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As children, we viewed the world through the lenses of our imaginations. The carpet became lava, the shadows formed monsters, the family minivan was a spaceship... Read the rest of this post

Twitter’s six-second looping video platform, Vine, is not revolutionary, but it is an important evolutionary development in online video. The strength of the format is two-fold; firstly, it brings filmmaking tools to the masses, and secondly, it recognizes that the mobile Internet should have its own micro-formats (with built-in looping) because traditional formats—shorts, features, commercials—don’t provide enough options.

The Vine is something that I wholedlheartey endorse because the shortening length of online animation has been something that we’ve been promoting for the past couple years. Cartoon Brew was, in fact, the first film/animation site to recognize the merit of micro-film clips and create an exclusive space for featuring them. We introduced the Animated Fragments column in 2011 with the idea that there were many creative bits and pieces of animation that didn’t fit into any conventional format. In our first post, the shortest animation was only eleven seconds long.

There was a difference though. No one created those ‘fragments’ with the intent of expressing a complete thought. They were interesting experiments but not whole ideas. The six-second Vine format has encouraged filmmakers to think of six seconds as a filmmaking length in which an entire idea can be expressed. Clearly, the filmmaker is limited in the scope of their idea by the Vine’s running time, but it’s also surprising how much content can be squeezed into six seconds.

Animators who use Vine are employing a surprisingly wide variety of techniques that include paper cut-out, hand-drawn, stop motion, pixilation, and mixed media. Often times, the most popular animators using the format don’t come from a traditional animation background. They are artists from other creative disciplines who have become animators overnight.

The real revolution of the Vine is its software, which is the easiest (and most accessible) animation creation tool ever made—even easier than creating animated GIFs. The Vine app will play an important role in moving animation out of the realm of the specialist and into an art form of the masses. Twitter, for its part, continues to upgrade its software and make it more animation-friendly. Last week, they released an updated version of the app which added gridlines, camera focus, and most importantly, onion-skinning (or as Twitter calls it, ‘ghost tools’).

The Vine platform, though less than six months old, has already had a significant impact on the animation world. Through its limitations, it has opened the door for many people to try animating for the first time as well as created a respectable new length for micro-animated shorts. Whether the format itself lasts or not, Vines have changed how we think about Internet animation.

See also: “How Etsy Is Using Vine and Stop Motion to Build Its Brand”

Pinot

Brock Davis

Meagan Cignoli

Ian Padgham

Reverse beard pixilation is done so often it’s almost an animation meme, but there’s always room for one more, especially when it’s as well done as Peter Simon’s Trim. The comments on the Reddit post about the film are interesting too—”I love how my assumption of who he is changed with each new hair style,” “Nazi, punk kid, white trash, hipster, biker, Jesus, Ultra-Jesus”—as well as the response from the director Simon: “That is something we were talking about while we were working on this. Each style has a very specific stereotype attached.”

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Beard, Pixilation

Designer Chris Abbas downloaded a public domain archive of still images captured by NASA’s Cassini Solstice Mission and composited them into an animated short. The pixilation approach shows fly-bys of Saturn, its rings and other objects in Saturn’s neighborhood. Abbas made some stunning artistic and editing choices that transforms raw scientific data into a marvelous visual achievement. For more details about the imagery, visit Astronomy Picture of the Day.

(Thanks, Pell Osborn)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Chris Abbas, Pixilation

Memorably surreal images—alternately beautiful and disturbing—populate the world of FIVE (FÜNF), a pixilation short by Moritz Reichartz and Andrea Éva Györi.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Andrea Éva Györi, Germany, Moritz Reichartz, Pixilation

Another simple and well-executed visual idea by Juan Pablo Zaramella, whose film At the Opera appeared on the Brew last month. Hotcorn! was produced by the Buenos Aires-based studio Can Can Club.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Argentina, Juan Pablo Zaramella, Pixilation

David Crowder Band - SMS [Shine] (via DavidCrowderBandVEVO)

I can only imagine how painstaking and involved this stop-motion-by-Lite-Brite music video was to create. According to the video’s description it was created, directed, and photographed by the band.

Continuing yesterday’s posts, here are some of the shorts (or excerpts/trailers) played as part of the 2010 Ottawa International Animation Festivals’ Short Competitions 3 and 4:

Fumiko no Kokuhaku by Ishida Hiroyasu

Milk Milk Lemonade by Ged Haney

Love & Theft by Andreas Hykade

Põgenemine by Kristjan Holm

Lone Wolf - Keep Your Eyes on the Road by Ashley Dean

Born HIV Free - Baby in the Sky by Jack-Antoine Charlot (Bonzom)

Wettessen by Matthias Daenschel