Toronto-based director/animator Nick DenBoer has been collaborating with electronic music producer and musician Joel Zimmerman (aka Deadmau5) for years. It’s an odd pairing in some ways—Deadmau5 (pronounced dead mouse) is internationally recognized for his original, well-engineered sound and straight-talking demeanor. DenBoer (aka Smearballs) is known for being uniquely talented at making super weird stuff, including some surreal branding for KFC.
TV series titles don’t usually need updating from season to season. But with the hosts leaving the theme park to head out into the real world in Westworld’s season 3, the time was right to make a change. Asking the question, “What would it look like for a machine to look back on the world of Westworld’s first two seasons, Antibody collaborated with AI Fiction to create “machine dreams” for the title sequence, which explores what the characters go through as they struggle with their new freedom.
L.A.-based art director Sasha Vinogradova’s animated short Forest is an environmentally conscious fairy tale that doubles as a grim fable about humans’ capacity for destruction. Made with Cinema 4D, Arnold, and After Effects, Forest is a milestone in Vinogradova’s fast-developing career as a visual artist and art director.
Aptly named, What You May Find, the FITC titles offer a dark and referential vision of a future in which technology and innovation are used to manipulate and homogenize humanity. Erin Sarofsky, who founded her design-driven production company in 2009, says her team was honored when FITC founder, Shawn Pucknell, asked them to create the titles.
When freelance animation director and designer, Russ Etheridge teamed up with his wife, Ayndrilla Singharay, to make a fantastical film loosely based on a Hindu myth, they didn’t plan on their production schedule coinciding with the birth of their first child. But things don’t always go as planned and, looking back, they can hardly believe they managed to finish Armstrong, a 10-minute 2D/3D short about love and strength and what happens when the moon suddenly disappears.
Sekani Solomon’s short film, Star Wars: The Last Stand, was viewed nearly 2 million times in the first two months after he posted it on YouTube. It was a pleasant surprise, to say the least, Solomon says, particularly since the film was a personal project that started out as a gag when he was working as a motion designer at Imaginary Forces in 2016.