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Nearly 1,000 artists applied to take part in this holiday-themed project.

The post Over 50 Animators Contributed To The 2016 Edition of Yule Log 2.0 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The 45th annual ASIFA-East Animation Festival Awards took place last Sunday in Manhattan. The long-running ceremony, which celebrates achievements in East Coast animation, is making an effort to gradually transform its annual ceremony into a more upscale affair.

Animography aims to make life a little easier by offering animated typefaces delivered in neatly organized After Effects files. The type foundry is the creation of Jeroen Krielaars, a graphic designer who runs the Amsterdam-based design studio Calango.

Animation and typography has always been a tricky combination. Hundreds of hours go into designing a family of type, a process that is, at times, highly exact. The moment you start toying with any typeface by scaling and adjusting the characters, you risk creating a warped graphic that doesn’t look quite right. For that reason, Animography should be on your radar. The typefaces offered on the site are scalable without any loss in quality.

What’s particularly promising about Animography is that it creates opportunities for graphic designers and animators to collaborate, experiment and build together. Currently, the site has teamed up with designer Derek Weathersbee, whose newly released typeface called Franchise is being animated one glyph (character) at a time by 110 different animators. In the challenge, each animator is given a single glyph to animate in a maximum of one second, 25 frames, and four colors. There have only been a handful of completed glyphs, but it promises to be a challenge worth keeping an eye on (check out animator Daniel Savage’s letter B submission—B is for Bouncy Beard—above).

Animography seems to have more plans in store, and is on its way to carving out a completely new niche. For more, check out Animography’s brand reel of animated typefaces from dead or fictional brands:

So many wonderful animal illustrations at the Animalarium!

(via Daniel Savage’s twooter)

A simple but effective experiment: Daniel Savage, creator of the iPhone app Gif Shop, wanted to try animating Chris Van Allsburg’s classic children’s book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. “The potential of e-books is something that fascinates me,” he says. “This video demonstrates what could be done, even without interactivity.”

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Daniel Savage, iPad

“Animated GIFs are the web’s vinyl records,” wrote Jamie Zawinski on Twitter a few months ago. It’s a sly but accurate observation. In the face of Flash and streaming video, the animated GIF, which has been around since the 1990s, has refused to fade away. It remains a ubiquitous part of Web culture and inspires countless memes among a new generation of Web users. While the underlying technology of the animated GIF hasn’t changed, artists continue to explore new approaches to the form, such as cinemagraphs and the recent animated GIF comics trend.

There are many reasons for the extended reign of the animated GIF, prime among them the form’s emphasis on cycles (or loops). Rhythmic repetition was a staple animation technique of theatrical animation during the 1920s and 1930s before being cast aside in favor of more realistic approaches to movement. The inherent beauty of cycled movement, which was cheapened by limited TV animation in the 1960s, has enjoyed a creative rebirth with the advent of the animated GIF. The animated GIF is also a remarkably potent form, and combined with good timing, it can deliver a surprising punchline as funny as any comedian’s joke. The British animator Cyriak has perfected this type of animated GIF. Perhaps the biggest underpinning reason for the endurance of the animated GIF is its utter simplicity: it has no sound, generally last less than 10 seconds, and require no technical knowledge to create, thanks in large part to the abundance of web apps.

This brings us around to the latest development in animated GIFs: a new iPhone app (also iPad/iPhone Touch compatible) called Gif Shop. Created by Daniel Savage and Matthew Archer, the app, which costs $1.99, streamlines the GIF making process on the iPhone, and makes it easier than ever for anybody to create their own animation. While it’s possible to make any kind of animation using Gif Shop, because of the app’s integration with the iPhone camera, it lends itself particularly to the pixilation stop-motion technique.

Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

Daniel Savage, the app’s co-creator, foresees a social media component to Gif Shop as well, and believes it can become to animation what Instagram is to photos. “The concept of simply creating animated GIFs,” he writes, “evolved into a service that enables our users to share animated GIFS across their networks with no concern for hosting and file size limitations other services may impose. Since the initial concept, Gif Shop is no longer the first of its kind, but we think there is one key factor the others have missed: simplicity. It is extremely important to us that we take the tedious act of making a GIF and make it as fun and intuitive as possible.”

It’s exciting to see the emergence of easy-to-use animation software for smartphones. These apps have the potential to make the act of animating as second-nature to the general public as taking a photograph. That’s a revolutionary concept, especially when one considers that fifty years ago, there were at best a few thousand people in the entire world who could animate. Most of the people using the Gif Shop app aren’t professional animators, but then again,