From the creators at LegoMatrix.com:

After around 440 hours of work, and just in time for the 10th anniversary of the original movie release, we are pleased to present to you our Lego version of the famous Bullet Time dodge scene from The Matrix.

Enjoy:

[Lego Matrix Trinity Help]

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YouTube - No Mas Presents: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No by James Blagden.

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[Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration | YouTUbe]

[Princess and the Frog Trailer - YouTube]

The new movie will add to Disney’s profitable princess franchise, and, more importantly, with directors John Musker and Ron Clements at the helm, I suspect it will have the kind craftsmanship and story that will make it worthy to become part of the Disney Classics canon.

Ron and John’s directing credits include: The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, and Treasure Planet. These guys have worked with the masters and, of course, are masters in their own right.

The Animation Podcast has a great interview with Ron and John in three parts.

From The Illusion of Life:

Sometimes an action could be repeated just as it was in a second scene, but more often a new beginning or a different ending were called for. In these cases, the animator could repeat part of the action by borrowing drawings from the earlier scene. In other cases, there would be an action that could be repeated intact in the same scenes—a character climbing a slippery pole, or sliding down an incline, or being knocked down by a mechanical device.

I remember watching the Disney classics as a kid and thinking some of these scenes are very similar to other Disney movies. I never realized that this type of repeated action was so prominent between films until seeing this YouTube compilation:

[Youtube link - Resemblance]

Having said that, I don’t considering this to be as big of a cheat as to deserve a flippant “fail” tag so indiscriminately handed out by the pharisees of the net.

The copying done here, is not tracing, but transferring poses from one character to another, perhaps even from Disney’s large collection of reference footage. As anyone that’s done any animation knows, putting any animation onto a new character is still a very difficult task regardless of where you get the poses.

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This hilarious Jack Kinney style Goofy short, “How to Hook up your Home Theater”, isn’t new — it was released in 2007, shown in theatres before National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, but it is significant because it recaptures the spirit of Disney in the golden era of animation. It aims particularly at recapturing the Jack Kinney classics like Hockey Homicide or a Goofy Gymnastics with a modern twist.

It’s available in the iTunes Store. Search for “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater”. It think it sells for around $2.

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Procrastination, a short animation by Johnny Kelly of the Royal College of Art.

[Procrastination - Youtube]

[Oktapodi - YouTube]

A team of creative folks used the free software to make a short animated cartoon, Big Buck Bunny. They were funded by Blender foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community.

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so it’s free to watch and distribute so long as the credits are attached. Theoretically you could even download the source files, remix the movie and then sell it for a profit. Here is the original movie via YouTube:

Watch Big Buck Bunny now on YouTube or one of the many other official viewing options.

[Color Wars Young to Old Morph - YouTube]

(A segment of this film originally titled Fantoche, linked previously).

Over 700 unique knitted pieces were created for the video by designer Lysanne Latulippe of the fashion label Majolie.

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• I Met The Walrus (Josh Raskin) View
• Madame Tutli-Putli (NFB, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski) View
• Meme Les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven) (Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse) View
• My Love (Moya Lyubov) (Alexander Petrov) Part one, part two, part three
• Peter And The Wolf (Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman) View DIVX version.

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Because charcoal leaves marks behind after it’s erased, the original action could be seen behind the new drawing. I repeated these steps about 5 or 6 times. To the left is my artwork (click to view bigger).

It was a lot of work for, what I consider to be, not a great payoff. I like to think that the work has some good conceptual value, even if it’s not that interesting to look at.

The following is a truly amazing wall animation that works on the same principle. (It would have been smart of me to document each step of the process in photographs too).

Realizing how much work went into the poster sized effort I created in University, I’m blown away by the amount of time and effort that it must have taken to create this video. Not only is each individual frame beautifully crafted but the animation is also wonderful. Please enjoy, Fantoche:

[Fantoche - YouTube]

Just for fun, the motion graphics fans out there might enjoy the stop action magic of Platform from motiongrapher.com.

“Smith & Foulkes used a Canon Digital SLR camera linked up to a laptop allowing them to capture frames and play them back checking the shots as they went along. By shooting digitally Smith & Foulkes ended up with a much larger image size to work with when compared with the normal 35mm motion picture frame. These frames were then taken into After Effects and Photoshop for a clean-up where people and rigs from shots were removed. A final grade was then added in Flame.”