At last a disaster movie that doesn’t occur in New York! District 9 is produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp, and is influenced by the real-life District 6 – an inner-city ghetto in Cape Town – only the inhabitants are not human but rather a race of oppressed aliens.

After plans to make the Halo movie fell through, Peter Jackson gave financial support to Neill to expand his shortfilm Alive in Joberg into a feature film. The production is completely independent, relying heavily on viral advertising, and so avoids all the politics and financial games that Hollywood is known for.

South Africa has had a long history of Xenophobia, most recently documented in 2008, which makes this film even more interesting as the term ‘alien’ is used by many governments to describe a foreigner residing in their country.

District 9 looks to tackle many issues, such as human rights, equality, immigration – and with a mix of subtle CG, an original setting and fresh South African accents, the film looks promising.

German 3D artist and film maker, Egmont Mayer, has created this impressive shortfilm that features a man and his giant rabbit. The story is centred around the character’s need to keep the animal a secret, meaning a relationship with a female neighbour is almost missed.

Right from the first scene the animation is so real and human-like, as the audience watches the main character convincingly squeeze passed an object from behind a translucent door (00:21). The interaction between the animal and the man is amazing as he struggles to keep the giant inside one room (01:21 – 01:41)- the impression of heaviness and weightiness is one of the hardest things to accomplish in animation, and it is achieved so well here.

The story continues showing the man continually turn down advances from the woman because of his responsibilities towards his pet, even dreaming of the girl at one point, until he is met with a nice surprise at the end.

This music video for hip hop artist Ill Bill features some impressive use of lens flare (01:28), not commonly associated with a cell-shaded animation. Its quick-paced editing works well to portray the violent battle, and the shaky-cam effects along with quick zooms and focuses gives the feel of a guerrilla documentary (00:26), where the audience are watching through the eyes of one of the soldiers.

Eros gives a brief look at what a blind person might perceive in their mind. While the concept of him imagining a beautiful women is unrealistic, unless he became blind later in his life (which then would mean he could recall the memory of the women), the way in which Tom Geraedts has revealed the image of the women is amazing. He uses a brilliant mix of vector motion graphics and transparency effects showing the brain almost plotting the shape of her face gradually into focus (01:48). The powerful soundtrack was engineered by Jeff Dodson and really combines seamlessly with Tom’s concept.

This video collage was created by artist Marco Brambilla with the help of production company Crush. It features a journey from hell to heaven and plays on high definition screens in the elevators at the Standard Hotel in NYC- playing forwards when the elevator goes up, and in reverse when it travels downwards.

Marco’s vision of hell and heaven, with all the parts between, is mesmerizing with such great detail in every inch of the screen. The colour theme starts red and orange to show a flame-ridden and burning hell, but slowly evolves through grey and purple into green, and then finally into the blue and white of the blissful scene of heaven. What is also interesting is the eye shape in both hell and heaven depicting the vision of God and Satan.

The entire canvas that slowly moves up is a total 1920 x 7500 pixels, including static illustrations by Marco and over 400 video clips composited by the artists at Crush. See photos of the elevator installation here.

In parallel to the technical research, Marco and his studio staff began the process of researching and collecting a vast amount of footage sampled from both mainstream and more obscure film sources. Marco then assembled still grabs from each piece of sampled footage into photomontages, which we would review weekly while Marco’s editor cut together a linear chronology of what the components in journey from hell to heaven may look like. [...] The clips were used in much the same way the way a painter would use a colour or texture. We felt it was like audio sampling, using the clips as beats and timing them all to work together to create something new and original

Notice the small Michael Jackson figure dancing just below heaven (02:22). Did Marco Brambilla know something the rest of us didn’t?