Cooking Up Fresh Inspiro
Jingle Bells, already? 🎄🤮
Keys & Curves is here to unlock inspiration for all things animation, straight to your inbox, every Monday.
👋🏻 Starting to feel the holiday grind? Over here it feels like a full-on Christmas season work jam since the day we took down the Halloween decorations.
It’s beyond easy to lose that creative drive during this crunched-for-time run to the end of the year, which reminds me of this recent quote from photographer and creative coach Chase Jarvis:
Creativity is a habit not a skill.
Maintaining the daily habit to find new bits of creative caffeine to fuel the workday is what we’re all about here, so – let’s get inspired!
📃 What’s inside:
Motion Design: Motion Systems are hot these days.
Tools: Old school techniques find new applications
Animation: Abstractions and acid-fueled genius
References: Black and white and basketball?
Spotlight: A monster-mind blast from the past
MOTION MADNESS
A Different Kind Of Coke Project
Coke is in the news for a holiday AI spot, but we found another, less controversial motion design system project for the Coca-Cola family of drinks from FOUND – these kinds of Motion-first systems are popping up everywhere these days.
Have you seen Keisuke Terashima’s deceptively simple and mesmerizing isometric marvels made in C4D?
Reece Parker and Apple sound like a motion design match made in heaven – check out his process that including drawing in… the NOTES app ❓
Director GRIF launches an eye-popping campaign for ACURA, check out these colors:
AGIO developed a spec project for imaginary restaurant Spago & Vino
Bobby Donald is cooking up some delicious looking bubble cel-style animations that are… done natively in After Effects?!? (He says a tutorial is on the way)
TOOL TIME
Blender Goes Hard For Old School Tools
A new add-on for animating with old school TIMING CHARTS in Blender?!?
Clay Pencil: even more Blender goodness w cel animation that drives 3D characters? 😍
We recently discovered SHADE, a color palette manager that works between After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator – working on a project across teams with strict brand colors has never been easier, and it’s on early sale for Black Friday?
Everytime I see Moho I’m impressed – it was used on Scavenger’s Reign 👀
Motion Boutique goes HAM with Newton 4 and After Effects type
ANIMATION STATION
Anniversaries Galore
Blast from the Past: have you ever seen Dunderklumpen - a fantastic animated film that mixes live-action and cel animation celebrates it’s 50th anniversary.
Tatsuyuki Tanaka, the mind behind one of my favorite series of art books, Cannabis Works, directed an amazing short that’s back on Yotube: Genius Party Beyond
We’re deep into stop-mo season with the Many Faces of Pinocchio
Dragon Ball Saisen – fan-made 3D that looks like animated manga
A breakdown on this awesome Sonic Super Transformation
Abstract Character transformations for Evangelion by Yoh Yoshinari
REFERENCES
Shadow Powers and Shoe Slices
Chris Samnee shows the power of lighting in design with his Batman pencil and ink progress posts:
Chris Samnee - Batman Process Robot arms, motion control cameras, and probe lenses make for a very Toy Story IRL look
Fabian Oefner slices up shoes and other interesting things to give a unique perspective
SPOTLIGHT
Milicent Patrick
The Keys & Curves spotlight doesn’t just shine on new artists – we also aim it at towards those that we should all know about from the past as well.
One of our favorites was not only responsible for some stunning effects work for CHERNABOG’s moment in Fantasia, but she also designed one of the classic Universal Monsters; the Creature From The Black Lagoon!
Readers, we cannot learn enough about Milicent Patrick – she’s much deserving of a deeper dive into her story.
Know of someone that deserves some time in the Spotlight? Let us know who!
That’s a wrap – we’ve been slammed with work lately (and thankfully) but we’re still working on some deep dive videos for your viewing pleasure. More soon!
So much good stuff!! Thanks Ryan!