch]
