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.

I hope I have the name right. I’m taking it from the copyright line. The site is iyasakado.com.

I’m a little sketchy about the details here, mainly because they’re in Japanese, and the Google translate feature, remarkable as it is, doesn’t work so well in translating from Japanese to English. (The results can be comical, in fact. Try translating a well-known phrase into Japanese with Google Translate and then translate it back. Send the phrase to your friends and see if they can guess the original. Hours of fun!)

Anyway, the high point of this site is a number of nicely done and imaginative Flash animations that are part of a series entitled “Steel Fantasia”. More vignettes than parts of a coherent narrative, they are nonetheless presented in order and take place in the same setting. They are delightfully done, with simple but clever animation, artful use of multi-plane backgrounds, imaginative painted settings and nicely designed sequences.

The animations are set in an alternate time or reality, in an industrialized society at about a World War I level of technology, amid tanks with mechanical, steam-powered legs, airships, ornithopters and towering city structures. There is apparently an ongoing military conflict, against the backdrop of which small dramas play out. The overall tone is actually whimsical and the animations are charming and thought provoking.

The movies are essentially wordless, the music is excellent and the sound effects are well done, so language is no barrier to enjoyment. The supplementary comments on the pages are lost, however, in the inability of Google to return much that is intelligible. Instead of the somewhat-readable translations Google returns from related European languages, Google’s attempt to translate Japanese gives us phrases like: “…industry it sends with self-confidence cow moth!” that are amusing but not particularly informative.

The animations are linked by graphics from this page, apparently in order from the bottom up. The movies can take a while to load before playing. You might want to start with the second from the bottom (image of the toy soldier’s head) to get a better flavor for the whimsical feeling of the better sequences.

Link via Cold Hard Flash, original link via Gil Crows website.

The Zoomquilt is a collaborative art project between 15 artists and a Flash designer.

There is also a non-animated HTML version (offline at the main site, mirror here), but the Flash version is definitely better.

Like Nosepilot, The Zoomquilt is essentially a diversion, a visual toy meant to amuse and entertain, and just maybe make you look at things a little differently.

While Nosepilot has been on the web for at least eight or nine years, I first encountered The Zoomquilt a little over a year ago, so I think it’s relatively new.

The project is the brainchild of German graphic design student Nikolaus Baumgarten. The other artists are listed on the intro page with links (in some cases to their own portfolios, in others to mirrors of The Zoomquilt).

From the intro screen, choose your version (choose Flash) and, as the intro screen explains, click and drag up to move forward, into the image, or click and drag down to move backward, causing the image to recede.

Either way the animation progresses from scene into scene, passing through image elements that serve as portals to the next scene.

The disparate scenes are tied together by a couple of morphing ribbon shapes that you basically follow through the various “worlds”.

The images are bizarre, often grotesque, which I think makes it a little easier to blend the different artists’ styles, and the progression from one scene to the next is nicely done.

The fact that you are controlling the movement adds to the fun. The overall effect is hypnotic.

There are always some people who, when I say I do digital art, assume that I somehow press a few keys and the computer “makes art” for me. Even after patiently explaining that I draw and paint on the computer with a stylus in much the same way I draw with traditional materials, I can tell they still have the feeling that the computer somehow “does the work” for me.

How much more difficult is it then to explain to the uninitiated the artfulness, esthetic judgment and careful craft involved in creating pieces like Jared Tarbell’s programatic art. Tarbell’s computational images grow before your eyes, when you touch a button. Surely the computer is “making the art”.

Tarbell creates his images by programming Java applets or Flash ActionScripts to construct visual images based on algorithms. He adjusts the programming parameters of his code in the same way a sculptor might judiciously add and subtract clay to a figure, or a painter might add, remove and change color areas on the painted surface of a canvas, until the desired image is reached.

As in work with traditional media, happy accidents are occasionally part of the process. Tarbell introduces small elements of randomness into his algorithms so that when you experience his images, your experience is unique, even though the overall character of the image is within his intended scope. In that way his pieces are slightly collaborative with the viewer.

In a larger sense his work is collaborative in that he makes his source code (and Flash ActionScript authoring files) freely available, inviting others to carry his code forward. He believes the code is only alive when it is being run and is particularly alive when it is changing and growing.

You don’t have to get into worrying about what is or isn’t art just to enjoy these works as interesting images (that happen to build themselves as you watch), or simply as something visually fun to play with.

I investigated several of his pieces, but found myself particularly drawn to the one called Substrate. The image at various stages (see screen captures at left) reminds me of a head-on collision between Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and a scientific drawing of a fractured geological formation. This one launches in a Java Applet (you can choose a size) and is random enough that it begins in different areas of the canvas each time.

I happen to be both a visual artist (at which I’m fairly good) and a coder (at which I’m modestly competent), enough to have an appreciation for both sides of what he is doing. His source code is surprisingly simple given the variety and complexity of the images.

Tarbell is cofounder of iospace and is on the board of the Austin Museum of Digital Art. His Flash techniques have been featured in several books. His personal site is at levitated.net.

Nosepilot is a diversion: a Flash animation in which charmingly simple vector drawings morph and change and blend one into the other in a loose, not-quite-a-story sequence set to music.

I think Nosepilot has been on the web in one form or another for at least 8 or 9 years, and has been immensely popular at times. There’s a whole story that goes with that. Rather than rehash it here, I’l let Scott Thigpen tell you about it on his Artsy Fartsy Weblog (which may or may not be up for much longer, if not go here).

From the scrolling text in the glasses in the Nosepilot opening screen, choose your language (mostly for text and credits, there’s no dialog) and the animation will begin.

After ten or twelve minutes, the animation drops you off at a group of still images. Click around and they switch to different versions and enlargements of themselves. Find the right one and they link to another group of images that respond the same way. You can click through these images into other sets (by finding the right one to click on) for at least 8 or 10 sets. I’ve never taken it farther than that, so I don’t know if it goes to any particular conclusion (I suspect not).

Nosepilot is just a diversion, there’s no “point” to it. If you don’t like it after the first few minutes, you won’t miss anything significant by clicking over to the latest celebrity gossip on Yahoo News.

I admire the simple, effective use of vector illustrations which allowed Sacul to make the piece resolution independent (the movie scales up or down with changes to the size of your browser window).

Here is a link to Sacul’s animated illustration portfolio.

Addendum: I may be wrong in my assessment of the “still images”, having missed an underlying graphic narrative. See this post’s comments for more.