Cinematic Trailers (Games!)

AMAZING:




Sometimes cinematic trailers can have better CG than some epic movies!

And this is not a cinematic trailer, but I recently saw it and it's incredible!

Great Student Films

Loom tells the story of a successful catch. This student film of 2010 won Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project at the VES Awards. The people who contributed to this short are doing amazing work today.


Student Academy Award winner (Bronze) in the animation category for 2011 went to two students from Ringling. These guys managed to pull off a very European style of animation and look. The ending result = awesome.


Along those lines, in 2007, came an extraordinary short film from the legendary Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image or Goblins School of the Image (in France). "Oktapodi" was nominated for an Academy Award for best short film in 2009. European style animation is simply amazing!


And still one of my favorites, and of course a great inspirational piece:

The Making Of

"Making Of" videos are so interesting. I love watching a movie that has amazing effects become deconstructed into something called a breakdown. Here are a few of my favorites:

From my favorite visual effects film of all time, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, this clip shows a breakdown of the incredible film. For 2009, these are ground-breaking visual effects using head replacement and explore the concept of "motion capture", which in my opinion paved the way for other great VFX films.


Also one of my favorites as far as breakdowns go, Alice in Wonderland is an amazing way of showing the true amount of effort it takes to create powerful visual effects.


And one that you wouldn't expect would have so much VFX, but is very heavily reliant on it: Black Swan.


-Sari

Ode to Stop Motion

Stop Motion animation made a brief comeback in 2009 with films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline. Although there was a considerable amount of CG involved, it was still stop motion nonetheless. In August 2012 from the creators of Coraline, Laika (a CG film company) will release a new film called ParaNorman, WHICH WILL BE AWESOME. So, welcome back Laika AND stop motion.



Along the lines of stop action animation, a gorgeous short was released by Zealous creative. Their piece Zero is an excellent and pretty much flawless piece on this studio's part. I look forward to what these guys produce in the future.



And lastly, from the internet stop motion master, this famous piece is a perfect example of the capabilities of incredible 2D animation.



There you have it, stop motion awesomeness!