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.

Did you ever find yourself doodling and daydreaming that a line you were drawing was something physical, like a hill you could slide down? Perhaps you found yourself imagining that the line would become reality, á la Harold and the Purple Crayon, and you could roll or slide away from whatever it was that you were avoiding by doodling.

Well, if it’s an imaginative diversion you want for your doodled line, here’s a nifty little amusement by someone who lists themselves on deviantART as “fsk“.

Line Rider is a Flash interactive that allows you to draw a line, going more or less from upper left to lower right, that will represent the two dimensional topography of a hill. When your line is drawn, you click play and the Line Rider, a small character on a sled with a trailing scarf, will go sailing, bouncing and, if you’re not careful, tumbling down the hill according to forces of imaginary gravity.

The module is quite cleverly done and is much more fun than my dry description would suggest. In addition to a nice bit of semi-realistic slow-motion gravity, fsk has programmed in a good bit of humor in the way the character responds to the physics of your imagined line. Play with several variations of line and you’ll see what I mean.

You can use a hand tool to scroll the drawing area (much as in standard graphics applications) and extend your line well past the boundries of the working rectangle. You can also save lines that you like for future use. fsk states that the interactive is a Beta (still in development) and invites comments and suggestions.

Link via Marco Bresciani.

Esao Andrews’ work fits loosely into a branch of contemporary fantastic art called “pop surrealism”.

His work often involves portrait-like images of young women in conjunction with odd elements, such as objects that are combinations of plant and animal forms, apparently intended to be a bit disconcerting.

Some of his paintings are more straightforward, almost like regular portraits (left, bottom), some look a bit like deranged children’s book illustration and some are simply odd. I wouldn’t say that the images I’ve chosen here are necessarily representative of his work, I just happen to like them in particular.

His web site has a delightfully entertaining Flash interface, one of the most amusing I’ve seen, in which a young woman sits demurely in a room with a few furnishings, and her face follows your cursor as you mouse over objects that pop up or change to reveal the sites sections. The interface is done with style and cheeky wit (she looks right at you and flashes her dress up when you choose “Paintings”) and is full of nicely imaginative details.

Unfortunately, once past the amusing nature of the interface, it’s actually not easy to navigate, the galleries consist of colored dots with no indication of previews and the images open in pop-up windows. (Who ever told artists that pop-up windows are a good way to display art work?)

If you like quirky, imaginative and oddball images, though, Esao’s work is worth the trouble to look through the galleries.

There are sections of paintings, done in oil on board, drawings, illustrations and designs for skateboard decks. There is also an archive to a previous site version. His “News” section mentions an upcoming site redesign (which promises “no pop-up windows”), but I hope he archives this one.

There isn’t much background or biographical info on the site, but there is a good interview with him on Pixelsurgeon.

Bermuda Shorts is a UK animation firm that lists itself as the first animation company to represent individual animation directors in the commercial animation arena.

Their site is organized that way. In addition to showcasing new work, the reels are organized by director and designer. You can also browse them organized by type: commercials, broadcast, promos and short films.

Most of the animations are for broadcast commercial applications, with clients like Volkswagen, American Express, MTV, Nikelodeon, Kraft, Coke, Nestle and the BBC.

There are also a fair number of experimental animated shorts and fun self-promotional pieces, but most of the commercial work is just as fun.

There is a broad variety of approaches between the directors, and all of them seem to be very imaginative and demonstrate the ability to communicate and entertain in short bursts, often 15 or 30 seconds.

The animations are done in a variety of animation media, 2-D cell, Flash, 3-D CGI, stop-motion, photo-montage and altered live action.

Images at left: History of Animation Nicktoons short by Filipe Alcada, Save the Children spot by Ian Bird, Nite Nite Volkswagen ad by Will Barras and Paper Dinosaurs Nickelodeon spot by Model Robot.

Gate: bi-monthly animation contest

Bermuda Shorts is sponsoring a bi-monthly competition called Gate for animation freelancers who want to break into directing, designers looking to move into animation and animation school grads who want to break into the biz.

If you’re chosen, they will feature you on the site as a guest director, bring you into the studio (assuming you’re in reach of London, UK, or can travel there) and promote your work for two months. If you get a positive enough response from the industry they’ll back you with a production team and give you studio space to produce your first job. Details here.

Link via Articles and Texticles

Any of you who are familiar with Dover Books, know what a great resource they can be of public domain images from previous centuries, particularly from the 19th century when thousands of engravings were published for novels, texts, catalogs and periodicals.

Many artists have used the Dover collections of these images as reference. Other artists have made more direct use of them to make new art.

Artist Caleb Johnston has taken a number of these examples of 19th century publishing technology and put them together in a 20th/21st century publishing technology, namely a Flash interactive, and produced a work in which these detailed engravings of people, plants, animals, anatomical diagrams and decorative letterforms animate, morph, and dissolve into one another in novel ways.

The module is interactive in that it depends on you move your mouse around to find “hot spots” within each image tableaux, and click on them to trigger animated sequences. Click, or re-click, on enough of them in a given image and you will trigger a progression to the next collage in the sequence.

The piece is nicely done although it does require a bit of perseverance to get some of the screens to “complete” and move on to the next one.

NFCTD is a wonderful diversion reminiscent of a cross between Max Earnst’s classic Surrealist collage-novel Une Semaine du Bonté, from the early 20th century, and the famous Nose Pilot Flash amusement that has been popular on the web for the last 8 or nine years. It presents an interesting juxtaposition of images, times, technologies and artistic visions.

Link via Cartoon Brew.

By now we’re all acculturated to being sold things by way of animated cartoons.

They start us early, dazzling our just-out-of-babyhood eyes with bouncing, sparkling bowls of chocolate-frosted, sugar-coated imitation food-like substances that are “part of this nutritious breakfast”, and move on to toys and games and even later to cars, insurance and everything else.

With their bright colors, simplified forms and magical moving drawings, animated cartoons are just so gosh darned appealing.

Get ready for a new wave of being sold by way of cartoon animation, this time being sold a political choice.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Jib-Jab cartoons, a series of modestly amusing and not particularly well done animated web cartoons that lampooned political figures. The key thing about them is that they became amazingly popular across the web by word of mouth (or, more accurately, word of email), a phenomenon that has become marked by a buzzword dear to the hearts of marketers, “viral marketing”.

The idea behind viral marketing is that, instead of spending millions to buy a few seconds of air time to try to shove your message down the throats of a resistant and TiVo-armed populace, you spend much less on an advertising vehicle that is clever and appealing enough for people to willingly spread across the internet themselves, via email, blogs, web site links, etc.

You and I are both participating in this process at the moment.

I’m telling you about, and providing a link to, an animated cartoon that is intentional viral marketing for a political campaign.

I find it interesting enough to pass along, partly because it’s well-done and partly because it represents the tip of a trend that will grow to be overwhelmingly obvious in coming months and years.

The ad is part of the govenor’s race in Nevada, where candidate Jim Gibson is using the cartoon to accuse his opponent Dina Titus of taking money from Enron without acknowledging its disposition. To do this he enlisted the services of the web animation studio Slamtoons, which has changed its name to Campaigntoons, to create an animated viral marketing ad that portrays Titus as a Jedi being corrupted by the dark side of the force, in the form a $2000 contribution from The Emperor (who one assumes is Kenneth lay in a hooded cloak).

The cartoon is actually nicely done, with nicely stylized characters, good backgrounds and good use of simple color and shading. The animation is minimal, of course, as in almost all web cartoons, but it’s effectively used.

I think we’ll see a lot more from this group (the cartoon also acts as viral marketing for them), and from many other web-based animators of varying degrees of ability, as the election approaches and the campaign funds start to flow. So pull up a bowl of chocolate-frosted, sugar-coated imitation food-like substance and enjoy the show.

Link via Wired.

I wanted to recommend this site to you because of its terrible navigation system (he said, grinning).

If you actually want to find something, like a simple “About Us” or “Press” page, the navigation on tokyoplastic is abysmal. If, on the other hand, you want to be amused and delighted by series of clever and superbly executed animations, that selfsame navigation is a treat.

On the “this is no way to navigate a web site” downside, you have to hunt around to find the site entrance (a graphic of some Japanese characters below a tiny gray “enter tokyoplastic”, on a home page with too many things on it), which opens the site proper in a popup. Within that you have to guess about enigmatic navigation choices (”Do I click on something? Are there words here somewhere?”) and work your way through an animation series just to get to the actual navigation choices. Then you have to guess again where to rollover and click on the main navigation image (a big tentacled plant/animal/monster thingie) and guess yet again about enigmatic section names like “workshop”, “factory” and “drummachine”, which are meaningless until you’ve actually gone to those sections at least once to see what the term means. Once you select one of those you have to wait through another animated sequence, which will often pause mid-sequence and require user input to continue, before actually reaching a site section, which is again likely to be enigmatic in content. There’s no way to navigate through this site without having looked around already.

But, of course, looking around is what the tokyoplastic site is all about. tokyoplastic is the site of a UK animation studio that does stylized, cartoonlike, elegant and superfluid CGI/Flash animation. (You can find out more on the Picasso Pictures site.) If you’re wandering around the tokyoplastic site, checking things out instead of actually trying to find something, they will tickle you brain and optic nerve with wonderfully silly, imaginative and amusing animated sequences. You may want to turn off iTunes long enough to listen to their excellent use of sound (particularly drum sounds), beautifully integrated with the animated sequences.

In the “workshop” section (upper left “flytrap” on the plant/animal/monster thingie), you’ll find some examples of their work for clients like MTV and Mitsubishi. The “drummachine” section features that wonderful use of sounds, and you’ll be rewarded with other fun items as you explore. Back on the home page (under the pop-up, remember?), the image of the er,.. dog thingie, is linked to a recently added animation that pops up in a separate window. There is also a newsbox on the home page in a small scrolling inline frame.

Oh, yes, the About Us and Press sections do exist, they’re accessed by clicking on the flower labeled “bits and pieces” (lower right tentacle of the plant/animal/monster thingie), which also gives you access to a bunch of other sections including the whole of their previous web site with lots of other animations.

Enjoy.