Thugs on Film is one of my favorites of the crop of independent Flash animation short series that have come and gone over the past few years.

Distributed by Mondo Mini Shows, Thugs on Film is lamentably no longer being produced. Mondo’s awkward an inelegant distribution and promotion model always confused me, and evidently, other potential viewers as well. They now seem intent on putting most of their efforts into Happy Tree Friends, a series whose appeal is lost on me.

No so with Thugs on Film, a wonderfully snarky setup in which a couple of British thieves, er, independent small businessmen, sit around in a warehouse full of loot merchandise and review movies, awarding the reviewed feature a rating at the end based on the number of pilfered recently acquired Rolexes up their sleeves. Thugs on Film is just up my alley, irreverent, funny and drawn with a style that has a nice springy feeling of rough line work and is designed with the requirements of inexpensive limited animation for Flash in mind.

The designers and animators take advantage of color and simple shapes to create mood and settings, and the limited animation is used to best advantage to compliment the writing. The characters, Stubby and Cecil, are well designed, both visually and conceptually, and play well off of each other.

For a while, you couldn’t even find these animations. Mondo’s misguided attempts to keep them monetized instead kept them out of reach, and confused even devoted fans trying to search out the episodes.

Some of them (though certainly not all) are now available again on the Thugs on Film section of the Mondo Mini Shows site, even if it’s in a less than wonderful interface. Wait for a short eSurance spot and the episode plays. You can choose more from the scrolling menu below the main screen.

The older ones ended with an interactive quiz, with a different short snippet shown in response to your answer, but these seem to be short circuited now into ads for Happy Tree Friends and eSurance.

Some of the older episodes are also better and more elaborate, they apparently got a little tired of the formula after a while.

You can also look through the other Mondo cartoons, though except for an occasional episode of Like, News, none of them has particularly grabbed my attention.

Created by Dan Todd, Thugs on Film was a group effort. I’m not sure how consistent the team was throughout its run, but here are some of the credits from a middle period episode (in which they reviewed The Mummy Returns): Directed by W Kamu Bell, Design by Rhode Montijo, Storyboards by David Donar, Backgrounds by Jenny Hansen and animation by John Cimino, Mark Giambruno and Mark West.

I give Thugs on Film five Rolexes.

Back in the mid to late 90’s, when the webcomics landscape looked more like an empty plain dotted with tiny houses than today’s bustling metropolis, one of those houses was an online comic called Bugbots: The Mansect Rebellion.

Created by husband and wife team Gerry and Viki Mooney, the strip had a fun, brash, 60’s Marvel feeling to it, with nice touches of humor thrown in. In the fourth issue, the comic became interactive, with panels that changed and revealed their word balloons on rollover. Unfortunately, that comic was eventually abandoned (or is ona long long hiatus), and the Mooneys moved on to other things.

Gerry Mooney, in addition to his continuing work in the areas of cartoon illustration, technical illustration and gallery painting, has ventured back into comics with a new graphic novel project called Sister Mary Dracula.

Based on a Flash animation that he created in 2001, it tells the story of fourth grader named Terry Malloy, a thinly-veiled stand in for Mooney himself as a schoolboy, who is convinced that one of his teachers at St. Egregius the Stricter Elementary, is, in fact, a vampire.

The 100 page story is being published in 20-page chapters, the first of which has been printed and is available through the site. You can read some sample pages on the site, as well as viewing the original animation. (I can’t give you direct links because the site is in frames and the navigation is in Flash.)

It may appear from the wording on the site that “Buy Chapter One” refers to purchasing a chapter of a webcomic, but it actually refers to an issue of the print comic (I think just due to the use of the word “chapter” instead of “issue”). The online pages are simply previews. They are large enough, though, to give a nice feeling for the light touch Mooney has applied to the drawing, with just enough tone work to set an appropriate mood for the story.

I don’t have the background to identify with a strict Catholic school upbringing, but I think most of us, particularly those who liked to draw in school when we were supposed to be doing other things, can find resonance in the protagonist’s experiences and flights of escapist fantasy.

If you’re a fan of pop songs, particularly from the 1960’s when the three minute pop song was perhaps at its peak as a musical form, you’re familiar with the concept of a “golden intro”, that delicious first 20 or 30 seconds of instrumental music before the vocals start, that was often a thing of beauty in itself, above an beyond what may or may not have been a great song in total.

For examples, listen to the exquisite first 20 seconds of the Beach Boys’ California Girls or that wonderful descending pattern that forms the intro to the Kinks’ beautiful Waterloo Sunset; ahhhh - fractional moments of musical bliss. (The existence of these little bits of beauty was, of course, accentuated in being defaced by disk jockeys of the time, who made an infuriating, deranged, grafitti-like art form out of talking over entire song intros and ending their blabbering only microseconds before the song’s vocals started, but I digress…).

Similar to the wonderful hidden jewels of song intros, the introductions, or opening credits, of films have long been a repository for gems that often stand out from their surrounding work; which again, may or may not be up to the quality of the intro.

In recent years the opening credits, once considered a form of entertainment in themselves, also prominently in the 1960’s, have been de-emphasized, their place having been taken by the closing credits. In either case, the titles of films are a sort of hidden and underappreciated art form, rarely in the spotlight but as worthy of attention as animated shorts.

In another example of Why I Love the Internet, there is a site out there devoted to just that concept. Forget the film, watch the titles is part of the Submarine Channel, a portal for independent film. When I first wrote about it back in February, the project was just getting off the ground and the selection was small. On checking back, I’ve found the selection expanded, well worth a return visit.

Much to my delight, it now includes the great closing titles to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (sequence at left), one of my favorite pieces of short animation in recent years (and a prime example of the credits being considerably better than the movie). These were designed and directed by Jamie Caliri, who was the director of the terrific animated ad called “Dragon” for United Airlines last year (see my post on Jamie Caliri).

Like that sequence, the Lemony Snicket titles were done essentially with painted paper cut-outs, artfully drawn, arranged and animated. In the case of the Snicket sequence the lead animators and layout artists were Todd Hemker and Benjamin Goldman. Forget the film is good about not only giving you the credits for the credit sequences, but links to further information.

The collection is not growing rapidly, but you can sign up to receive their newsletter and know when the next title sequence gem has been added to the showcase.

I hope today is a good day for you to get lost in a time-sink, because here’s another major one.

Netdiver is a site that collects and displays links to websites that the author, Carole Guevin, aided by her techie co-founder Jean-François Simard, has selected as particularly appealing and well done. The overall emphasis of the site is on design, but Guevin has devoted an extensive section to the display of web sites by illustrators, as well has having sections of Photography sites and other Portfolios (largely designers).

There is also a section dedicated to Flash sites, Industrial, Powagirrrls, video and animation and a category for “Imaginative” (as though the rest of them weren’t).

In addition, there’s news, articles and a substantial and highly useful Toolbox for graphic and digital designers. The Sitemap will give you an overview of the available goodies on this extensive site.

The home page is somewhat blog-like, though without dated posts, with items of interest pulled to the fore.

When you enter an individual category you’re dropped on the most recent page of many, e.g. page 16 in the Illustration category. The numerical links to previous pages are arranged across the top of the page under the general navigation.

Guevin definitely has a point of view and specific range of styles in the sites and artists she selects, but it’s wide enough that you may find it accommodates work and designs appealing to a variety of tastes.

Don’t blame me if you look up and find out half your day has disappeared. I warned you.

OK, I have to admit that this is something I find particularly appealing for a number of reasons, and may not appeal to everyone to the same degree, but I can’t help enjoying it as much as I do.

First of all, I’m a sucker for comics stories or animations in which the artist interacts with his or her creation. One of my all-time favorite Warner Brothers cartoons, for example, is Duck Amuck, in which Daffy is tormented by the hand, pencil and eraser of the unseen animator.

Animator vs. Animation, a Flash animation by Alan Becker, is a kind of reversal on that notion, in which the animator’s creation gains a will of it’s own and engages him in a battle for control.

The particularly delightful thing for me is that the battlefield on which this conflict is played out is the Flash application interface itself. As someone who works in Flash, and in fact teaches it, I took great delight in seeing this familiar set of tools, palettes, timeline, and controls deconstructed in a battle between the artist’s stick figure character, initially labeled “victim”, and the artist, cleverly represented by the mouse cursor.

In spite of some of the Flash-specific references and in-jokes, I think anyone can appreciate the general idea and the entertaining way it’s presented.

Apparently, the animation has been successful enough that Becker has revised it, and followed it up with a sequel, Animator vs. Animation II, in which he has given his protagonist (antagonist) more power, in anticipation of a greater challenge, and the battle rages well beyond the Flash interface.

He says in the introductions to the two animations that the first one took him three months to complete; the second one, five months.

Becker doesn’t seem to have a web site, instead posting his animations and other projects to his deviantART space.

One of the other items on his page is this quite nice acrylic painting of his own home-grown watermelon. There are also other drawings. His brief bio indicates that he is only 18 and plans to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design and pursue a career in art. Something tells me we’ll be seeing more from him as time goes on.

[Link courtesy of Janet Kofoed]

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get weary of the overuse of 3-D CGI in TV commercials.

Yes, some of it is clever and very well done, but there’s just so much of it that the 2-D, spy-themed mini-cartoons for eSurance, produced by WildBrain (who I profiled here) and animated by the Ghostbot studio, are a welcome relief; and, to my mind, much more entertaining than slick CGI spots like the Geico Gecko.

Ghostbot, who I first wrote about back in November of 2005, has now created 9 of the animated commercials. Ghostbot is an animation studio in San Francisco that does TV commercial animation in Flash, a vector animation technology created for web animation that is finding increasing use in television cartoons.

A bit 60’s modern, a bit 90’s retro, Ghostbot’s sharply stylized, colorful and nicely realized cartoon shorts have a bit of the feeling of classic film title animation, though hyped up to a frenetic pace that allows them to suggest the basics of a story in 30 seconds.

Their Projects gallery features the eSurance spots as well as other Ghostbot projects, including a music video for Five Iron Frenzy.

Advertisers are beginning to realize the value of commercials that entertain; and the eSurance site offers a download of a longer (3 minute) WildBrain/Ghostbot animation called “Carbon Copy” (left, bottom), that is even more fully realized than the TV shorts, and uses the same characters, but has only minimal branding at the end of the story.

Ghostbot sometimes wears their influences on their sleeve; several of their commercials feature variations of giant robots (above, second image) that feel like homages to Brad Bird’s terrific feature, The Iron Giant, and their “Quick Draw” commercial looks a lot like Kazu Kibuishi’s Daisy Kutter comics series; but I like aggregations of influences and references to other bits of entertainment, like Ghostbot’s 30’s film noir nod to Casablanca in their recent “Proof” eSurance spot (above, third image).

One of the nice features of Ghostbot’s site is that they not only make the sample shorts available (in Quicktime), but they also have a section of preliminary concept drawings and Storyboards (unfortunately reproduced a little small, but large enough to get some idea of what they look like).

In the Portfolios section, there are individual portfolios for co-conspirators Alan Lau, Roque Ballesteros and Brad Rau, as well as links to friends and associates like Kenn Navarro, Rhode Montjo and Arvin Bsutista.

There is also a login for the “Ghostbot Secret Base“, whose mysteries are beyond the reach of this writer.

The Ghostbot principals also maintain the long-running Punch Pants blog, with news and views on their work and projects by friends and others in the commercial animation community.

French animator Arthur De Pins first gained notice with his animated short L’Eau de Rose (Bed of Roses, image above — bottom, left), for which he created the characters and animated them in Flash, with some additional compositing in After Effects.

Macromedia (Adobe) Flash, a computer animation application which was originally aimed at the creation of animated banner ads for the web, has been coming into its own as an animation tool for both television cartoons and animated shorts aimed at the animation circuit. The Kalamazoo Animation Festival International actually has a special category for Flash animation and awarded that category to L’Eau de Rose in 2005.

De Pins worked with producer Jeremy Rochigneux on Rose, and teamed up with him again for La Révolution des Crabes, which took home home top honors, and the prize money, from the 2005 session of Nextoons, The Nicktoons Film Festival.

In the meanwhile, De Pins has been creating animations for commercials in Europe and illustrations for European magazines like Max-Magazine and Wombat. His web site is in French, but non-French speakers can easily navigate through the galleries of illustrations (some NSFW) arrayed in the left column and the choices for animations on the right, including his first short, Geraldine.

At the top of this site you’ll find his bio, bulletin board, wallpapers and links.

De Pins illustration style has a strong graphic simplicity combined with a feeling of completed rendering that is achieved with artfully controlled areas of flat color. His celebrity portraits (image above, bottom, right) are particularly strong in this way, as are his panoramic illustrations for Max-Magazine (image above, top). His gallery for Max includes some comics that are done in a broad, cartoony style that is closer to his animation style.

His illustrations are wild, sexy, funny, unabashed, wonderfully drawn and beautifully colored.

Link via Cold Hard Flash (and here)

Note: The site linked here contains adult material that is not suitable for children and is NSFW.

Unlike many of his compatriots, animators who left Disney Studios when the company ovelords decided to abandon their 100 year heritage and close their 2-D animation studios in favor of CGI, Adam Phillips left his position running the effects department of the Sydney-based studio of his own volition.

His focus since then has been on his own short animations, composed in Flash and posted on the net. His Hitchiker short won the Flash Forward Film Festival in 2003, followed eventually by the first of what has be called the “Brackenwood” series of short animations, which are simply remarkable. One of the early shorts from that series, Prowlies at the River, really made people in the animation community sit up and take notice, and set new standards for the use of Flash in animation.

The “Brackenwood” stories focus around Bitey, a mischievous faun-like character who taunts and teases other creatures, and usually gets his comeuppance. They take place in some mythical place or time, populated with unreal creatures that, in Phillips hands, act and feel very much like real animals. The image above is from LittleFoot, the most recent in the series.

You will find most of the Brackenwood animations on the Animations page of Phillips website, as well as some other shorts on the Bitey Castle page. Don’t forget to go back to the home page, though, and check out the great little shorts in the 30 days: 30 shorts section, linked by small numbered boxes in the upper right.

There is also a 3-part interview with Phillips on the Cold Hard Flash site. (Here are parts 2 and 3.)

Phillips’ professional background is apparent in his superb command of timing (which is everything in animation), his fluid ability to tell a story visually (most of the Brackenwood animations are wordless, or at least not in any language I recognize), and to compose and frame images dramatically. He combines those skills with a great sense of color, atmosphere and lighting, and a nuanced ability to suggest the complex with the simple, to immerse you in his wonderful pseudo-mythical world.

What really sets Phillips apart as a Flash animator is the ingenious way he has worked within the limits of vector based animation to achieve a wonderful sense of studio-level animation. He occasionally uses Swift 3-D, a vector based 3-D animation app that compliments Flash, for some camera moves, certain types of animation and a bit of modeling, but Flash is the main tool, and he really makes it look like it was created for character animation, rather than motion graphics.

It is his thorough understanding and clever application of the limits and strengths of vector animation that make his work shine. Look, in particular, at the way he suggests dappled light and shadows, and the remarkable way he creates the effects of moving water.

Phillips has been able to generate enough interest to keep producing his independent animations, which get a large audience, but still has to put projects on hold, like his much anticipated Waterlollies, the latest in the Brackenwood series, while he takes on freelance animation jobs. Phillips indicates that he has plans for a Brackenwood feature film, which is something to look forward to.

Link via Cold Hard Flash

What a great idea this is. The Submarine Channel, a web based launching point for independent film and multimedia producers, has started a new feature called Forget the film, watch the titles.

This is the start of an ongoing collection of animated film titles, featuring examples of both opening and closing film credits divided into sub-genres like Animation (meaning animated characters), Motion Graphics (animated graphic design), 3-D (animated 3-D computer graphics) and Mixed (title sequences that use multimedia or mix the previous techniques).

Film titles are an art in themselves, usually done by a different creative team than that of the main movie, and often much better than the movie itself. (A case in point are Jamie Caliri’s wonderful closing titles to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which are unfortunately not part of this collection.)

Don’t be disappointed, as I was initially, that Forget the Film Watch the Titles. is not yet a huge compendium in which you can look up your favorite title sequences and classics like the Saul Bass gems. The project is just in its infancy, and the collection is small (maybe 20 or so in all at the moment). It’s an ongoing project and it’s going to take a while because they’re trying to do this by the book and secure permission to display the title sequences, a laborious process to say the least.

Think of it like a new blog, just starting, but promising and fun to check in periodically to see what’s new and watch the collection progressing. There are enough titles here for you to get a feeling for what they’re doing, and they do have some good ones (images at left, top to bottom: Nanny McPhee, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Made in Yu, Moog).

Link via Cold Hard Flash

As part of an exhibit called Leonardo Da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK, there is an online exhibit of Animated Illustrations, in which the director of animations, Steve Maher and his team have used a combination of hand-drawn and computer-modeled animations to bring some of Leonardo’s amazing notebook pages to life.

There are animations of his drawings of the human figure that have been set in motion, his intricate studies of the anatomy of a bird’s wing, his crafty, and craftsmanlike, war machines, studies of rays of light reflecting from a convex mirror and a 3-D excursion between his floor plans and elevations for a church. The animated progressions from one geometric solid to another are obviously computer animated, but are quite beautiful as animated drawings.

I was particularly fascinated by the animations of Leonardo’s drawings for the working of the human heart because I took on task of animating the heart for this project on organ and tissue donation (click on “The Interactive Body”, I did the Flash module in the pop-up). In addition to explaining organ and tissue donation, the aim was also to demonstrate how the transplantable organs work and I found the animation of the heart the most challenging.

Leonardo’s heart drawings, like his other detailed anatomical drawings are the result of his practice of dissecting corpses in secret, a process which seemed to have no other motivation than Loenardo’s insatiable curiosity, and for which he risked imprisonment (or worse) for heresy.

While all of Loenardo’s drawings should be interesting to artists, of particular interest is the animated version of the Virtuvian Man, in which you get to see the master’s anatomy lessons in motion and watch, for example, the changes in the forearm as it pronates. (Now there’s a great idea - a complete animated anatomy text, rotating the forms in 3-D space and showing changes to the various muscle groups as they flex and extend!)

They’ve taken some liberties, of course, and these animation s should not be thought of as the original drawings, although they are always the starting point. The result is not only a nice series of animations. Sitting in front of a computer screen on which Leonardo’s 15th Century drawings are being rendered in motion or rotated in three dimensional space produces a fascinating feeling of immediate connection between the present and past.