The Reward

"The Reward", available here on vimeo, is a nine minute animated film by students at The Animation Workshop in Denmark. The film is beautifully polished, and uses a strong style unlike anything else out there right now. It is primarily hand drawn, but uses 3d to its advantage for seamless camera angles and backgrounds. There is a ton of concept art available online, as seen here for example, that showcases the strong design elements of this film.

The technical skill and amazingly creative designs in this film are worth watching, even if you're not into animation. The making-of video, available here, is also extremely detailed and informative- it breaks everything down all the way to color scripts. This piece and all the work that went into it shouldn't only be inspirational for animators- design students can absolutely benefit from looking at the work that goes into something like this as well. Diversify!

Flash Animation by Adam Philips

I can probably speak for many people out there, that when we vision well designed animation, we may not consider simple flash animations. And among the large amount of cheap animations and stick figure fights there is Brackenwood by Adam Philips. Adam is an Australian freelance animator whose main body of animation work, for which he is best known, consists of flash animation compositions published on his website Bitey Castle and on the flash portal Newgrounds (there, as of March 2010, his movies have over 14 million views and he is one of the highest ranked artists). He is the creator of the Brackenwood series.

Readers should seriously take the time to at least watch one or two of this series.

You done watching? Alright then.

I think now you can see why they're so great. Adam has taken a simple medium and elevated it to a serious production level. The story he's crafted with Bitey (see picture)

 is mysterious and exciting.The music and visual aspects all come together to make a great series.

And while it costs a fee, he does offer courses in animation for those who are interested. I think some cartoons on TV currently could use some pointers from this guy.