If sound is done badly, people notice that the work is rubbish.
If it is done well, it’s mostly ignored. This is a good thing.
And then there’s this tape dispenser. Which is probably too overt for most productions, but works amazingly well in this short.
(Also check out the stop-motion Orange Ad, and… well everything else really)
I recently listened to an interesting presentation by one of the creators of Jib Jab — a company that has pioneered its way into animation through the use of the Internet. What is particularly fascinating is the fact that this company is an independent started by two brothers (and understanding wives). Marketing and distribution have been made possible by clever business sense, quality productions and the Internet.
This will happen a lot more.
KIWI is a great example of this.
As soon as people can easily transfer media from the Internet onto their TV sets, this will really take off.
JibJab interview part 1 here, part 2 here.
This looks like it could be an interesting film, but what really interests me is the excellent composition and lighting in this still. Look how clearly the girls are framed by the L-shape foreground. The eye is also drawn to them through the high contrast of black and white and further drawn to their faces which are drawn simply and, once again, with high contrast. The image is nicely balanced by the use of the scroll pattern on the far left. It’s heavy enough to balance out the image, but not distracting enough that it draws you away from the girls. A simple triangle formed with all 3 girls keeps the eye mainly focused on that group, but there is enough interest in the rest of the picture to keep it interesting (bins, broken glass and windows).
The lighting not only provides a great composition, but it’s also very atmospheric. As you would expect in a photograph, the high contrast peters out gradually in the background providing a a sense of rich depth. Finally, while most of the image is in a flat shade, certain areas are highlighted with a tecture. Check out the road, the highlight on the tree and the building. Again, this is almost a photographic style if printed in high contrast. I think it’s particulary brave to shade the road jet-black in the foreground and high-white in the background. What further contrast of shades could there be? And still it looks like the same surface.
This is a quite brilliant animated short. It starts out all lovely with a rabbit running through the fields, and turns into a waking nightmare. Really horrible to watch, but still excellent.
From an interview with Run Wrake:
The story is basically a very simple morality tale about greed - the dangers of greed and exploring nature. It came about when I found some 1950’s stickers in a junk shop about 20 years ago. When I was moving the studio out of Soho about 2 years ago, I fond them again in the bottom of the drawer and thought it would be great to make a film out of them. There were about 200 different stickers.
Wrake took these stickers, scanned them into Photoshop and then used After Effects to animate the parts. Quite often working with found images just seems showy, but in this film it works really well to turn, what I believe were always creepy illustrations, into their true nature.
I think I may get a complex about rabbits if I see too many more scary rabbit creations (Watership Down, that episode of Spaced with the art play thing, etc.).
The film can be seen here.