I look at a lot of motion graphics for inspiration on my own work and usually what I find to be most inspiring is character based animation and design. Although the animation work I do at Crawford is usually not character driven, I still translate this influence towards practically every project that I’m involved with in some shape or form. Nathan Love happens to be one of my favorite studios to study and marvel over their expertise in character driven animation. In this piece, Nathan Love collaborated with NBC Artworks to created a station ID that playfully represents the NBC brand. In a short interview about this project the owner and creative director had this to say, “the brief was to create a stand-alone logo animation for NBC. The only guidelines were to make it our own, and of course, for it to be ‘the best logo ever.’” The style of retrofitting the original mark of NBC definitely has that “Nathan Love Flair” in my opinion after being an avid fan of the studio for quite a while.

If you know me a little bit you probably know that I’m a big fan of animation.  I usually look through quite a bit of other people’s animation work for inspiration on my own projects as a motion graphics designer.  I recently stumbled across an animated short film, Alma, which has some really impressive character animation.  I even thought the animation was at the caliber of being good enough for Pixar’s standards.  I did a little bit more investigating on this film and discovered that it was actually created by a Pixar animator (Rodrigo Blaas) who had took some time off from the studio for a bit to focus on Alma.  The story is a little creepy, but I think the animation is beautiful.  I hope you enjoy it.

Lemony Snikets A series of Unfortunate Events

I find it fascinating to see how title sequences have such great potential to either compliment and/or recap the story in films .  I remember seeing Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events back in 2004 during the holidays, and although I had only thought the story was just okay I was genuinely impressed with the ending title sequence.  I think its kind of funny that my favorite part in the film is the end credits but its true.  Everything works so well together: the mood, illustrations, animation, lighting, effects, etc.

There are a lot of web sites for a graphic artist to seek inspiration, and I try my best to absorb as much as I possibly can keeping in mind of future projects I will work on.  I usually take a moment each week to see if there is anything new at one of my favorite sites, which is The Art of the Title Sequence.  They have some really good collection on there ranging from a time span of decades of title sequences in films.  I still remember the first time I checked out the site their very first post was the sequence from Lemony Snicket.  In my opinion, I couldn’t agree more on choosing a finer example to start off with in introducing what a well-crafted title sequence can look like.  Not to mention how to continually engage an audience when the movie is “technically” over.

http://www.artofthetitle.com/2007/12/21/lemony-snicket/