Director Reza Dolatabadi and Prodco Madrefoca Launch NOBORDER Studio
April 30, 2025
Ten artists, three months, 340 white shirts and 2,576 stain-painted frames later, Aardman and Kode Media prove “Dirt Is Good” for Persil laundry detergent in this painstaking stop-motion film thru Ogilvy & Mather, UK. [Watch]
Check this impossible-to-ignore animated spot from Moscow motion house Loop and Mexican character designer El Grand Camacho for the massive Garorock music fest taking over rural Marmande in south-western France this summer.
[Watch]
Powered by first person accounts of time spent in solitary confinement, the haunting and claustrophobic nine-minute VR experience called “6×9” produced by The Mill for UK newspaper The Guardian gives viewers the chance to simulate what 100,000 people in US prisons endure for 23 hours every day. [Watch]
The bumper crop of student films from the 2016 CalArts Character Animation program includes “You Look Scary” by Xiya Lan and “Desert Critters” by Li Wen Toh – both demonstrate outstanding storytelling talents while using fully divergent styles, techniques and narrative structures. [Watch]
Ice versus gold. The battle of the warring sisters – Evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) and Ice Queen Freya (Emily Blunt) – visualized by director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and The Mill crew in a shimmering collision of live-action, CG and motion design for Universal’s “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” end credits. [Watch]
Independent Spanish director/CD (formerly a co-founder and director at DVEIN) Fernando Domínguez Cózar shows off his mastery of style, tone and haunting photo-real 3D in these titles for Kike Maíllo’s second feature film, an action thriller called “Toro.” [Watch]
Hideyuki Tanaka and his Tokyo prodco Frame Graphics prove maximalist bubblegum is alive and thriving in Japan with this kooky and complex candy store of motion capture, CG and compositing for the track “Sai & Co” from Japanese fashion model and singer Kiriko Takemura aka Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. [Watch]
Supamonks, the French animation crew responsible for 2014’s infamous Holypop film, are back with another off-the-rails 3D rampage.
[Watch]
The standout in a series of three films created by Beakus director Amaël Isnard for the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London, “Seeing the Invisible” is a master class in how to make educational content entertaining, digestible and therefore memorable. [Watch]
Part of a full rebrand for UK culture-oriented TV channel Sky Arts, these 25-second IDs from MPC in London mix live action and VFX to “visualize the transformation from ordinary to extraordinary through color.” [Watch]
Meet Sofia, a 3D amalgam of 500 actual children trapped in crisis situations all over the planet, their faces merged into a scared and vulnerable young girl created for UNICEF Sweden by Stockholm agency Edelman Deportivo and Swedish VFX facility Pixel Grinder. [Watch]
Join New York prodco Dress Code for an intimate and insightful look into the life and liberty of David Carson, a singular combination of self-taught graphic designer, surfer, lecturer and free spirit. [Watch]
The 15th edition of the venerable FITC Toronto creative technology event opened April 17 with this title sequence by Vancouver’s Giant Ant. Leveraging the conference theme “Level Up,” the 2D, 3D, and cel-animated romp traces a fun revisionist history of video games packed with sly nods and clever transitions. [Watch]
Populated by impossibly cute and enigmatic characters, this frenetic promotional animation called “Zoning Tokyo” for Arts Council Tokyo was directed by Takashi Ohashi with character design and animation by Japanese manga artist and illustrator error403. [Watch]
