Our wonderful nature

http://vimeo.com/26632368
This starts of as such a beautiful animation with great realism and technique and its just so perfectly awesome!!! Then just as I was getting bored...the 2 animals start fighting with a mixture of martial arts including capoera and kickboxing and the dude even did a double corkscrew! That's serious skill. It just gets funnier and funnier but always with the beautiful animation and then at the end when one of the guys finally gets the girl...all romance is dead and they just mate and run away. Absolutely hilarious portrayal of nature. I would love to make something like this with the perfect animation and it still be funny. Such a misleading title too, I thought I was in for 5 minutes of how it started like something off the discovery channel. If there was more things like this on the discovery channel I would SO watch it!!

Lego movie

I saw the lego movie yesterday it was HILARIOUS. But on a serious note...I was impressed with the level of animation. I particularly liked the way they did the water and fire. They made them both flow really well just using stop motion that would have taken forever! I was curious if all of the movie was made in stop motion like the faces etc so i googled and this is what I found...
http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/20/how-the-lego-movie-was-made-animation-video/
So apparently none of it is stop motion! It's not real lego at all! They make virtual lego bricks on the computer then use a software that clicks them together and it works like real lego how it doesn't connect with some pieces. The video at the top of the page explains the whole process of this film right from storyboarding. I found it quite interesting how just a bit of lighting can make a virtual object look like a real life object! I think the visuals are absolutely fabulous mainly because you can't tell it's all computer generated! 
I think knowing it's all done on computer took the magic out of it a bit but I think making it in stop motion would have taken a heck of a lot longer than this so I see why they did it in this way.

Blik

I found this video on vimeo. It's about a young boy who falls in love with a much older neighbour.
I think its amazing that even with no dialogue and no faces you get the story and even the emotion. I would like to learn the skill of using body language to portray emotion. I think in animation it needs to be slightly exaggerated so you notice it.
I am also intrigued by the style. It looks hand drawn with brilliant colours and textures and has little pencil lines on but somehow the characters look like they're made from wood and quite 3D. I can't find anywhere that says how they did this but I really do like it! I also like the realistic movement they captured, I think they may have filmed this before animating it.

Process

I found this link really interesting. It explains the process and production of 'Frozen'. It explains that although it is based on the Hans Christian Anderson novel 'The snow queen' it only takes a few bits from this like the ice and the queen. The entire rest of the story is completely different. It also explains reasoning behind decisions and what was difficult and easy like creating a character (Olaf) that is able to split into 3 pieces and put itself together was an interesting task.
This part parrticularly made me giggle but I can understand why they did it!-
'Like all of our films, research was a big part of out process. With our animators living in California, we needed to send them to Cheyenne, Wyoming so they could experience what walking through deep snow is like. They actually did it in dresses – the guys did it in dresses to – in order to get a sense of what it would be like for our heroines to traverse the snow.' 
This peice really helps you get an insight into the work that goes on behind the scenes in the making of disney movies.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/09/25/inside-the-research-design-and-animation-of-walt-disneys-frozen-with-producer-peter-del-vecho/