The preface for Matthias Hoegg’s Thursday includes the phrases “BAFTA nomination”, “everyday love story” and “blackbirds battling with technology”, so it was obvious we were dealing with something very special. The Royal College of Art graduate has dialed straight into the heartstrings with his own brand of beautiful image making and exquisite story-telling to lighten up your Tuesday afternoon.
The past twelve months have been busy for Bristolian animator Ruffmercy as he’s knocked out video after video for the likes of Lily Allen, Run The Jewels, Danny Brown and Wiley, enticing them with his unique concoction of live action and hand-drawn animation. The latest addition to his stable of excellent videos is for Young Thug track Old English which sees him dispense with the live action altogether, going hell-for-leather on the animation in a disorientingly fast-paced spot. It’s a lyric video but not as we know it, with scraps of slang flying up on screen in a brightly-coloured, childlike scrawl. And while I don’t actually have a clue what “slimes,” “boolin’” or “Mollies” are, I get the impression – and you will too – that the subject of the song is drug-related. Chop that chicken down!
Modern Love, as with any love, can be a painful, difficult thing; but also one that can save us from loneliness, and make us feel safe when the world feels like a frightening place. It can make us see a new city in bright colours where before it was grey, and it can also crush us. These vacillations between fear and warmth, joy and pain, and a heart swelling and being later torn apart into nuts and bolts is explored beautifully in this animation by Adam Wells, which brings to life a story in The New York Times’ Modern Love series by Laurel Fantauzzo entitled Breaching the Seawall.
Maybe it’s because it’s January and yesterday was officially the most suicidal day of the year, but something about this animation really threw me. It was something to do with the throbbing pain in my thumbs from playing too much Candy Crush Soda Saga (in bed, on the train, in the bath) and that numb-eyed sensation that comes from scrolling through Twitter like a dead person, and refreshing Facebook without even knowing I’m doing it. Technology, as much affection we have for it, is a barrage of information that we don’t know how to handle – and the amount of time we engage with it is spiralling out of control.
We seem to be following Nicolas Ménard’s progress like a sort of online This is Your Life – and as I was studying with him until last summer, were we to take that idea to its conclusion, there’s an opportunity to bring out friends and family for some song-and-dance nostalgia.
A lot can happen in a day. And when a lot of things happen, you get a lot of pictures, as shown to rather mind-blowing effect in Parag K. Mital and Evan Boehm’s video collage Untitled No. 1 – a piece composed entirely of images collected from the previous 24 hour news cycle. The day in question was 10 December last year, though the pair is now releasing the video with some superbly searing, brutal new music by Rob Hart.
Just as I was wondering nervously if Laura Marling had gone and got lost in the wilderness of Joshua Tree for good, she’s gone and announced a new album – hoorah! Just like Beyonce, Laura has accompanied the sudden announcement of her new songs with a video: a truly beautiful little animation from London studio Art & Graft. Featuring a few drops of ink transforming slowly into a wild, headstrong horse galloping through a desert to a world unknown, this powerful little piece of film is enough to remind us of Laura’s own majesty. The rather moving essay on her brand new website backs this up perfectly. Welcome back Laura, you’ve been missed.
I think I’m safe in saying that fans of Panda Bear, the pseudonym of Noah Lennox of Animal Collective, are probably pretty into video games. I’m also sure that those who are into video games (myself included) are also fans of the good vs. evil storyline prevalent in most games and a lot of films that resemble games, Studio Ghibli etc. There is pure beauty in the little guy overcoming the big baddie, or the idea of friends working together to solve a puzzle, or to override some kind of evil power.
As accolades go, being the man behind “the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar” is pretty special. That’s exactly what PES (aka Adam Pesapane) can boast though after Fresh Guacamole’s nod for best animated short despite running to just 100 seconds. After a super successful Kickstarter campaign PES is back with his new short Submarine Sandwich in which various bits of vintage sports equipment are sliced and diced and laid into the eponymous deli staple. PES said the new film has been “a labour of love” that began with a single image: “A boxing glove in a deli slicer… knuckles to the blade. This idea stuck with me and I knew I had to bring it to life.”
Contrary to popular belief, libraries can be wildly fun and psychedelic places if you’ve got the right tools to work with. Here and willing to help me prove my point are Tord Torpe and Magnus Nyquist, who created an animation to this end. Entitled KHIB Biblioteket after the library at their school, Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway, the animation sees a bandy-legged gent wandering absent-mindedly up to his library door, only to be thrown head first into a world of Memphis-inspired jumping shapes, swirling perspectives, fast-paced bright flashing colours and lights and morphing letterforms. It’s an incredibly ambitious project for a pair of students and happily it succeeds magnificently in its task, even being awarded a prize by Norwegian design blog Grafill.
Did you know that the first episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has had nearly 21 million views on YouTube so far? With that in mind, since launching three days ago, the third instalment of the cult series is marching quickly towards the million-hit mark. Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared 3 is the much-anticipated follow-up to the very well-recieved previous epidoes which you can see here and here. This time, the characters are spending a day in the countryside, having a delicious raw chicken picnic when suddenly their day is dampened by a pesky butterfly landing in their basket of meat.
If you’re anything like me, the 1990s were a decade dedicated to pogs, the Spice Girls, Hey Arnold and Clarissa Explains It All and with those keys players to occupy us it’s no surprise we were too busy to pause and take note of all the great slang vocal being flung around. Fortunately i-D were more than happy to recount the lot in their classic alphabetical fashion, and they even recruited the marvellous Layzell Bros to help them.
The internet is a weird and fantastical thing when you really think about it – fuelling so much more than our social lives and procrastination, it’s a constantly growing, unpredictable entity. Celebrating the wonders of the world wide web are animation studio Buck, based in Los Angeles and New York.
Moving pictures and music are a simple, universal pleasure, which is probably why I’m so drawn to Drew Tyndall’s series of animations, Loops.
