I’m usually able to look at a video and take an educated guess on how something was made, but "Horde" by the Brutus Collective eluded me. The film features masterful cel and 3D animation, in addition to an eerie stop-motion-like varnish that coats the each scene. 

How do you visually distill cinema in 30 seconds? That brief sounds as enticing as it is daunting, but London-based studio Man vs. Machine crafted a supremely elegant solution to that challenge in their rebrand for the UK’s Film 4 network. 

Thanks to gateway drugs like Two Dots and Threes, I’ve become increasingly attuned to the growing world of casual, design-centric games. One node in the indie gaming scene that has particularly inspired me is Vectorpark, a.k.a. Patrick Smith. In a world where Candy Crush aesthetics have dominated, Vectorpark is a breath of fresh air. 

Like many working in animation today, I grew up obsessively drawing cartoons. It wasn’t until college, however, that I was introduced to the rebels at UPA. 

Working in a style that came to be known as “limited animation,” UPA was formed in conscious contrast to Disney’s perfectionism. Their films embraced applying design to animation in wildly interpretive ways. So much of their language laid the foundation for the future field of motion graphics.