Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

Some top notch stop action filmwork here:

Adagio

This animated short does a great job of commenting on both human nature and religion without saying a word.

Ready -- Set -- BUMBO

As a new father I was really inspired by this series of videos done by a father and his child for YouTube. Sitting around all day with your kid as a stay-at-home Dad may not sound all that much fun, but with a video camera, a Bumbo brand child chair, and some stop action edits lfatboyl has whipped up trilogy of videos that are catching some serious buzz.

Here's part I, II & III followed by some hillarious behind-the-scenes outtakes.

Sunday Inspiration: Dave Media - There Are So Many of Us

Click To Play

Animation: Colby Buzzell - Men In Black

Colby Buzzell (such a cool name) was a solder who served in the Iraq war and became a blogger while serving, (and I must say he really has good taste in blog templates!). His blog became very popular and, after completing his service, the blog entries were edited together into a book titled: My War.

An Excerpt from this book was illustrated by artist: Christopher Koelle and those illustrations were animated by a studio named: The Law Of The Few. The result is what you see above which was broadcast as a segment in PBS crossroads and also posted on their website as a text transcript under the title: Men In Black.

His book has won many awards and much acclaim. The military has since clamped down on blogging from the battlefield. I wonder why.

Music: Animusic - Pipe Dream 2

Animusic is a company founded by Wayne Lytle who had always envisioned electronically synchronizing music with animation on a computer [Wikipedia link]. In 1995 he teamed up with computer Artist David Crognale to create a project for a commercial client. Since then Animusic has produced what they call video albums that is a CD like group of songs, only on a DVD, with animations to go with them. The first one was released in 2001. A great deal of their stuff has found it's way onto the internet. This clip is from their latest video album "Animuisic 2"

Animation: Metacafe - Plisko - Desktop Danceoff

Desktop Danceoff - The most amazing home videos are here

I discovered Metacafe while doing a google search last night at about 2AM my time. I noticed it was a video hosting site with embeddable videos. Since we are in the business of surfing around on video hosting sites like this I decided to take a look around. Then I noticed they had this thing called a "Producer Rewards Program" Intriguing. . . Upon closer examination I discovered that this is another uploading site that will pay people for their videos! I immediately did the upload embedded above to test it out. It's a little doodle I did testing out a free Mac application called Single Framer which makes stop motion or timelapse Quicktime files with a DV camera plugged into your Mac. I have also now included Metacafe as part of our collection of video host links in the right column.

I am a little embarrassed that I have missed them up to now. They have over a million unique viewers per day and it looks like they've been around a couple years already. The way it works is a producer uploads a video as a special submission to this rewards program (they host lots of other stuff too). If that video gets 20,000 views it qualifies for the program and they will pay the producer $100 for the 20,000 views and $5 per 1000 views after that. This is a non exclusive agreement which means you can license the video anywhere else but metacafe will retain the right to use it themselves and market the video to any other media. . . forever. It looks like that means they could distribute it as part of their podcast or any number of other things as long as it is their own use of the material.

As I browse through the videos that get paid it appears like a mix of attention getting schemes like amazing shots of this or that, mechanical stunts, magic tricks etc. There is also a lot of short, how to videos and of course. . woman in bikinis on the grass, women getting wet, women in low cleavage shirts on a bed playing with kittens. . . . you get the idea. There is a martial arts/acrobat that is the highest earner. He did a montage video of his moves that has had over 5 million views and earned over $26,000.

It seems like it may be a challenge for anyone who wants to earn money with videos that are trying to make a difference in the world. It is a lot easier to find a woman in a bikini. There may be room, however, for the John Stewart approach that is grabbing attention and entertaining people while also being informative. It remains to be seen.

Metacafe is also the first commercial video hosting site I have found of this kind where there is actually and adult video category which appears to have nudity of the rated R variety.

Comedy: Jeff Lew - Killer Bean 2: The Party

This is a great web success story. It is another one of the classic web videos that put iFilm on the map. It also put Jeffry Lew, it's creator on the map. He did this video as his first 3D modeling project as an homage to John Woo's The Killer. He used a bean as his character because it was the easiest kind of 3D character he could think of to model and animate: A sphere with arms and legs. Since it's release on iFilm it has become number 2 in iFilms top 100 of all time and 28 in the top 50 3D projects of all time by 3D world magazine. Jeffrey Lew has also gone on from there to do professional 3D work including the lead animator of 20 different shots in The Matrix Reloaded.

Video Game Filmmaking: DAoC - My Immortal

This video was created using screen captures from the massively multiplayer online roleplaying video game Dark Age of Camelot. The characters in this game can do various emotes such as drinking (with invisible mugs in this case) or dancing, laughing,crying begging etc. This allows for a primitive sort of acting. Another character is played in first person view and that one acts as a second camera. Between this perspective and the primary characters own camera (played on a seperate computer) a great diversity of shots can be achieved. Other players are recruited as a supporting cast, a screen capture program is used to turn the game play into video clips and they are edited together with sound and/or music like any other footage.

I love this new generation of short films that are being created in video game engines because it represents a really innovative way to create 3D animation sequences. Look for more examples of of this approach in future posts. I have a feeling it was works like this that inspired the Southpark Episode that takes place in the World Of Warcraft.

Unfortunately I don't have much information about the producer of this video since the credits all seem to list people only by their character names in the game.