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?

The From the hoop team created this amazing animation in memory of Earl Manigault.

Story of From the hoop is inspired by Earl Manigault’s life. Earl Manigault was one of the greatest basketball players of his generation. Mentored by Holcombe Rucker through his youth he became the star of his high school team. As a universitary champion, he seemed destined to shine in NBA. But before the transition, he fell into drugs and lead his life far away from the basket. After dark years made of jail, drugs and friend’s death, he gave up this world to return in the right way to Harlem. He started the “Walk Away From Drugs” tournament for kids in Harlem. He died in 1998 from a heart failure.

This piece is full of both emotion and confusion. The main character, Earl, is taunted by his fears and paranoia, and they take the form of basketball opponents. The pace of the editing does a great job in building suspense and the animation is brilliant, especially the shift of focus from foreground to background while the fence’s links grow longer (01:59). Special attention was made to making good use of both ambient and principle sound to top off a great production. See making of information here.

As with all of Nabil’s work, what initially looks like a random montage of video miss-edits turns out to be a unique, well-timed and original composition of photographic and vector graphic shots.

Perhaps what stands out the most in his latest video, T.I.A (This is Africa) by the artist K’naan, is the sense of depth he has created though out the sequence. At any one point during the duration of the feature there are at least three levels of action, sometimes four or even five, with the foreground images casting a shadow on the background. And to stretch the depth further, a photographic footage in the foreground will seamlessly turn into a vector graphic in the background (01:01).

See Nabil’s other videos here and here.

Great effort must have gone into this stop-motion music video for Rex the Dog’s Bubblicious and it has truly paid off. The concept of the video is brilliant- it almost works as a tutorial to make your own dog. The animator creates the character from cardboard and glue and makes its mouth sing along with the song. With the addition of eyes, and a stage with speakers the tutorial video progresses into a full on music feature, with lighting effects and more extravagant character movements.

There is some significant camera positioning which gives authenticity to the characters and scene- A close up of the singer’s mouth with a shadow of the dog bopping his head to the beat in the background (01:53) and the introduction of the disco ball with the camera attached above (02:16), are two examples.

Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber have created this stop-motion chalk animation which pairs together perfectly with its gentle acoustic music by Firekites. The animation shows a semi-abstract sequence of events involving some animals and human characters, but is drawn on a series of blackboards of different shapes and sizes. It is perhaps these varying backdrops and the camera’s panning between them which gives great depth to the video- each blackboard a different scene and location. The whole sequence consists of 2000 individual drawings, each previous drawing leaves a glow of white following the moving character.