GOBELINS Paris and Escuela ESCENA Announce Animation Short Film Incubator Program
June 9, 2025
After winning the praise of festival audiences and juries for his charming and low key animated short “Fear of Flying” last year, Dublin’s Conor Finnegan spun 180 degrees to create the twisted tale of a malevolent sphincter in “Asshole.” His latest project, uses “stop-motion paint on puppet parts and lots of After Effects” to conjure this vibrant/cryptic music video for Irish-born, Berlin-based-artist Candice Gordon. Conor is represented by Nexus.
Epileptics beware, Zeitguised push motion capture to the edges of recognition in this lobe-lashing chroma-cacophony for “Cream Theme” from veteran German electro-duo Mouse on Mars accompanied only by this enigmatic caption, “Escapism is freedom if claimed by a subject – it can not be consumed.” [Watch]
Some of you may remember when Star Wars (aka John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune and Robert Blalack) won the very first “Best Visual Effects” Oscar back in 1977 but I challenge anyone to list all the winners since. Enter Chicago native and montage master Nelson Carvajal with his latest [Watch]
Matt Pyke and Universal Everything invite you to spend seven hypnotic minutes with their “slowly evolving video sculpture” called Walking City, a fusion of architecture, evolution and movement “referencing the utopian visions of 1960’s architecture practice Archigram” who, according to Wikipedia, “was an avant-garde [Watch]
Biscuit director Noam Murro and a crew of 50+ artists and producers from The Mill clean up at the Big Game with 60 seconds of funny/creepy puppy strangeness in this out of character clip for Audi thru Venables Bell & Partners. [Watch]
Barcelona’s Tigrelab nudge the lyric video genre forward by interpreting the melancholy of “Blue on Blue” from James Blunt’s latest album Moon Landing thru the cold detachment of technical schematics. [Watch]
London’s Time Based Arts (founded in 2009 by Flame artists Mike Skrgatic and James Allen) prove once again that big VFX no longer have to come from big shops. [Watch]
In what I suspect is a typographic first, Leo Burnett Lisboa crafts the official font of their hometown by deconstructing and reassembling the electrical wires of the city’s famous tram system. Created with the support of the Lisbon City Council, LX Type can be downloaded free here – with additional interactive features, so you can try out the font and find locations associated with each letter “transforming words into spontaneous and personalized guides to the city.” [Watch]
Few people on the planet do cool and clean 3D like Mike Alderson and his ManvsMachine crew. Case in point: this new Air Superiority campaign introducing the Nike Air Max 90 with audio by Echolab. “The 2014 collection sees Air + Lunar + Flyknit technologies combined for the first time, so we wanted to develop a [Watch]
Cluster Studio in Mexico City just sent us there latest: a frenetic, genre-mashing :60 for the Nissan Juke featuring surgical editing, over-the-top action tropes and a multitude of animation and VFX techniques all created by a team of 16 artists on a tight schedule. Agency: TERAN \ TBWA, Production: Garage Films, [Watch]
Directors Michelle Dougherty and Karin Fong and the Imaginary Forces crew carve out dramatic and superbly intricate titles for the new Starz pirate series “Black Sails” and declare them “Nothing less than a full-on art history mash-up of Baroque motifs, Gothic architecture and Rococo style. Using a sculptural language [Watch]
Newcastle Brown Ale and Droga 5 prepare you for the Super Bowl ad they didn’t/couldn’t make. More taking the piss here. [Watch]
Interesting insights shared here by Shutterstock who distill data from their archive of 30 million+ images and 350 million+ downloads to explore recent and emerging design and video trends from around the globe. [Watch]
Ryan Honey and the Buck team show off their mastery of cel animation (and sense of fun) as they illuminate an eccentric ditty from CHI & Partners in this light and lithe :40 for the Hive next-gen thermostat control system from British Gas. [Watch]
