web animation - The Ink and Pixel Club

Sara — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:39:59 +0000

While I recover from a birthday cake hangover, please enjoy Crater Face, a simple and surprisingly moving student film from animator Skyler Page.

web animation - The Ink and Pixel Club

Sara — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:03:50 +0000

StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization that gives Americans of all walks of life the opportunity to talk about their lives and have their words preserved for posterity at the Library of Congress. One of StoryCorps’ projects is recording the stories of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks as told by their families and loved ones. Three such interviews were made into animated shorts by Rauch Brothers Animation. They’re perfect examples of how relatively simple animation can effectively protray deep and complex emotions. Beyond that, the films speak for themselves.

John and Joe from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

She Was the One – StoryCorps 9/11 animation from Rauch Brothers on Vimeo.

Always a Family – StoryCorps 9/11 animation from Rauch Brothers on Vimeo.

If you’d like to learn more about the people who made these films, Cartoon Brew has an interview with the Rauch Brothers.

web animation - The Ink and Pixel Club

Sara — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:34:24 +0000

This stop-motion recreation of the Jonny Quest opening is amazing.

Jonny Quest Opening Titles from Roger D. Evans on Vimeo.

The original version was great to begin with and Roger D. Evans’s loving tribute captures everything wonderful about it while playing to the strengths of the medium he’s working in. The characters, movements, and backgrounds are all reproduced with meticulous attention to detail, from the menacing walking eye to the slow, shambling gait of the mummy to Race Bannon’s flying kick as he rescues Jonny from a bad guy. But the three dimensional sets allow Evans to move the camera around and break free of the profile shots of characters moving straight across the screen that were necessary in a series that relied on cycles and limited animation.

Evans doesn’t own the rights to Jonny Quest. If Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner – who do own the rights – are smart, they’ll either commission him to do some work for them or make a deal to run the stop-motion intro on their spinoff channel Boomerang, which has been running mostly the same interstitial material since its debut. But unless this happens, Evans has no way of making money off of his labor of love, the making of which he shares on his website. Does that mean that this project, while a great treat for fans of the series and free publicity for the show, was a waste of time for Evans and his crew? Not at all. Animating someone else’s characters as a personal project can have great rewards.

What fanimation can do for you

web animation - The Ink and Pixel Club

Sara — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:32:35 +0000

I’m betting you’ve already seen Google’s impressive and fun animated doodle celebrating the birthday of Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen. The appropriately fanciful tribute, drawing inspiration from the accompanying song “Don’t Stop Me Now,” took Google doodler Jennifer Hom and her team of artists about three months to create. The NBC website has an article on the making of the doodle. Here’s hoping that the Google logo will be playing a background role in many more creative animated projects.

web animation - The Ink and Pixel Club

Sara — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:06:24 +0000

I’m running behind on the latest article and feeling a bit under the weather to boot. (It’s nothing serious and nothing related to the flu or pigs.) So while I rest up until I’m feeling well enough to finish the latest article, please enjoy the latest Simon’s Cat cartoon, or the whole lot of them if you’ve never seen them before. These entertaining shorts go beyond just “the cute/funny/annoying things cats do” with appealingly simple drawings and excellent comic timing.