The sight of a tiny handmade puppet hitting a tiny handmade crack pipe will likely make you laugh. If that doesn't work, try a tiny puppet blowing up a tiny drug lord's house. These scenes, from William Child's puppetry biopic of Pablo Escobar, manage to tell Escobar's actual story of a life of crime with the humor that comes with the territory of handmade puppet animation. According to It's Nice That, the five-minute film is supplemented by a box set, which includes a book of production photos that didn't make it into the film. Watch the short film below.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this new site from designer and developer Matt Johnston. He has started a project exploring the aspects of watch design with a smart and simple website he’s calling Wrist. Taking a page from Windows of New York, Johnston's goal is to illustrate and animate one watch every other week, all the while playing with typography, color, and animation.
Already on the site are watches from Timex and From Us With Love, but we can think of dozens of different watches that we’d like to see Johnston mock up. Side note: The animation didn't work on our Safari browser, but did work on Chrome.
Visit Wrist to get your bi-weekly dose of beautifully animated watches.
From stand-alone sequences to transitions and even cover art, Terry Gilliam's cut-out animations were a major part of Monty Python films and television programs. In 1974, Gilliam was given about 15 minutes of airtime on BBC1's Do It Yourself Animation Show to talk about his craft. He gives a surprisingly thorough tutorial, managing to cover everything from finding source material and planning and photographing a sequence, to the mechanics of cut-out animation. His biggest takeaway, besides instructing viewers to not pursue animation, is that the simplest sequences are usually the most effective. [via SwissMiss]
If there's a better way of telling Dikembe Mutombo's life story than through an animated version of the hoops star, we can't think of it. To mark the re-release of Mutombo's signature adidas basketball sneaker, illustrator Nathan McKee and animator Jamal Qutub created a web series called "The House of Mutombo" following the eponymous protagonist from his early days in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to his finger-waving notoriety in the NBA. Mutombo narrates the series. The clips are only about a minute each, but myth making doesn't take much longer than that with original lettering, charmingly 2D animation, and an inexplicable hawk that pops up in episode two.
Check out the first three episodes and some images from the series below.
One can't utter the words "midcentury modern American furniture" without picturing that Herman Miller logo and iconic design pieces by Nelson and Eames. But, the American design house has actually been around over a century. Dutch agency Part of a Bigger Plan has made videos for the likes of Mr. Porter and Louis Vuitton and was tasked with covering Herman Miller's history in an anniversary video to hype the launch of the WHY platform. Cleverly, it packs 108 years of design history into just 108 seconds.
The video for Franz Ferdinand's new single "Right Action" makes us long for the simple and bold graphics of intermediate school textbooks. Directed by Swedish animator Jonas Odell, who also did "Take Me Out," it might be the most graphic-design-reliant video we've seen in some time.
In 2010 Chicago singer Willis Earl Beal published an autobiographical novella in the form of a few issues of a zine. For his contribution to Nowness' "Shorts on Sundays" series, he adapted elements of that original zine into the short film, "Principles of a Protagonist." In the six-and-a-half minute film using the same hand-drawn line aesthetic as his Acousmatic Sorcery album cover, Beal outlines the character traits that every protagonist requires. One of those principles, he explains, is the reason for his "Nobody" T-shirt and tattoo.