Marcel the Shell better watch his back, because he’s got some serious competition in the totally adorable stop motion animation department thanks “To Give a Present,” a charming new short created by Kirsten Lepore for Yo Gabba Gabba‘s Christmas special. If her name sounds a bit familiar, it’s because we featured the CalArts grad student’s work here before; Lepore’s film “Bottle,” which explored the unlikely pen-pal relationship between a snowman and a sandman, was a finalist in last year’s Vimeo Festival in the animation category and recently received the first ever Student Annie Award. Click through now to watch her latest, and be amazed as your heart magically grows three sizes larger. Read More »
This morning, the good folks over at Colossal turned us on to this amazing new rotoscope animation by Korean design firm Studio Shelter and directed by Ha Juan, in which every single frame is a drawing of a different character, often in a different style and even a different medium than the frame before. The result is a slightly manic, jagged 2-d video about creativity, form, and character that made us want to pick up the pad. Not only that, but many of the single drawn frames are works of art worthy of display all by themselves, so we can only imagine what it took to create a video like this. Click through to watch, and let us know if you find it inspiring or head-spinning in the comments. Read More »
Did you realize that Emile Cohl, a French cartoonist, first brought the stop motion technique to America? Or that filmmaker Willis O’Brien used stop motion for the special effects in Lost World in 1925 and King Kong in 1933? Learn more about the history of stop motion film in Chloe Fleury’s entertaining paper animation after the jump.
Chicago-based filmmaker Alex Heller has made a stop-motion video for Scala & Kolacny Brothers‘ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” — aka the haunting all-female choir version of the song that you heard in The Social Network trailer. Rather fittingly, the short animation is about “one lonely doll’s desperate attempt to be accepted.” Click through to check it out.
This stop-motion video, which was shot over four hours using 111 human “pixels,” is the fifth installment in French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond’s GAME OVER Project. As always, we’re impressed by his work, and now wish to spend the rest of our afternoon shelling out quarters at the arcade.
Meet Mike. He’s the star of “Guy Walks Across America,” a stop-motion, time-lapse video that chronicles his epic “stroll” from New York to San Francisco — with stops at several famous landmarks along the way. (Here’s a Google Map of the route that they took.) As a YouTube commenter noted, this could easily serve as a commercial for Levi’s. Watch the original video, along with a behind-the-scenes “making of” clip (it was put together over 14 days using 2,770 individual still frames!), after the jump.
There tends to be quite a bit of overlap between the video gamers and internet media fans. And that’s why we’re living in a golden age of video game-themed viral clips, with new additions to this genre constantly surfacing. To commemorate the latest meme (and one of the greatest) of this geek canon, Stop Motion Sticky Note Mario, we have collected the ten best video game-inspired viral videos. If we forgot your favorite, make sure to tell us in the comments.
Wes Anderson’s fantastic foxes aren’t the only animated thespians in theaters this season. Next week another stop-motion feature opens in New York, and instead of wildlife, stars francophonic plastic figurines — Cowboy, Indian and Horse. In A Town Called Panic, Cowboy and Indian shop online for Horse’s birthday present, only to receive 50 billion bricks more than they intended. Meanwhile Horse tries to court a mare music teacher, but can never find time alone.
Like any clever animated feature, Panic flaunts enough campy misadventure to suit the younger kids, while leaving room for older ones — with hilariously mature themes like the perils of online shopping and perverse scientific advancement. The film, also known as Panique Au Village, is based on the Belgian television series and was the only stop-motion feature at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Stop-motion animation creates the illusion of an object moving by combining frames of the object in incremental positions. After the jump, five other notable stop-motion pictures from around the world.
With Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out this weekend, every Zissou-loving, B.F.G.-worshiping and Bill Murray-enthusiast cinema go-er is salivating with anticipation. Anderson, a master of whimsical dark comedy, chose to adapt the beloved children’s story into his first-ever animated feature film.
The medium? Stop motion. A meticulous animation technique that links hundreds of individual photos to create an illusion of movement, stop motion has been around for decades and continues to mesmerize viewers. In the past few years, the music industry has grown hip to this classic technique and has begun employing it in many a music video. Some of our favorites are after the jump.
Gio Toninelo has parlayed a lifelong obsession with G.I. Joe action figures into a gig as the founder and curator of the annual G.I. Joe Stop-Motion Film Festival, a traveling cinematic circus which stops at the 92Y Tribeca this Saturday night. After indulging in some childhood nostalgia, we grilled Tonielo on how he feels about the upcoming live-action Joe movie, how to get started with stop-motion film, and whether vampire Edward Cullen can hold a candle to ol’ Joe. Read More »
