April Fools Animation Rundown
The general concensus among friends and colleagues is WTF were people spending money on before 2008, because some of these events are stunning in their complexity. Or said another way, visual artists and animators now have the tools to do anything they want. As quickly as you can fire up an HDV video camera and edit suite, you’re in business.
I think that’s pretty cool.
Two events struck me as outstanding, although a third sneaks in yet again as it does every year: Google really did pwn the internet this year again. Whether it was the Google future search tool G’day MATE, the Google Wake Up Kit “nag” feature for heavy sleepers, or the completely off the rail hijack of youtube forcing all “now watching” videos to serendipitously link to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up (try explaining that meme to someone outside of the geek world – I guess it beats goatse); Google was having a laugh at the world’s expense. Brilliant.
But on to the best of the best.
The Legend of Zelda: The Movie
At number two is a stunningly detailed trailer for a non-existant Zelda movie. If you’re a fan of the Zelda series as I am, you immediately recognize all of the scenes. The music was really well done, and the boss scenes are outstanding. Too bad Link has a serial-killer look about him. Not sure about the casting there. But take a look at the production values all around and you will be impressed.
After doing a little digging, it seems this project was released a little while ago with no fanfare, and IGN secured exclusive rights to show it on April 1. So not quite an IGN pet project, but impressive nontheless.
Image courtesy Rainfall Films. You can view the trailer on the IGN website.
BBC: Flying Penguins
I have a friend that works at Framestore UK and he swears they didn’t do it, but the compositing and character animation in this 90 second video for BBC iPlayer is really incredible. Too bad the colonies are stuck with a low-quality youtube version. The iPlayer itself featuring an as-yet unseen by me making-of featurette, is only available in the UK.
Still, with animation this good, I’ll settle for that.
Muppet Bloopers
OK not really animation but I’m a big muppet show fan. Check out this very unique performance not seen before today.