Anticipation For A New Year of Animation
Keyslinging and Curve Setting Inspiration.
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👋🏻 How you doing?
We’re baking keys and hanging curves this holiday season – and hoping the end of the year is treating you well and setting up the new year to be better than the last. We’re getting excited for some new movies coming out soon (anyone watch the trailer for FLOW yet?) and planning our cozy couch catch-up for all the shows and films we missed.
We’ve got a date set for an ILM-animated double feature with Ultraman: Rising and Transformers One. How about you – what movies did you miss this year?
📃 What’s inside:
Animation: A New Studio Emerges
Motion Design: What’s Old Is New
Tools + Training: A Novel Approach To AE Projects
Spotlight: Mesmerizing Mograph Cube Explorations
ANIMATION STATION
Animation Everywhere
Animation Obsessive takes an in-depth look at The Glassworker, the new feature film from first-time animation studio Mano in Pakistan. Months ago we sat down to watch the 90-minue making Of for this film on Youtube, almost out of curiosity to see what a BTS for a yet-to-be-finished film looks like – and we came away shocked. Heavily influenced by Studio Ghibli but being made by a studio full of artists completely new to animation, it looks like one to watch in 2025.
Blender Studio continues to impress with their non-stop output of NPR-focused shorts, this time with a look at how they made Cowboi
Pencil test from the previously mentioned Tatsuyuki Tanaka continues to show how mindblowing his animation skills are.
Dash Studio designs Cartoon Modern-esque characters for MONEY MAGIC
Happy Holidays from this little cutie by Silvia Casali
MOTION MADNESS
Old Tools Teaching New Tricks
It’s always exciting to see the new tools and techniques flooding the mograph zone on the daily – but sometimes it’s even more exciting to see something new with the tried-and-true. Cinema 4D stepping in for After Effects shape layers, After Effects used as clean-up for traditional animation; what else is out there that would surprise us?
The always prolific Fraser Davidson and CUB Studio show off how you can tag in C4D for those flat fantastic animations rather than relying on AE all the time.
Taylor Yontz shares a dynamic Duolingo shot where After Effects came to the cleanup rescue over the top of some
Sekani Solomon shows just how far you can take those new Cinema 4D particle tools in another spectacular CASH App spot.
The team at Yond Studio pushed Joysticks & Sliders to it’s limits to bring a beautiful bird to life over some great live-action plates (check out that rig!)
Grilli Type shares an in-depth case study with lots of brand animations on their creation of a custom font for Tik Tok
Superstar Steve Savalle rocks some sports logos with clean camera moves and fun effects.
TOOLS + TRAINING
Everyday We’re Keyframing (With New Tools)
AEExplorer looks interesting (and free): rely less on Windows Explorer to organize and manage all your After Effects projects in one place.
Super-stylized character animation in Blender explained!
SPOTLIGHT
KEISUKE TERASHIMA
If you haven’t run into Keisuke Terashima’s amazing series of Cube Explorations on social media, you are in for a treat – one that will simultaneously have you asking “how do they do that” and then diving immediately into Cinema 4D to try to figure it all out.
It’s rare that someone’s work can be both so intimidating and inspiring all at once, but the ways in which Keisuke bends Cinema 4D to his will in such an inviting way does just that.
Take a deeper look at Terashima’s approach to experimentation with this long form article (Chrome does a great job translating it from Japanese) and see how it inspires you to start playing as well.
Check them out on:
Know someone that should spend some time in our Spotlight? Let us know who!
That’s a wrap for this week– we’re in full-on holiday mode at Keys & Curves: we’re cooking up an end-of-the-year rush of our favorite work, artists, and more.
Until then, keep on slinging those keys and riding the curves! 🤩