Reel of the Month Club (Dec. 2024): Coat of Arms
December 21, 2024
How is it possible for Santa to deliver all those presents in one night? Vancouver director/animator Eoin Duffy takes a stab at the answer. [Watch]
Medicate yourself against the mad materialism of the season with this thoughtful and wonderfully low-key graduation short by Austrian director/animator Johannes Schiehsl and crew which just finished it’s tour of over 70 festivals. [Watch]
The cover of Stash 104 featured this jaw-dropper of a promo from Parisian character specialists Supamonks for a soft drink brewed by Catholic monks called Holypop. Hang on to your frock. Supamonks: “In the south of France, close to the Bourget Lake, stands a friary called ‘Les Frères de la Sainte Famille’. For more than […] [Watch]
Norwegian-born Montreal animator Torill Kove gives us a glimpse of taking design too far. Via the NFB. [Watch]
San Francisco directing team Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch aka Encyclopedia Pictura, replace their intricate and hyper-detailed live action ways with intricate and hyper-detailed animation on the music video for Panda Bear’s “Boy’s Latin” with Hornet director Eran Hilleli on board as animation director. [Watch]
London’s Electric Theater Collective supply VFX and animation back up for Rogue director Saam Farahmand‘s new stunner for Channel 4’s Born Risky campaign starring British singer-songwriter/model/multimedia performance artist/DJ Viktoria Modesta who, after spending most of her childhood in and out [Watch]
The MOOOVE from Swiss lighting company Senses has lurked on my wish list for years and now Woodblock directing team Crave (Roman Kaelin, Falko Paeper and Florian Wittmann) up the must-have factor with a cool online spot featuring the modular, magnetic-jointed lamp in action. [Watch]
Ringling College students Michael Bidinger and Michelle Kwon hit every beat perfectly in their graduation film, a stellar four-minute romantic comedy called “Jinxy Jenkins, Lucky Lou.” [Watch]
A smile-worthy and sly comment on the have and have not nature of Christmas (and life in general) From the Amsterdam, Barcelona and London studios of Glassworks who celebrate 20 years of VFX mastery in 2015. [Watch]
A riveting tour de force of broadcast promotion from director Tomek Baginski and the crew at Platige Image in Warsaw, Poland for History Channel. Tomek Baginski: “We were working with the client for a long time before we even started planning the shoot. [Watch]
The Best of Stash 2014 Collection releases in full on Dec 31 but here’s an early taste: A brilliant near-future sci-fi online ad for Greenpeace published in Stash 105 called “New Bees” directed by Polynoid and produced and animated at Woodblock in Berlin. [Watch]
Witness the behind-the-scenes tension and ultimate victory as Framestore takes on their biggest project to date pulling in every department in every Framestore location worldwide.
“Project X has been under wraps for months and required the full might of the Framestore renderfarm. It is easily our most realistic and immersive creation. It is so complex that if the project was to be rendered on a single laptop it would need to have been started approximately 2014 years ago, on the first ever Christmas Day.” [Watch]
Mill+ co-directors Ben Smith and Bryce Wymer hit themes of greed, betrayal, sexual intrigue and rivalry in the title sequence for the new Netflix original “Marco Polo” written by John Fusco and produced by The Weinstein Group.
“Bryce developed a technique to capture the images being ‘invisibly painted’ using an overhead projector and meticulously hand-painting the images onto a dense paper stock that allowed the water to sit on the surface of the paper.
“Sumi ink (ink formulated for sumi painting and calligraphy) was then dripped onto the invisible water paintings, spreading beautifully throughout the entire image. This was captured through high-speed photography to create an elegant, monotone image, confined to the waters edges.”
Compare and contrast: Here’s a smaller scale ink-in-water treatment from 2011 called “Dirty Water” from hush.fr director/illustrator Clément Beauvais For BDDP Unlimited:
Vessel Studios in Atlanta turn their talent for highly detailed, accurate and often beautiful medical animation to the lighter task of creating a refreshingly unusual CG holiday greeting called “Whimsical Wishes.” [Watch]
