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.

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.