Monster movies, especially Japanese ones, have had a long love affair with practical effects work. But short film Kaiju Bunraku, which made its debut at Sundance last year (and is now finally online), takes that relationship and runs with it, in a beautifully stylized story told entirely with puppets.
At some point, you’ve probably found yourself mindlessly scrolling around Google Maps’ satellite view while bored at work. But artist Páraic McGloughlin saw Google Maps as more than just a distraction, and by painstakingly capturing very specific road layouts and agricultural features, he was able to create a series…
Camille Boyer and cinematographer Nik Mirus worked with a Montreal-based agency called Caravane to create a surreal short film called Club Palace. It looks like a computer animation student’s final-year project, but in reality it was all filmed using real-life miniatures and clever practical effects.
Individually, these random, frustrating occurrences of everyday life aren’t enough to ruin your day. But when compiled into a short film that’s aptly titled Life Is Pain, this collection of ‘first world problems’ will undoubtedly leave you feeling frustrated as you’re reminded of life’s endless little annoyances.
What’s most impressive about Daniel Mckee’s videos is the filmmaker’s ability to organize thousands of images and then assemble them into an animated montage that’s both frantic and fascinating. With Amazon Rise, he’s edited three minutes of random Amazon products together based on their ascending prices, and I just…
There are some movie scenes that are so iconic, so memorable, that even if you only catch a glimpse of a single frame, you’ll still instantly recognize the film. So what are the movies that made the biggest impression on your mind? Just watch this short film, which crams a million different movie frames into five…
Instead of a majestic national park, or the crowded streets of a busy urban center, filmmaker Drew Geraci pointed his 4K camera at a microscope with every day foods and objects magnified up to 1,000X. The results are a series of atypical landscape shots you could never see with the naked human eye.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is creeping ever closer to finally coming out, but we still have a ways to go. We’ve all been waiting so long it’s getting unbearable, and there are only so many times you can reread Porg news. So why not spend the time curating your own mini film festival, and enjoying some recently released…
Thomas Blanchard doesn’t paint like normal artists do. Instead of painstakingly applying colors to a canvas with a brush, he dumps gallons of brightly colored paints into a giant tank filled with oils and other liquids, producing psychedelic waterfalls of color that could never hang in an art gallery.
As soon as cameras got small enough to ride along with drones, the internet quickly filled with amazing aerial footage shot by pros and amateurs alike. But in addition to a camera-equipped drone, filmmaker Ian Montgomery used a second quadcopter carrying a bright spotlight to capture these eerie videos of what barely…
Your typical New York timelapse follows the city as it progresses from the sunlit day, to the twinkling windows of skyscrapers at night, and right on through until morning when the sun rises back into the sky. But filmmaker Julian Tryba throws that timeline out the window, with this bizarre timelapse of the Big Apple…
Using iron powder to teach kids about the magic of magnets has been a staple of grade school science for decades. The tiny iron particles are seemingly brought to life in the presence of a powerful magnet; an effect that filmmaker Roman De Giuli manages to turn into a moving masterpiece with closeup photography and…
In hindsight, Return of the Jedi’s Ewok Village scenes have a lot in common with Temple of Doom’s sequences with Mola Ram. After all, both are about human sacrifice, it’s just that one happens to be perpetuated by sentient teddy bears. Which is why a mashup of both, held together by the glue that binds all good…
Unless you’ve done the right thing and moved yourself into a secluded cave for the next four years, after spending each day enduring a constant stream of depressing news on social media, you can probably relate to the animated characters in Ari Weinkle’s short film, Moodles, who collapse into giant piles of limp,…
We wouldn’t blame you for thinking that Julius Horsthuis spent weeks designing and animating his sci-fi short, Fraktaal, using 3D software. But as the artist reveals, “It so happens that I’m a lazy animator.” So he instead relied on complex mathematical fractal patterns to automatically generate the alien worlds and…
It doesn’t matter what medium you choose, animation is a tedious process requiring you to painstakingly bring every frame to life. But it’s even more challenging when your brush is an LED flashlight, the air is your canvas, and you can’t actually see what you just drew.
Remember the last time you fell asleep on the couch and your TV remote left an imprint on your face? Taking inspiration from that, DBLG, a UK-based ad agency, produced an amusing series of animations by imprinting characters and objects directly onto human skin.
Remember the mindless doodles you made in your notebooks as classes felt like they’d drag on forever in high school? Jake Fried uses similar materials, ink and Liquid Paper white-out, to bring a complex cut-and-paste collage to life in his short film, Paper Trail.
Forget the uncanny valley and not-quite-perfect CG humans freaking you out, this title sequence for London’s recent OFFF digital arts festival will make you so uncomfortable you’ll want to burn your laptop. But at the same time the animation is so beautiful you might find yourself watching it two or three times…
