Channel Frederator Blog

The Daily Mail is reporting that Wallace & Gromit will be making a comeback on television this Christmas season. The special is called “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (sounds Christmas-y enough to me) and will be 30 minutes in length, just like “A Grand Day Out”, “The Wrong Trousers”,  and “A Close Shave”.

Maybe it’s my weak American mind trying to take in the British humor (or is that “humour”), but I always thought Aardman’s best work was the shorter format. Both “Chicken Run” and “Curse of the Were-Rabbit” seemed to drag for me while I was watching them. The classic W&G shorts and the Creature Comforts series felt great.

Hopefully the piece will make its way to US television, or at the very least, the US festival circuit.

-Floyd Bishop

GAME OVER is just one of several art projects developed by the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, working with the NOTsoNOISY creative agency. The piece is a series of short films, each one based on a different early video game. Instead of pixels, we see humans in colored shirts moving from seat to seat in a theater.

Other films in the series include Pole Position, Pong, and Tetris.

-Floyd Bishop

While I was moving this weekend, I saw some of my kids toys rolling around in a basket, and a song popped into my head. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I thought about it a while and remembered something about Sesame Street. Thirty some years ago, this clip somehow cemented itself deep into the recesses of my brain, only to show up in a YouTube search.

What kind of animation related things are rolling around in your heads?

-Floyd Bishop

This is a great piece of footage. This animatic was done by Phil Tippett and crew for the first “Jurassic Park” film. It’s really cool to see the armature supports and such as well. The personality that Tippett’s crew was able to inject into these characters was incredible. While I can see why CG was chosen over stop motion, that snake like tongue would have been awesome!

Here is the way the sequence played in the final film.

-Floyd Bishop 

I’ll be away for about a week, so I won’t be posting. Wish me luck applying the sunscreen evenly. I’ll leave you with this shore-related music video, starring some Playmobil People. It’s “Like a Toy Lost In the Sand” by Graceful Storms, a project of the French singer Manu Servé.

—Anne D. Bernstein

Inspired by Eric’s post, here’s a piece of Flapjack Fan Art I created for my pal and ol’ Cubicle Buddy: Thurop Van Orman, creator of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.

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