Reel of the Month Club (Dec. 2024): Coat of Arms
December 21, 2024
Nexus director Kibwe Tavares, who you know from his excellent big fish tale “Jonah,” turns his considerable narrative talents to the financial world in this detail-packed three-minute brand film for Umpqua Bank animated by the Nexus crew and produced thru CAA Marketing. [Watch]
How can a music video director make their low budget production punch out of the frothy torrent of visual media released everyday? The truth is (and therefore the fun is), no one has a clue. Enter Studio Smack, Floris Kaayk and their intense new work for “Witch Doctor” by Dutch alt rockers De Staat. [Watch]
Electo-diety Amon Tobin joins forces with the all-Paris team of creative agency Cream, directing collective Deluxe, and CG-masters Mathematic for this riveting and impossibly sleek reveal of the Peugeot Fractal concept vehicle which premiered at the 2015 Frankfurt Motorshow.
[Watch]
Raven Kwok (aka Guo, Ruiwen) re-teams with Monstercat’s mysterious musical artist Karma Fields to create this mesmerizing, code-based generative video using Voronoi tessellation, a geometric model dating to René Descartes’ 1644 vortex theory of planetary motion. [Watch]
UK designer/animator Steve Kirby just dropped us his first animated short and our first chuckle of the day. Based on two minutes of audio from a local radio phone-in show, “If the Cuckoo Don’t Crow” captures the eccentric charm in a true story of hurricane prediction, lost tea towels and a one-earred Jack Russell. [Watch]
Check this intense blast of mechanical adrenaline called “ZERO DAY,” a stylized and stylish take on a near-future cyber-collapse courtesy of the Wisconsin wizard of CG aka Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) fueled by a killer track from standingwave (aka Kyle VandeSlunt). [Watch]
After a string of insanely fun video teasers, the worst-kept secret in the animation world is finally official: UK animation powerhouse Aardman has acquired a majority share in NYC animation studio Nathan Love to establish their US production entity called Aardman Nathan Love. [Watch]
Lots of innovative character work here from director Limbert Fabian (who co-directed the incredible Chipotle “Scarecrow”) and the Moonbot crew for an ambitious new Michelin campaign out of TBWA\PARIS designed “to bring Michelin’s unique tire development philosophy to life.” [Watch]
The popularity of Zoetropes is certainly linked to our current love of all things analogue: meaning handmade, warmer and somehow more honest. But now that TBWA Singapore and Airbnb have created this 12 1/2 foot-wide monster, the question becomes: Did we just hit peak Zoetrope? [Watch]
Take a peek at four months of intensely detailed work by Oscar-nominated stop-motion star PES and “dozens 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]
One of the most intriguing short film trailers of the year, this peek at director/CG artist Antoine Delach‘s six-minute stereoscopic opus called “Ghost Cell” renders both grand and mundane vignettes of Paris as impossibly complex webs of scanned data. The nightmarish result, though scientifically generated, feels distinctly organic. [Watch]
Every once in a while, someone puts the awe back into awesome. Witness this short film from Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh documenting their construction of the first physical scale model of our solar system across seven miles of the Black Rock desert in Nevada. [Watch]
Back in April, Belgian rapper/pop-star Stromae teamed with French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet to take on the evils of social media in “Carmen”. Now, upping the darkness quotient several notches, he recruits director Xavier Reyé and Belgian VFX house Benuts for this spectacular interpretation of cancer. [Watch]
The character insanity continues in the second teaser from NYC animation house Nathan Love leading up to their big announcement on Sept 22. We swore not to reveal what the “A” in ANL stands for, but we can tell you the news has to do with the continued invasion of the US by UK animation/VFX studios. [Watch]
