Inspirations is a beautifully realized and wonderfully conceived short CGI animated film by Cristóbal Vila.

It is a homage to the works of artist M.C. Escher, conceived as Vila’s fanciful imagining of the artist’s workspace, filled with objects that refer to aspects of Escher’s work

On his website, Etérea Studios, Vila provides information about the short, including stills and annotation about the sources of objects and concepts used in the film, and a page about the referenced artworks by other masters.

I particularly enjoy the highpoint of the piece, in which one of Escher’s images that suggests three dimensionality emerging from a flat surface, itself emerges from a flat surface.

Vila also created the beautiful short, Nature by Numbers, which I wrote about here.

[Via io9]

Pythagasaurus is a wonderfully realized CGI animated short about “…the Mighty Pythagasaurus, the fabled tyrannosaurus practiced in the skills of trigonometry and long division”.

The short is directed by Peter Peake and animated by Pascale Bories, with wonderful voice characterization by Bill Bailey, Martin Trenaman and Simon Greenall.

Not exactly what you would expect from the preview images (grin).

[Via MetaFilter]

As someone who very much enjoyed Dave Stevens’ comic book The Rocketeer, and the Republic Pictures 1950′s Commando Cody serials, to which Steven’s character was a loving homage, I couldn’t help but like 3-D animator Joe Banana’s The Rocketeer 20th Anniversary, which is in turn a homage to Steven’s character and the underrated 1991 Disney live action movie adaptation (a homage to a homage to a homage?).

Banana, who is co-creator and animator of the berserk game characters the RABBIDS, has created his delightful interpretation of the Rocketeer character done as a 3-D animated feature or TV show, giving us just enough of a taste to make us hope that Pixar will take the hint.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

Codehunters is a 2006 CGI animated short directed by Ben Hibon, who directed the animated sequence in the current Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie.

Working with Stateless Films and Blinklink, Hibon worked to make the CGI images look graphic and closer to 2-D drawings than most CGI, and the film has a nice blend of anime style and more rendered imagery.

The story, such it is, involves some kind of dystopian setting, and doesn’t make a lick of sense as far as I can tell. There is an explanation of sorts here, but it’s too boring for words.

Of more interest is the page on CGSociety in which there is a discussion of the film, which was originally made for a weekly MTV Asia TV show called Screen, and meant to be a prologue for a longer work that was never developed.

[Via Drawn! by way of Cartoon Brew]

[Note: you may see links to a site for the film at "codehunters.tv". Be aware that Google lists that site as potentially infected with malware.]

Listicles, part of The L Magazine from New York, is a blog for which every post is a list of some kind, has posted an interesting list of 10 Surreal Animated Short Films.

These are culled from various sources (including the Goeblins Annecy animations) and are a mix of hand drawn and CGI animation.

All of them are interesting, and collectively make for a good bit of amusement and fascination.

(Images above: “Galileo” by Avrillon Ghislain, “The Lady and the Reaper” by Javier Recio Garcia, Music Video for “Where Dream & Day Collide” by Madder Mortem, directed by Christian Ruud and Kim Holm, “Garuda” by Nicolas Athane, Meryl Frack, Alexis Liddell, Andres Salaff and Maïlys Vallade)

At first I thought these images by Japanese artist Kazuki Takamatsu were 3-D depth mattes, renderings of 3-D CGI models in which shades of gray are assigned to areas according to their distance from the virtual camera. (Their white, sculptural quality also brought to mind the paintings of A. Andrew Gonzalez.)

However, even if CGI depth mattes, or something similar, are the source material or inspiration for them, Takamatsu’s finished works are actually gouache paintings, and fairly large in scale as you can see from these photos at Gallery Tomura.

Takamatsu uses the term Distanfeerism to name his style. Other than that, and the fact that he graduated from Tohoku University of Art and Design, I can find very little information about the artist.

Takamatsu’s site is in Japanese, but there are link titles in English.

(Note: the sites linked here may be considered mildly NSFW.)

[Via Jason Kottke]

I will sometimes gripe about manufactured culture to the point where it may seem I don’t like certain genres at all, when in fact I do (e.g. CGI animated movies and superhero comic books).

After griping about Hollywood CGI animated features in the course of raving about Sita Sings the Blues recently, I’ll point out that I really do like Computer Generated Imaging when it’s used with intelligence, wit and imagination (The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies); as opposed to being put into service for super-slick formulaic features in which name voice talent is seen as a prerequisite but actual stories are in short supply.

As a case in point, I’ll recommend a wonderful short film by Bruce Branit called World Builder, in which a man builds a holographic 3-D environment for the woman he loves. The live action part of the film was shot in a single day, the CGI post production was done over the course of two years.

The film makes good use of CGI, which, in a way, is part of the subject, and anyone who has worked in CGI applications, even consumer level “world builders” like Bryce or Vue d’Esprit, and users of Google Sketchup in particular, will find entertaining nods to the way these things work.

The real point, though, is that the film is a story, and a touching one at that; and the effects are in the end only tools to enable the telling of the story; something that Big Entertainment tends to forget in the midst of their calculations about box office receipts and visions of sugarplum merchandising returns.

Branit directs Branit/VFX in Kansas City. You can find other films by Branit there and on Vimeo.

[Via Kottke]

Goro Fujita was born in Japan, grew up in Germany and studied there at the German Film School, where he concentrated on 3-D character animation. He is now a freelance character animator and visual development artist.

The gallery on his site focuses mainly on his personal work. The section of finished work only contains 15 images. There are also sections for personal 3-D work and a nice sketchbook section with life drawings and quick sketches from life and imagination.

The real treasure on Fujita’s site, however, is the section of speedpaintings, meaning quickly done digital paintings. These are whimsical, imaginative and wonderfully realized in the spare, unfussed-with style inherent in speedpainting. They range across a wide variety of scenes and subjects and are sometimes hilarious (he has this thing for rabbits). In them he plays with color, composition, lighting and visual texture in ways that only free-ranging casual exploration is likely to bring out.

I have no idea how much relation any of them have to his professional work, and some are obviously playful interpretations of existing films, but a number of them are suggestive of intriguing ideas for stories.

There is a section of his short animations and a demo reel, as well as a section for tutorials, that includes tips and tricks for speedpainting, a painting screen capture and a “making of”s article about the most elaborate of the images in the Finished section, which was a Challenge entry for the CGSociety.

Fujita also has a blog, Chapter 56, in which he discusses his animation, paintings and various other topics.

[Link via Fossfor's Laboratory]