May 31, 2018
May 30, 2018
May 29, 2018
May 28, 2018
Darrel
I was able to get a short interview with the creators...
What inspired you to come up with this story? Any of these moments reflect any personal experiences you might have had?
We had no idea what it was going to be at the beginning. The first approximate idea we had, came from a paper art concept of a friend of ours. We built a social critique with touches of humor, but it was very complicated, so we tried very simple jokes without history or progression. Finally we opted for the final version, a story of seduction with increasingly serious hiccups of the protagonist.
Maybe the fact that Marc and I were going through a serious crisis of love has something to do with the theme.
It's an interesting location at a subway station, how did you decide upon this?
The station where it takes place is very inspired by our metro stop to the coworking where we made the short film, besides it was a controlled environment, perfect to maintain quality with the available resources.
How long did the production take from story concept to final?
We practically spent a year trying different ideas through 2D animations and layouts, although it is difficult to measure it accurately because we made the models of the environment and the protagonist meanwhile.
Was the twist ending something you had thought of from the beginning? Or was it something you gradually arrived to during the storyboarding and development process?
The end came progressively, since we wanted a romantic ending at the beginning, but we realized that the final result was decaffeinated in all the versions we tried so we opted for this more surprising version.
Which animation school did you attend?
Pepeschool Land, the same school that gave us the infrastructure to develop the short and bring it to fruition, thanks to the teachers and students who helped us a lot along the way.
Do you have something in mind for your next short film? When are we expected to see it?
The desire is there, but right now it is complicated by the economic and social difficulties involved. We are convinced that we will do more personal projects in the future, but we do not know when exactly. It would not be the first time that Marc and I talked about a second part of Darrel or making a Darrel series.
May 25, 2018
May 23, 2018
A Family Dinner | True Stories!
Comic Artist secretly records her family having dinner and creates an animated scene from the audio.
May 22, 2018
May 21, 2018
May 20, 2018
In 1992, Bill Plympton made history by drawing an entire film on his own
These days, independent creators have plenty of unlikely side roads to mainstream success. Like animator James Curran, who created his own animated opening-credits sequence for Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures Of Tintin, released it to the web, watched it go viral, and ended up with a job offer from Spielberg himself. Or E.L. James, who wrote a series of erotic Twilight fan-fiction pieces, then turned them into novels and self-published them as the 50 Shades Of Grey series, which sold so well as e-books that the brick-and-mortar publishing houses came sniffing around and put them into print.
But back in 1992, there were fewer opportunities for a wholly independent creator to get national attention. That never stopped DIY animation pioneer Bill Plympton, who in 1992 released The Tune, the first feature animated film with every image hand-drawn by a single artist. Like today’s Kickstarter-funded, YouTube-promoted, grassroots-supported indie creators, he financed and marketed the film on his own: He created and sold merchandise, chalked ads for his movie on East Village buildings, and pre-released completed segments to MTV as independent shorts that played on Liquid Television. But he did all this before there was a supportive network for efforts like his, largely by building a fan base, one bizarre animated short at a time.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, animation buffs knew Plympton largely as the guy whose sketchy, twitchy colored-pencil cartoons were almost invariably the best things about the shorts festivals that periodically toured theaters, like Spike & Mike’s Festival Of Animation, or the International Tournée Of Animation. Pieces like “25 Ways To Quit Smoking,” “How To Kiss,” “One Of Those Days,” “Push Comes To Shove,” and the Oscar-nominated “Your Face” were notable for their distinctive, instantly recognizable visual style, and for being consistently surprising and absurdist. Plympton strongly believed that animation was infinitely flexible, and that realism in cartoons was a waste of the medium’s potential. In a 2000 The A.V. Club interview, he put it this way: “I think it’s part of the responsibility of an artist to shock, to upset, to make people think differently, and to surprise people. And that’s where the good humor is, if there’s a surprise and there’s something unexpected. Something that’s not normal, not in the realm of general living expectations.”
His shorts followed suit: Each one was an exercise in stretching, melting, distorting, and transforming the characters’ faces or bodies. Sometimes the effect was disturbing, as in 1990’s “Tango Schmango,” which rotoscopes two dancers, with the male partner sometimes telling terrible jokes, and the female partner laughing hysterically, with her lips peeling back to expose giant stretching teeth and immense gums. More often, though, Plympton’s work was just meant to startle people into laughter with unlikely, abrupt transformations and turnarounds.
Given that limitation, it’s no surprise that The Tune is visually simple, with minimal backgrounds and sketchy drawings. But Plympton’s signature has always been deceptive simplicity, at least until the faces start melting. The film follows a hapless every-schmoe named Del (voiced by Daniel Neiden) who’s trying to write a hit song to sell to his corporate overlord Mr. Mega (Marty Nelson), in hopes of becoming enough of a success that he can afford to marry his sweetheart Didi (McElheron). Rushing to Mr. Mega’s office with his latest half-completed song, he gets lost and winds up in a mythic place called Flooby Nooby, where songs just spontaneously happen. The Mayor (Nelson again) explains that Del is trying too hard as a composer, and just needs to learn to feel the music. So they wander around Flooby Nooby, listening to the denizens sing in a variety of styles: surf music, Delta blues, an Elvis pastiche, and so forth. Eventually, Del gets into it, starts generating his own songs, and tries to make his way home.
The musical format let Plympton assemble the film over the course of years largely as a series of self-contained music videos. He was able to release segments along the way as shorts: The Elvis-esque number, “Dig My Do,” featuring a dog bragging about his high-flying hairstyle, came out as a standalone piece in 1990, while the non-musical segments “The Wiseman” and “Push Comes To Shove” hit MTV in 1991. Other musical sections were never released separately, but they can comfortably stand alone, like the deeply strange “No Nose Blues,” in which a disturbingly caricatured (and noseless) black man has a passionate affair with a gigantic nose, then sees it all over town on a variety of other faces, and realizes it’s been cheating on him. Also particularly memorable: “The Lovesick Hotel,” an upbeat number about a hotel full of themed rooms featuring creative suicide methods for heartbroken people, from carnivorous plants and couches to beds with built-in rotary saws.
But some of the best and strangest parts of The Tune aren’t musical numbers or stand-alone pieces; they’re random snippets of story. In particular, there’s the surreal sequence where Del notices that in Flooby Nooby, objects actually become smaller as he gets nearer. The Mayor tells him that perspective is a myth, and that objects in Del’s world are afraid of being eaten, so they puff themselves up when people get close. Then he demonstrates with a fat, placid dog, which turns into a monolithic beast when Del approaches, because he’s spooked by meeting a stranger. Another funny sequence animates one of Plympton’s family portraits, and places it in a variety of increasingly unlikely settings.
One of the two most striking things about The Tune is its complete lack of consistency. Plympton says on the DVD commentary track that he varied his animation technique from segment to segment to keep himself interested in the project over the years, so over the course of McElheron’s sad ballad “Home,” for instance, he tries a variety of visual experiments, dropping out the color, then dropping out most of Didi’s face as she sings, leaving only her lividly textured eyes, nose, and mouth hanging in midair. The film gives a perpetual sense of an artist testing out every style that crossed his mind. Transformation is key to Plympton’s work, and the theme extends to his style as well as his content.
The other striking thing is that working on his own lets him work without censorship. He’s always had a macabre bent and a love of what he calls “barnyard humor,” which here extends everywhere from a field full of cowshit to a country-music song about happy reunions, in which various paired foods (spaghetti and meatballs, a hot dog and a bun, a hamburger and a french fry, a slice of pie and a scoop of ice cream) happily reunite… and then usually hump like bunnies. Nothing in The Tune is as raunchy as later Plympton features, but it’s clear he isn’t playing toward Disney standards, or worried about offending his audience; he’s playing to his own sense of humor, and letting everyone else choose to come along for the ride or not.
The Tune played Cannes and Sundance in 1992, and Plympton says he went in fully expecting a multi-million-dollar distribution contract to materialize out of nowhere, because in his naïveté, he thought that was how film festivals worked. When that didn’t happen, though, it didn’t daunt him. He went back to the drawing board, literally, and continued scripting and animating his own independent films: 1997’s I Married A Strange Person!, 2001’s Mutant Aliens, 2004’s Hair High, 2008’s Idiots & Angels, and the upcoming production Cheatin’. These days, Plympton has far more outlets for self-promotion, like his online production blog for Cheatin’, or his own YouTube channel. And he has more routes toward financially supporting his own work, like contracting out for an installment of a Showtime shorts series, or for a Simpsons opening-credits couch gag that tells the tragic origin story of the couch itself, while implying that Homer Simpson has a half-couch bastard child.
But The Tune still stands as a first, not just for him, but for the industry. In an era of committee-created, test-marketed, corporate-approved visions, it was just as much of an outlier as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs from the same year, and just as much of a positive sign for the future of independent cinema. If one man can make a movie, anyone can make a movie, provided they have the determination, and preferably an entirely oddball vision.
Source.
But back in 1992, there were fewer opportunities for a wholly independent creator to get national attention. That never stopped DIY animation pioneer Bill Plympton, who in 1992 released The Tune, the first feature animated film with every image hand-drawn by a single artist. Like today’s Kickstarter-funded, YouTube-promoted, grassroots-supported indie creators, he financed and marketed the film on his own: He created and sold merchandise, chalked ads for his movie on East Village buildings, and pre-released completed segments to MTV as independent shorts that played on Liquid Television. But he did all this before there was a supportive network for efforts like his, largely by building a fan base, one bizarre animated short at a time.
Cheatin' - Animation Production Blog
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, animation buffs knew Plympton largely as the guy whose sketchy, twitchy colored-pencil cartoons were almost invariably the best things about the shorts festivals that periodically toured theaters, like Spike & Mike’s Festival Of Animation, or the International Tournée Of Animation. Pieces like “25 Ways To Quit Smoking,” “How To Kiss,” “One Of Those Days,” “Push Comes To Shove,” and the Oscar-nominated “Your Face” were notable for their distinctive, instantly recognizable visual style, and for being consistently surprising and absurdist. Plympton strongly believed that animation was infinitely flexible, and that realism in cartoons was a waste of the medium’s potential. In a 2000 The A.V. Club interview, he put it this way: “I think it’s part of the responsibility of an artist to shock, to upset, to make people think differently, and to surprise people. And that’s where the good humor is, if there’s a surprise and there’s something unexpected. Something that’s not normal, not in the realm of general living expectations.”
Drunker Than a Skunk - Trailer
His shorts followed suit: Each one was an exercise in stretching, melting, distorting, and transforming the characters’ faces or bodies. Sometimes the effect was disturbing, as in 1990’s “Tango Schmango,” which rotoscopes two dancers, with the male partner sometimes telling terrible jokes, and the female partner laughing hysterically, with her lips peeling back to expose giant stretching teeth and immense gums. More often, though, Plympton’s work was just meant to startle people into laughter with unlikely, abrupt transformations and turnarounds.
Bill Plympton Animation Reel.As Plympton puts it on the commentary track for The Tune, he got the idea of creating his own full-length movie in the ’80s when he was assembling his shorts for a retrospective collection, and he realized he’d produced more than an hour of animation on his own in just four years. It was the equivalent of a movie, he realized, which implied that in another three or four years of animating, he could actually create an entire film of his own. So he enlisted the help of composer Maureen McElheron and New Yorker cartoonist P.C. Vey to help him write a script, and then he spent the next several years drawing and coloring each image himself. The 69-minute film isn’t entirely a one-man art-studio gig: He hired artists to fill in the backgrounds, and had a camera operator, a sound crew, musicians for the soundtrack, and performers for the voices. But he drew and colored every single image himself. (In a DVD featurette about Plympton, Simpsons creator Matt Groening says with a straight face, “See, what Bill hasn’t learned that I’ve learned is, I’ve learned how to con a whole bunch of people into doing the animation.”)
Cheatin' - Character Design Production Blog
Given that limitation, it’s no surprise that The Tune is visually simple, with minimal backgrounds and sketchy drawings. But Plympton’s signature has always been deceptive simplicity, at least until the faces start melting. The film follows a hapless every-schmoe named Del (voiced by Daniel Neiden) who’s trying to write a hit song to sell to his corporate overlord Mr. Mega (Marty Nelson), in hopes of becoming enough of a success that he can afford to marry his sweetheart Didi (McElheron). Rushing to Mr. Mega’s office with his latest half-completed song, he gets lost and winds up in a mythic place called Flooby Nooby, where songs just spontaneously happen. The Mayor (Nelson again) explains that Del is trying too hard as a composer, and just needs to learn to feel the music. So they wander around Flooby Nooby, listening to the denizens sing in a variety of styles: surf music, Delta blues, an Elvis pastiche, and so forth. Eventually, Del gets into it, starts generating his own songs, and tries to make his way home.
The musical format let Plympton assemble the film over the course of years largely as a series of self-contained music videos. He was able to release segments along the way as shorts: The Elvis-esque number, “Dig My Do,” featuring a dog bragging about his high-flying hairstyle, came out as a standalone piece in 1990, while the non-musical segments “The Wiseman” and “Push Comes To Shove” hit MTV in 1991. Other musical sections were never released separately, but they can comfortably stand alone, like the deeply strange “No Nose Blues,” in which a disturbingly caricatured (and noseless) black man has a passionate affair with a gigantic nose, then sees it all over town on a variety of other faces, and realizes it’s been cheating on him. Also particularly memorable: “The Lovesick Hotel,” an upbeat number about a hotel full of themed rooms featuring creative suicide methods for heartbroken people, from carnivorous plants and couches to beds with built-in rotary saws.
But some of the best and strangest parts of The Tune aren’t musical numbers or stand-alone pieces; they’re random snippets of story. In particular, there’s the surreal sequence where Del notices that in Flooby Nooby, objects actually become smaller as he gets nearer. The Mayor tells him that perspective is a myth, and that objects in Del’s world are afraid of being eaten, so they puff themselves up when people get close. Then he demonstrates with a fat, placid dog, which turns into a monolithic beast when Del approaches, because he’s spooked by meeting a stranger. Another funny sequence animates one of Plympton’s family portraits, and places it in a variety of increasingly unlikely settings.
Clip from 'The Tune'
One of the two most striking things about The Tune is its complete lack of consistency. Plympton says on the DVD commentary track that he varied his animation technique from segment to segment to keep himself interested in the project over the years, so over the course of McElheron’s sad ballad “Home,” for instance, he tries a variety of visual experiments, dropping out the color, then dropping out most of Didi’s face as she sings, leaving only her lividly textured eyes, nose, and mouth hanging in midair. The film gives a perpetual sense of an artist testing out every style that crossed his mind. Transformation is key to Plympton’s work, and the theme extends to his style as well as his content.
The other striking thing is that working on his own lets him work without censorship. He’s always had a macabre bent and a love of what he calls “barnyard humor,” which here extends everywhere from a field full of cowshit to a country-music song about happy reunions, in which various paired foods (spaghetti and meatballs, a hot dog and a bun, a hamburger and a french fry, a slice of pie and a scoop of ice cream) happily reunite… and then usually hump like bunnies. Nothing in The Tune is as raunchy as later Plympton features, but it’s clear he isn’t playing toward Disney standards, or worried about offending his audience; he’s playing to his own sense of humor, and letting everyone else choose to come along for the ride or not.
Revengeance Trailer
The Tune played Cannes and Sundance in 1992, and Plympton says he went in fully expecting a multi-million-dollar distribution contract to materialize out of nowhere, because in his naïveté, he thought that was how film festivals worked. When that didn’t happen, though, it didn’t daunt him. He went back to the drawing board, literally, and continued scripting and animating his own independent films: 1997’s I Married A Strange Person!, 2001’s Mutant Aliens, 2004’s Hair High, 2008’s Idiots & Angels, and the upcoming production Cheatin’. These days, Plympton has far more outlets for self-promotion, like his online production blog for Cheatin’, or his own YouTube channel. And he has more routes toward financially supporting his own work, like contracting out for an installment of a Showtime shorts series, or for a Simpsons opening-credits couch gag that tells the tragic origin story of the couch itself, while implying that Homer Simpson has a half-couch bastard child.
Footprints Trailer
But The Tune still stands as a first, not just for him, but for the industry. In an era of committee-created, test-marketed, corporate-approved visions, it was just as much of an outlier as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs from the same year, and just as much of a positive sign for the future of independent cinema. If one man can make a movie, anyone can make a movie, provided they have the determination, and preferably an entirely oddball vision.
Source.
May 19, 2018
May 18, 2018
May 17, 2018
May 14, 2018
May 11, 2018
7PEAS
"7Peas is a series we are currently developing. It will deal with gender issues and sex equality through supercharged fights, mixing live footage and animation. This episode 0 is for us the way to give an overview of the aesthetics of the universe."
Directed by: Bounty / Banana - Steven Briand & Julien Jourdain de Muizon
Ninja: Julien Jdm
Stray Dor: Luca Fiore
Ninja girl: Melissa Humler
Production Manager: Sébastien Guitton
1st Assistant Director: Zulu Finalteri
DOP: johan leclaire - bottarelli
1st Camera Assistant: Jodie Arnoux
Fight Choreographer: Kefi Abrikh
Stunt double: Gary Cothenet
Stage Manager: Théo Charpentier
Storyboard: Etienne Guignard
Concept Art/Layout: Joseph Rahamefy & Alison Jofrio
Animator: Hugo Louiset
Sound Design: Mectoob
Graphic Design: Milos Trkulja
sylvain chaux
Joachim Imbard
Gaffer: DayanOualid
Costume Designer: Nicolas Brosseau
Monteur: Pierre-Alain Berisset
Post Prod Manager: Charlotte Brisebarre
FX Supervisor: Jao Eka M'changama
VFX Artists: Michael Moercant & Jean-Martin Mossu
Workflow Supervisor: Nicolas Huguet
May 07, 2018
May 05, 2018
May 04, 2018
May 03, 2018
May 02, 2018
Travel Oregon
"Only Slightly Exaggerated" campaign for Travel Oregon.
Directed by Kylie Matulick & Todd Mueller.
Written and produced by Wieden + Kennedy
Animation by Psyop & Sun Creatures Studio
Music by Oregon Symphony
SUN CREATURE
Executive Producers: Guillaume Dousse, Charlotte de la Gournerie
Producer: Guillaume Dousse
Associate Producer: Simon Lee Bresling
Line Producer: Charlotte Sanchez
Production Manager: Fie Ørnsø
Art Directors: Simon Lee Bresling, Guillaume Dousse
Animation Supervisors: Liane-Cho Han, Kenneth Ladekjær
Background Supervisor: Patrice Suau
Storyboard Artist: Liane-Cho Han
Colorscript Artist: Daniel Cacouault
Concept Artists: Patrice Suau, Daniel Cacouault, Thomas Reteuna, Ben Marsaud, Mourad Elias Seddiki, Simon Masse, Leïla Courtillon, Linnea Sterte, Luca Vitale, Lucas Durkheim, Samuel Klughertz
Character Designers: Kenneth Ladekjær, Luca Vitale
Layout Background Artists: Simon Masse, Jean-Michel Boesch, Linnea Sterte, Thomas Reteuna, Jade Khoo
Layout Posing Artists: Kenneth Ladekjær, Pierre Rütz, Mourad Elias Seddiki
Layout Compositing Artists: Birk Von Brockdorff, Anthony Lejeune
Background Painters: Patrice Suau, Simon Masse, Thomas Reteuna, Matthew Vince, Grace Liu, Sylvain Fabre, Théo Boubounelle, Alexis Liddell
Character Animators: Pierre Rütz, Christoffer Elsborg Kramme, Mourad Elias Seddiki, Thibaud Petitpas, Kenneth Ladekjær, Cyrille Chauvin
FX Animators: Thibaud Petitpas, Olivier Malric, Rachid Guendouze, Ines Scheiber, Stéphane Chung, Kenneth Ladekjær, Touraj Khosravi
Clean-up Artists: Christoffer Elsborg Kramme, Kay Sales, Laura Büchert Schjødt, Nawell Sdiri, Marick Queven, Sandrine Han Jin Kuang, Mette Ilene Holmriis
Color Detail Animators: Christoffer Elsborg Kramme, Kay Sales, Laura Büchert Schjødt, Nawell Sdiri, Sandrine Han Jin Kuang, Mette Ilene Holmriis, Pierre Rütz, Mikkel Mainz Elkjær
Animation Color Artists: Christoffer Elsborg Kramme, Kay Sales, Laura Büchert Schjødt, Nicoline de Selsted Lind, Mette Ilene Holmriis, Mikkel Mainz Elkjær
Senior Compositing Artists: Birk Von Brockdorff, Paul Ó Muiris
PSYOP
Directors: Kylie Matulick, Todd Mueller
Managing Director: Neysa Horsburgh
Executive Producer: Lucy Clark
Head of Production: Drew Bourneuf
Producer: Nick Read
Associate Producer: Lara Arikan
Designers: Joe Ball, Devon Manney, Andrew Park, Robin Thompson
2D Supervisor: Ryan Raith
Storyboard Artist: Max Forward
Compositors: Ryan Raith, Joe Ball, Sarah Blank, Tommy Wooh
Flame Artist: Kim Stevenson
Editors: Brett Nicoletti, Lance Pereira
Assistant Editor: Rob Cavedo