During the month of July I had some great days enjoying the Anima Mundi, the 16th International Animation Festival of Brazil. I watched several short animations and three animated feature films. If you ask me about them, I’m going to talk about the feature films and some shorts, but checking the festival catalogue I can remember of almost all. Of course there are always some remarkable animations that you can’t forget so easy. That’s the case of KJFG No. 5:

Three professional musicians – the bear, the rabbit and the wolf – are practicing their art in the forest when a hunter turns up…

The Hungarian animation directed by Alexei Alekseev won some prizes in short film and animation film festival around the world, including the Sacem Award at Annecy 2008 (you can watch the video awards ceremony here). Alekseev made everything in the film: scripts, scenery, animation, music and sound. It’s a short, simple video and brilliant animation – I watch it several times. I hope you enjoy it.

Joining humour and attractive images has been very used in the last product campaigns. If you make the public smile you won some points, that’s probably the idea. The agency DDB Sydney used this strategy to the last year’s campaign of Wrigley chewing gum “Wrigley’s Extra”.
Those commercials were starred by a group of super cute food creatures designed by TWiN™. The cute CG characters full of personality interact with live action scenes on the Wrigley’s Extra commercials, directed by Jonathan Baker.
The ads had some success since there was a first Wrigley’s Extra commercial, then the Wrigley’s Extra ‘White’ commercial, and a new campaign this year starred by the same group of characters for the new “Wrigley’s Extra” chewing gums.

The adorable taro root mice bellow were created by Jimmy Zhang, a chef and produce artist in San Francisco. The image is part of The New York Times‘ slideshow Playing With Food, which also includes more images of food turned into art by James Parker, Hugh McMahon and Saxton Freymann. It’s part of the article Knife Skills: Creating Feasts for the Eyes by Kate Murphy. She presents the carved watermelon sculptures by Mr. Parker and explains the growth of those kind of creations using fruits and vegetables:

“We’re seeing more fruit and vegetable entries every year that are incredibly creative,” said Thomas Smyth, chairman of the Salon of Culinary Art, an annual competition sponsored by the Société Culinaire Philanthropique in New York. Recent eye-catchers, he said, have included melons carved to look like Fabergé eggs and lifelike cocktails made of butternut squash, carrots and papaya.

Probably part of the “guilty” of the current appetite for whimsical produce art belongs to Saxton Freymann, which published in 1997 book Play With Your Food, with pictures of brussels sprouts pigs, broccoli poodles and lemony bears. The article also presents a video with Hugh McMahon carving the portrait of James Beard in a watermelon.
Related posts:
Jeu d’oranges
Food to amuse
Maurizio Savini
Funny sausages
Cuisine Sandwich

GAME OVER is a brilliant video performance project created by the Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, using stop-motion (pixelation) technique to visually reproduce classic arcade games, pixel by pixel.

It consists of a series of collaborative animation movies which revive some of the very first video games. The pixels are replaced by a group of real human-beings that are moving from seat to seat in a theatre during about 4 to 6 hours. Each “pixel” has its own rules and decides what s/he wants to do for each picture. Once all these pictures are turned into a short animation movie, a giant human-scale video game unfolds “live”.

The project started with video performance of Pong. The second video was Space Invaders on June 24th 2006, followed by Pole Position on February 11th 2007, and Tetris on November 24th 2007. The videos demanded a lot of time to be shoted, planned, and the result is great. However, two more reasons to watch them: the special effects and the soundtrack all made with voices only. Watch Tetris bellow.

The animated short film No Quarter it’s a light-hearted comedic view on the devastating consequences of overwhelming greed. The animation, by Mike Trent, was created as his conclusion project for 3D Animation program at Vancouver Film School. I enjoyed very much the aesthetic, including the colours, the characters and the humour presented on it; all those elements help to create an old-time atmosphere. (via CGTalk)

Every new year people do their predictions: doing more exercises, eating more healthy food, visiting new places, being more kind with other people, and many other things like that. In my personal, and mental, predictions list I also listed things to do to save the world: recycling, use less energy, taking shorter showers, use less paper and re-use it, taking my saddlebags to the supermarket and greengrocer, avoiding the use of more plastic bags, and eat less meat.
The international organization WWF has a new video campaign for climate change in UK, to those that don’t want to listen, called How to save the world. The animated video lists small actions good that we can do to make a big difference and helping to stop the climate change. The animation was designed and animated by Jon Yeo and Maria Sandström, and written by Rafaela Perera and Ravi Karawdra. (via No fat clips)
PS.: this post is dedicated to the great guy behind Martin Klasch, who was worried about my blogging absence.
Related posts:
Humans!
Global Warming

L’âme Seule (The lonely soul) is a touching animation created by three talented students from EESA (Ecole Européenne Supérieure d’Animation): Cédric Berthier, Jean-Sébastien Leroux et Maximilien Royo. The short-film (4min) tells the story of a lonely character and the discover of what is missing in its life. The making-of shows part of the process of this a stop-motion animation and the creation of the characters with plasticine. The music was composed by SoH-So, who also made the site.

Möbius transformations revealed is a neat a short video by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, and it’s shared under a creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. It depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity.
The video was a winner in the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The video (bellow) it’s also available on the site to download in high resolution (130 MB). It was built primarily using POV-Ray and Mathematica, and the soundtrack (from Schumann’s Kinderscenen, Op. 15, I) is performed by Donald Betts and distributed by Musopen.

Doug Savage is known for his humorous cartoons Savage Chickens drawn on post-its. The Savage Chickens is daily cartoon with an acid humour, and for your enjoyment has a feed available. And I must say that just now I’ve got a decent attitude to subscribe to it (yes, I know, I should do it before).

The sometimes-slow-creature-here noticed this neat cartoon due to Doug Savage had won the Laura Veirs and Saltbreakers music video contest. The stop-motion video was made to the song “Phantom Mountain”. The contest rules were simple: made a videoclip for any of their songs and send it until August 31th. He tells about his video experience on the page Behind the Scenes. Some of the Phantom Mountain Fun Facts:

There are about 500 sticky notes in the video, including a butterfly and 4 or 5 stunt butterflies.
There are over 1500 photos in the video. I used a digital camera on a tripod, which I had to sort of crouch over. My back was killing me!

I drew so many cartoons that I actually developed a callus on the inside of my left thumb from drawing too much. Towards the end, I had to get up and shake out my arm every few minutes.
The old clock radio on the table used to belong to my great-grandmother.

And finally, the winner music video bellow (3 min). Great work.(via Koreus)

The last PETA campaign PETA’s ABC Campaign points to the importance of spay or neuter. The ABC (Animal Birth Control) tackles the issue of companion animal overpopulation and urges people to do their part by taking simple steps to help end this crisis.
To spread the mesage, the burlesque dancer, model and actress Dita Von Teese joined to launch PETA’s new ABC campaign. There is no doubt about Dita Von Teese’s Sexy ABC Ad (picture above), being sexy and catching our attention.

Dita knows her ABCs and just how important animal birth control is. Every year, nearly 4 million dogs and cats are put to death in the U.S. because there are not enough good homes for them. Until we all do our part to put an end to this cycle, euthanasia will remain a tragic necessity.
In her ad, Dita urges fans to “bone up” on their ABCs and, if they are considering adding a dog or a cat to the family, to adopt from a local animal shelter and be sure to get their new family member spayed or neutered.

I’m supporting this campaign, because I believe on its importance. All my (three) cats are neutered (and spayed) and never had any problems with that. They are healthy and happy. My youngest furry guy, Truffaut, was found meowing in the garage of my building sick and starved. I don’t believe in buying animals when there are thousands of those poor animals living on the streets of São Paulo. And if I can help, even with small actions like those, I will. I hope you do the same.
Bellow, a behind-the-scenes footage from Dita’s photo shoot and her exclusive interview with PETA.