フミコの告白 (Fumiko's Confession) is a short film made by a Japanese student Ishida Hiroyasu. It’s a genuine Japanese style animation.
The story is simple, cute and just like its title. One day Fumiko confess to a boy who she loves. ” Uh..I..I…want to be your girlfriend! ” “ Sorry! I just want to concentrate on baseball now! ” With a broken heart, Fumiko runs and cries but knocks against something and flies to the sky. After a series of adventures, she collides that boy accidently and finally stop. Fumiko confess to him again. ”I..I will cook miso soup every morning for you! ” “Sorry! I just want to concentrate on baseball now!”
In this film we can feel a completely different art style from Europe or American animation. Japanese animators are good at drawings and can always make their films like fine paintings. Beside that, their 2D animation skill is usually very mature, and they’ll use it to make some fantastic character performances and morphing.
If you are interested about how can a student make this short film or who the creator is, visit his blog. There are a lot of 2D and 3D creations and other little animations. By the way, he is just 21 years old now.
The Soliloquist is a remarkable piece which is made by a TNUA student Ma Kuang-Pei.
The art style of this film is very fascinating. Ma Kuang-Pei uses a lot of paper texture and hand-drawing sketches to form a kind of old times feeling. Also, he joins a lot of details to every shots to make it looking like still paintings. By doing these things, the whole animation is just like a magical moving-picture book, presenting a thick feeling of loneliness and sadness.
Its motion graphics and camera works impress me so much, too. Because of the film shooting in only one take without cut, it brings audience a continuous visual effect by unceasingly pictures' moving and changing. This kind of animation skill will make people always amazing about how a scene or an object transform to another, and Ma Kuang-Pei does it very well.
The story is about a heart broken man’s life and imagination. It’s from Ma Kuang-Pei’s own experience of felling out of love. Then he uses these grieved emotions as materials and motive power to make this animation. During the process, he was trying to cast his hurt soul to the character in the film.
As a result, this film not only heals some part of his broken heart but also brings something wonderful to him. The Soliloquist won Annecy 2009 Graduation Films Special Distinction Award. That’s the first time Taiwan animation got award in this national festival.
Après la pluie is a cute and short animation. Once more – it was made by Gobelins’ students.
Seeing this film is my first time to know how incredible Gobelins is. In animation field, we used to take those highly completed and high quality animations as “commercial animations” because these animations are good enough to sell. Sometimes to be said commercial animations is just a kind of praise. However, it seemed absolutely meaningless to say this to Gobelins’ animations. Their creations have been already beyond those commercial ones. They are just in another higher level.
Although this short film has no real story – just run and chase, it’s still charming. I like their art style. It mixes a kind of 2D painting with a 3D space feeling. Their solid art design can easily drags audience into the fantasy world. The characters design are also great, too. Big monster looks quite cute and elastic.
It’s usually fun to see a film's making-of because the process of a good animation is another kind of art. Here we got two. One is the official The Making of Après la pluie. Other one is made separately by Tanon-Tchi - a creator of this film - as a personal demoreel.
Woodman animation series now includes 3 woodman animations made by a NTUA graduated student Hero. This animation series is well-known in Taiwan’s cyberspace – especially in BBS.I recommend you to see Woodman 2 and Woodman 3.
Woodman 2 is about a popular BBS site Bahamut. In this film, Woodman and his partner have to defeat a lot of boring guys who attack their favorite board KUSO. If you are not a BBS user or familiar with young people’s internet culture, you might be quite confused after seeing this animation. However, using these unique BBS culture as an animation element is the most attractive point to now youngsters, and that is exactly what Hero wants to do.
In fact, his goal is to present an interesting BBS culture they called “KUSO” which means a kind of wacky humor. For instance, there are some articles and jokes associating our Founding Father Sun Yat-sen with kung fu. They said Sun Yat-sen is actually a powerful kung fu master and always beat down his opponents with his fists. All his theories actually are some books about his mighty kung fu. Using these funny stories as sources, Hero created woodman’s partner The Invincible Iron-fist Sun Yat-sen. Its model is composed by a famous robot Mazinger Z and a ten dollar coin which has a head embossment of Sun Yat-sen.
On the other side,Woodman 3 absolutely has nothing to do with BBS culture. This time woodman’ mission is to fight with the computer bugs caused by rendering error. It has a very cool visual effect by compositing virtual animation characters with real backgrounds, and this time its story is more easily to understand by audiences – includes juries of animation competitions. As a result, Woodman 3 has won over 10 awards and nominated almost every competition participated in Taiwan.
Now Hero is making his new film Woodman 4. He gathers a group of animation experts like KD and Sheep Wu to help him accomplish this animation .In his anticipation, Woodman 4 will be raised to a movie level, and he hope it can be a milestone in Taiwan’s animation field. Without any unexpected problems, we’ll able to see this film within a month. Let’s expect it!
Gary is made by some students from Supinfocom – another grand animation school in French.
Like all excellent French animations, the art design of this film is really artistic. What’s different is that Gary uses a kind of 3D rendering technique we called non-photoreal rendering. By rendering with this method, the image will be more like hand-drawing or other painting styles but not a traditional 3D looking. In Gary, its character and scenes were rendered like something painted by crayons. Moreover, to imitate more closely to a hand-drawing animation, it rendered the big boy with a non-stop faltering colors and lines. It makes the film just like an old 2D animation because of its inaccurate coloration.
The story of this film is also very interesting. Creator uses what children think and like as main elements to compose the story. Having a secret crush with an older sister, drawing something and playing with it, imaging fantasy dreams with some ordinary items and so on. It will let audience recall their own childhood and have a kind of emotion connection with this film. If a story can touch people’s private feelings deep in mind, it will be successful.
Sadly, GaryOfficial Website doesn’t work now. As all excellent animation films, Gary should have a lot of splendid art designs and some films about how they make this animation too. It’s a pity we can’t see that. In Motiongrapher, you can see a brief interview about Gary.
Oktapodi is a very hot animation in 2008. Every people related to animation have seen it because it almost swept all the important festivals and awards in that year. It was made by Gobelins’ students.
At first glance, you might think this short film is a trailer of some animation feature film made by PIXAR or Dreamworks and want to ask when it will be playing in the theater. Actually, it’s just a students’ creation. Six juniors of Gobelins made this whole film from some original ideas to final 3D animation. It’s really amazing.
Everything in this film achieves a highly professional level. Firstly, the story is simple. It’s just about two octopuses’ fleeing. This kind of animals’ action film can develops advantages of animation and is welcome from kids to adults. Second, characters’ performances are very funny and interesting. It tightly catches all the audiences’ eyes from the first second to the last. People will be fascinated by these two octopuses’ actions and want to see more. Third, the art design of this film is really outstanding. If you visit their official site to see gallery or see the film - The Making of Oktapodi - you will know what I mean. As to animation students or even professional animation artists, their works are just so formidable.
This film has won a very big award - SIGGRAPH 2008 Best of Show Award. It’s one of the most important awards in animation field. The winner of this award can be directly nominated by Academy Awards Best Animated Short. Besides this award, it also won SIGGRAPH 2008 Audience Award, Annecy 2008 Canal Award, Imagina 2008 Best animation and a lot of other big awards. Many people believe that this film should be the biggest winner in 2008.
Visit their official site, and just know more about these incredible students and their art works.
