It’s been a while since Capacity has updated—and from them that’s usually a good sign. They’ve just put up some of their recent blood, sweat and tears, including two projects for Cartoon Network, one for CMT, and one for NFL Network.

Last but not least is the epically bad ass CN Master Control spot. It looks like Capacity had a ton of fun with that one; the character design alone is worthy of applause.

   Post from: Motionographer

Okay okay, enough already. We’ve known about the Psyop “buyout” now for almost two weeks, but we didn’t report it because it’s industry news and not a spot for Zune or something. After tons of email inquiring about it, I’ve decided to refer readers to the definitive response from Psyop’s CEO, Justin Booth-Clibborn.

In addition to explaining that the deal isn’t really a buyout in the traditional sense, Booth-Clibborn explains that “day-to-day running remains in the hands of the people who are running Psyop right now. My role will change a little bit, obviously being the CEO of a public company brings with it some responsibilities that I haven’t faced up to now, but I’ll be very much involved in what I do now, the public running of the company.”

Please read the full interview before predicting the end of the world. Thanks to Booth-Clibborn and Creativity Online for providing such a lucid account of the arrangement.

   Post from: Motionographer

I don’t often get tingles from the work posted here, but this new short film directed by Phillip Van had my entire body covered in goosebumps.

“And She Stares Longingly At What She Has Lost” is one part of a five-part exquisite corpse project launched by Little Minx partnered with RSA Films. In addition to Van, four other directors—Chris Nelson, Malik Hassan Sayeed, Josh Miller, and Laurent Briet—responded to the last line of text of the previous director’s script.

Using a script as the creative baton is an interesting approach to creating an exquisite corpse. The result is a set of high-end short films that share an ephemeral thread—a conceptual rather than visual commonality.

As always, Method nailed the visuals and brought Van’s ideas to life in exquisite detail. The balance between fantasy and hyper-reality is one of the things that makes this piece tick. Each image is so charged with symbolic and emotional content.

Some technical bits from the release:

“Phillip had this idea of a man made out of water, someone who is not quite there,” says Caudron, Lead 2D VFX Artist on the project. “It was essential that he be a palpable presence, but also that he seem otherworldly. It was quite a challenge to appropriately balance the real and surreal worlds.”

To nail down a realistic image, the animation team scanned the real life actor into a 3D model, which gave them the man’s complete geometry with which to work:

“The 3D model was a huge help,” says Caudron. “We were able to apply all our lighting and water effects in a series of layers. The character ended up being very layer-heavy, but it sped things up considerably.”

In creating the gnarled and twisted forest that represents the hardships of life, Boyd was reticent at first, but quickly enthused by the challenge:

“Forest scenes are notoriously difficult to render, due to all the detail,” he explains. “We got so into this project, however, that we started looking for new ways to work and new things to learn. Almost everything was shot against bluescreen, with just a few plants and shrubs around the set, so it was up to us to create the forest. To render the entire thing, I used a system called ‘delayed reads.’ With the geometry of one 3D tree, we were able to have the system procedurally create unique trees at render time. While 3D trees are typically so dense in information that you can’t have more than one open at a time, we were able to render out 100 or so each time. It was tremendously helpful.”

Full credits

   Post from: Motionographer