BLOG: With the help of Vincent Morisset, Arcade Fire made a really great video for their track Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) – you can watch that here. But what was really really cool in a different way? All the promotion they did leading up to the release of the Sprawl video.
With the help of students at the Cine Institute in Haiti, Arcade Fire created funny and weird puppet-head teasers that – what do you know – actually make you want to see this video they’re on about.
MUSIC VIDEO: Liquid TV‘s Imaginary Company and Lavender Diamond teamed up for this quirky Madonna cover.
BLOG: There is little that Eighty Four Films touches that we don’t love. Having said that, this Halloween-themed short is definitely one of their stranger productions. Island of Horrors, animated by Jim Dirschberger and voiced by Richard Enriquez, is the tale of a deranged man’s seaside amusement park of horrors.
BLOG: Pamel Reed and Matthew Rader make up Reed + Rader, and together they create fashion GIFs worth staring at. Combining backgrounds in photography and animation to, according to It’s Nice That, “create hypnotic, augmented realities,” the pair collide geek culture and haute couture and make the combo seem obvious.
BLOG: Portugal-born, Netherlands-based illustrator Vasco Vicente has a graphic style that is both horrifying and poetic. It grabs you for reasons you aren’t entirely comfortable with and leaves you charged. Check out more of the young artist’s works at vascovicente.com.
BLOG: These days, it seems everyone wants to be friends with Ira Glass. Even his now famous on-air apology for This American Life‘s misstatement of the facts during their Mr. Daisey And The Apple Factory show was more endearing than anything else. Comics artist Chris Ware and animator John Kuramoto, though, can always say “I knew him before the apology.” (Ware and Glass have actually been buddies for a while, and the trio have gone on to work on a much more intensive project called Lost Buildings.) They directed this animation for “This American Life — Live!” three years ago.
BLOG: Andrew Thomas Huang‘s gorgeous exploration with color and form won the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at this year’s Slamdance. It’s called Solipsist. Five points for anyone who know what that word means.
BLOG: Does anyone remember Stuxnet? Patrick Clair and Scott Mitchell do. The director-writer team came up with this cool motion graphic about the first weapon made entirely out of code.
BLOG: A huge wet congratulations to Ivan Dixon on scoring the LoopdeLoop top prize for animated looping short about (what else) LIQUID. Ivan used based his loop on his own personal experience – always a good bet. Although now we all know why it takes him so long to use the little boys’ room.
Incidentally, Ivan makes up one half of Rubber House Studio in Melbourne and, along with Gregory Sharpe, they are leading a resurgence in luscious hand-drawn traditional animation with an edge. Check out their potentially offensive video for Gotye above and their teaser Old Feed below.
Congrats again, Ivan!
BLOG: We really like Joanna Neborsky, who primarily creates illustrations and animations for really cool publications (say that five times fast) like Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers – a comic Western set in 1851.
Or her illustrations of Joe Berkowitz‘s essay in The Awl: My Superpower Is Being Alone Forever.
A Liquid TV favorite remains her animation for n+1, titled What Was The Hipster? Check it out!
